Ten centuries of European architectural heritage
The seeds of a national museum were sown as early as the 1780s with the establishment of the Royal Bohemian Society of Learning, ancestor of today’s Academy of Sciences. Its members were wealthy, aristocratic and enlightened; items from...
The founding of the so-called ‘New Town’ in 1348 made Prague the third largest city by area in the whole of Europe after Rome and Constantinople. According to the census of thirty years later, the population had already...
From the 1720s to 1890s, Prague’s castle district was surrounded by a defensive wall, punctuated at intervals by gates and bastions. However, the so-called Marian ramparts proved to be of limited military use, so between 1898 and 1903...
New City Hall (Nová radnice) — not to be confused with the mediaeval New Town Hall (Novoměstská radnice) — was built between 1908 and 1912 according to a design by Osvald Polívka. At first, the new building acted...
The township of Smíchov, on the left bank of the Vltava, was a centre of Christian worship from the earliest times. The first Carthusian monastery in Bohemia stood close to here, from its foundation in 1342 until its...
On 3 September 1890, a powerful flood washed away three arches of Charles Bridge. Two eighteenth-century statues by Ferdinand Maxmilián Brokoff toppled into the river and were smashed to pieces. Enough was salvaged to be able to re-create...
The commercial and residential building U Dörflerů was built in 1905 by the firm of Matěj Blecha. Occupying a prime location near the lower end of Wenceslas Square, its decorative facade is the perfect example of art nouveau...
The name František Sander is principally connected with the architecture of navigable waterways, particularly the Elbe and the Vltava, in the early part of the 20th century. He was responsible for the impressive Vltava embankment of 1904 running...
Postal services in Bohemia started in 1526, when mounted couriers made the first deliveries between Prague and Vienna, the twin seats of the Habsburgs. But it was not until the reign of Maria Theresa in the 18th century...
The baroque statues for which Charles Bridge is rightly famous are not arranged according to any predetermined plan. They were erected individually over many decades, part of the programme of recatholicization after the Thirty Years’ War. The choice...
Visitors to Prague are always surprised to learn that the avenue of saints keeping watch over Charles Bridge was never planned as a single architectural scheme. In fact the statues were created by no fewer than fifteen sculptors...
