Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
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...
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...
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...
This renaissance house with its baroque exterior is typical of the residences in this part of the city’s Malá Strana (Lesser Quarter). Many of them carry baroque era cartouches with symbols of animals, birds or...
This two-storey townhouse ‘U Červeného pole’ (‘The Red Field’) is an ancient survivor in a street otherwise dominated by much taller buildings from the 1900s, such as the nearby ‘U Myšáka’. The earliest records show...
Of the many celebrated Czech architects of the first decade of the twentieth century, perhaps the most prolific was the Austrian-born Osvald Polívka. Best known for civic projects such as Prague’s new City Hall (1911)...
These handsome semi-detached villas in Prague’s Střešovice district look just as though they were uprooted from suburban London, the new middle-class landscape for which the poet John Betjeman coined the name ‘Metroland’. So it’s no...
These fine art nouveau apartments on the border of the Vinohrady and Žižkov districts date from 1910; they were built by Antonín Polívka to a design by the architect Josef Pospíšil. Seven years earlier, Pospíšil...
The street in Prague’s Vinohrady district named after the composer Frédéric Chopin presents, as they say, a ‘smorgasbord’ of historical styles: one end is all gothic revival, turrets and bay windows, while the other exhibits...
The ornate Parisian-style apartment blocks of Kodaňská Street and its immediate neighbourhood are some of the most impressive domestic houses in Prague. But even those not facing directly onto that grand boulevard still have a...
