Memorable visit to where history got twisted
It happened on the same day: watching Notre Dame burn on two different screens last month, on TV and on Twitter — one of the real-time peculiarities of our age — I happened to come across an article about London city planners approving a new, 300-metretall skyscraper dubbed “The Tulip.”
The Norman Foster-designed latter’s svelte stem is expected to transform the U.K. capital’s skyline when it eventually takes its place beside “The Gherkin,” another iconic building backed by the same billionaire, Joseph Safra, behind “The Tulip.”
It all got me thinking about how certain buildings come to define different cities — new and old — and how some architecture is pop culture, especially in our Instagram-fuelled moment. It also reminded of my visit recently to one such building in beautiful, haunting Prague. I’ve been meaning to tell you!
“Welcome to Dancing House,” a woman chirped when I arrived at my destination, located on the bank of the Vltava River, after I had adjusted to the modern traveller’s vertigo of I-have-been-herebut- have- I-been-here?
Instagram-bait if there ever was, the building (a collab between Croatian architect Vlado Milunic and Canada’s own Frank Gehry) always seemed tailor-made for our post-and-share age — how certain images from around the world are seared into our brains these days in an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind sort of way.
Call it a new classic. See its twin towers — one stone, the other bending glass — offering a waltz-like nod to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. See, too, its top, making like a Medusa-ish dome.
It’s viewed as the most significant piece of postmodern architecture in the Czech capital — and the most visible emblem of its post-Communist chapter — and coming here had long been on my cultural to-do list (Prague having been taunting me for a while, my last visit to the city stretching back 25 years). And when I discovered that you could actually stay inside the Dancing House, too — it has unveiled 21 suites, so that a part of it is now a hotel — the deal was sealed.
“The original house which stood here was destroyed in 1945 by the bombs of U.S. aircraft when the Americans mistook Prague with Dresden,” my guide proceeded to tell me after I had checked in, and was ready to snoop.
Proof that a picture is not always worth a thousand words, she went on to fill in other gaps: 1989’s Velvet Revolution and its most famous architect (the playwright who later became president of the republic) Vaclav Havel plays a role in the history of the building! Long story short: Havel lived next door to where the Dancing House now looms, and he was neighbours with Milunic, the architect. They both shared a dream that it would one day host a cultural centre.
After the Cold War, Havel had a chance to put the dream into motion, and the nine-storey structure was conceived — a very untraditional design standing out even more conspicuously amongst the Baroque and Gothic buildings for which Prague is famous. A literal “dance over the end of totalitarianism,” as its website matter-of-factly states. Stagnation, order and rigidity … versus dynamism, fluidity and eventually … well … selfies!
That is to say: Few buildings are in the metaphor business as deeply as the Dancing House — it’s now competing, particularly in the selfie department, with the city’s famously crowded Charles Bridge (one of the great fashion runways of the world, as I was reminded when I visited that, too, during my trip).
“Controversial,” my guide murmured, pointing out some of the inevitable huff-and-puff about Dancing House at its beginning (“a crushed can of Coke,” went one of the jabs). Vindication, perhaps, came when the Czech National Bank splayed the house on commemorative coins some years later.
While sleeping inside it was fun (check!), and the rooms pretty pro forma, the very best thing about it was being an elevator away from the rooftop, where now sits a fancy restaurant (named Ginger & Fred, natch), a fabulous outdoor terrace and, one final level up, a coffee shop. Views, views, views — of which there is nary a bad one in Prague.
The rooftop is also not a bad place to discuss the legacy of Havel, as I discerned when I eavesdropped on two Brits discussing the late statesman in the café when I took a seat. Like in many parts of Europe, the howling winds of populism are blowing, at least to some extent, in the republic. Was Havel too idealistic, perhaps — just like this building?
In a city that is more than just beer, supermodels, and Kafka (though there is that!), I had my own Mission Impossible- meets- Killing Eve fantasy while staring out at this onetime capital of the Habsburg Empire — which became a state in 1918 and then, under the Munich Pact of 1938, was annexed by Nazi Germany, and later spent decades under the shroud of the Iron Curtain.
A husk of history, Prague’s pull is, as novelist Sarah Perry once described it: “Every city, of course, is composed of these layers of art and architecture laid on histories of violence, but I had never spent so long in a city where the past was so … insistently present.”