ARCHITECTURAL MOVEMENT
On my own, on a three-day vacation in Prague, I wandered the streets of the old city without a tour book, following pictographic tourist signs and the movement of the crowds. I was suitably impressed with the city’s castle, its bridges, and its impeccably maintained art nouveau facades. But what stopped me in my tracks was a large modern concrete apartment block just outside the Jewish quarter. It’s facade was made from triangulated concrete planes that tipped gently this way and that from the perpendicular, catching the light and holding the eye dramatically. This immense five-story building was charged with kinetic energy, alive with a hard, modern pulse.
Its architect, Otakar Novotný, is one of the best-known Czech Cubists. At the Czech Cubist Museum, a fifteen-minute walk away, there’s a charming permanent display of furniture, glassware, tableware, posters and painting, including works by architects Josef Gočár, Josef Chochol, and Novotný himself. These galleries are housed in a former office building by Gočár, that’s dressed in faceted panels of rich red sandstone.
The overall aesthetic of Czech Cubism is energetic and expressionistic, characterized by hard graphic lines, sloping planes, and attenuated lozenges. The furniture is kooky and eccentric, as if fabricated to decorate the set of a happy horror movie. It’s also bulky, with swollen profiles to accommodate the depth of the turning wood and glass planes. A tall cabinet with shimmering faceted glass doors can’t hold more than a few place settings, so compromised it its interior space.
Though only clumsily applied to smaller objects, Czech Cubist stylings suit buildings brilliantly, offering a rich technique to model large surfaces. I can’t think of another modern building that breaks its large planes as simply, boldly, and effectively as the Novotny apartment block. Architecture often stands on the sidelines of principle-driven artistic movements, hampered by cost, scale and utility. So it’s surprising that Czech Cubism finds its finest expression here, in buildings. It engages light, surface, and optics indelibly.
House in Neklanova, Prague, 1913-1914. By Josef Chochol.