INNOCENTS ABROAD
To announce my arrival in Prague last month I posted a photo of Frank Gehry’s
Nationale-Nederlanden Building, more popularly known as the Dancing House or Fred and Ginger, on social media. As intended, it made a splash. One friend, a talented architect, commented, “The ugliest building in Prague.” Another friend, also a designer, asked, “Is this building finished yet?”
Compared to other institutional buildings in central Prague, the NNB certainly stands out. This seven-story exhibition and event space occupies a prominent
corner on Rašínovo nábřeží, the street that runs parallel to the Vlatava River, right across from the Jirasek Bridge. Cars and pedestrians swarm around it all night and day. Its outer corner is expressed as two slender volumes – a stiff cylindrical tower and a swooning, glass-enrobed cone that leans passionately into it. The building looks less like a signature Gehry structure – a heap of swirling metallic shards – than an illustration from Delirious New York rendered in three dimensions. This expression is, within the setting, brazen. Among the stately early twentieth-century apartment and office blocks along the street, whose staid facades are trimmed with neoclassical and art nouveau ornament, the NNB is cartoonish. Its scale and attributes are slightly overscaled, slightly exaggerated, and slightly garish.
The NNB is constructed from a concrete frame and lifted off the corner with chunky columns, all of which lends it a crude, workmanlike feeling when seen from the sidewalk below it. It lacks the lightness and the dynamism of Gehry’s more recent monumental work, and of the real Fred and Ginger. But the building is not a deliberate provocation. It retains an innocence in spirit, as if imagined by a child. In its simplicity and expressiveness it’s true to Gehry’s vision, an LA building dropped, with joy, inside the heart of an old European city. It’s not concerned with following the rules, and not concerned with breaking them either.
Photograph by Nalina Moses.