Location: Prague, Bohemia, Czech Republic
Architect: Frank Gehry & Vlado Milunić
Construction: 1992-1996
10 Photographs
On my first visit to Europe since I had begun studying architecture, I was hankering for my first real architectural adventure outside of Australia, and desperate to see at least one building I had seen during my studies and loved. We were going nowhere near the Neue Staatsgalerie or anything else that I knew well, but I knew of the work of Gehry from the definitive Guggenheim in Bilbao, but had also loved this whimsical little corner building he had done, that I had seen somewhere along the way and we had a fortuitous stopover with enough time to get into the city from the airport, have a wander and then get on our connecting flight. I felt confident enough in my skills at finding things that I set off with two brothers in tow, through the streets of this classical city looking for an architectural marvel. With nothing but a paper map to guide us, which didn’t even have the location of the building on it, we spent a whole day searching the city for this building. I had no idea what it was actually called or where in the city it was, just an abundance of overconfidence, a vivid memory of the building and the way it sat in the city, and a hunch that it was near a bridge of some sort, possibly a river. The story of that day has a few twists and turns, but it is not the story of the Dancing House in Prague, because we were in fact in Vienna, Austria, and I had got the location wrong by 300 odd kilometres.
In my defence, at the time, there were few ArchDaily or Dezeen type websites to peruse for architectural inspiration and research buildings and their locations. Instead, you might have seen a photograph in a book, a magazine, or on a wall in a studio crit somewhere along the way and then you find yourself in the city and off you go looking for it. There remains to this day no listing for the Dancing House on the only architectural website around at that time, Great Buildings Online.
I love the story of my first journey to seek out the Dancing House, (or Tančící dům or Fred and Ginger, or any of the other myriad of nicknames given to the Nationale-Nederlanden building over the years). It was a proper unguided adventure, of the sort we seldom have these days, it was with two of my brothers and it didn’t involve much of Gehry’s architecture. The actual visit to Prague, some years later, was much less interesting from a storytelling perspective. I can’t quite remember why exactly I was in Prague; I was probably taking the long way home from an ice hockey tournament of some sort. I had done some research this time, into the location and city of the building, I had secured a ticket to a tour of the building, and I was on my way. The actual visit was a little underwhelming. We couldn’t view the whole building, as is often the case with working buildings, and the group was too large for the tight little spaces, so you couldn’t really get a sense of the place as it ought to be.
As an architecture student, I was blown away by the sinuous work of Gehry, who seemingly was able to make buildings do things no-one else could and I have seen a bunch of his projects along the way. While I am an admirer of some of his buildings, I find others less powerful, but this building if the former, not the latter, despite its faults. I love the way it seemingly wraps around the corner, cloaking it with its eccentric façade, that despite its unconventional rhythm, keys into the historic fabric beside it.
To me, the building sits comfortably with a different kind of sensibility, more like the respect you have for a peer, than deference or imitation of an elder. It was one of my early lessons in context, learning how the rhythms of architecture and urbanism, are very often undercurrents, masked by what might pass for ‘style’. It was obvious to me that Gehry had harnessed these currents to extraordinary effect in this instance.
It is an odd building in many ways, especially inside, but the Dancing House is important to me as it sparked a realisation about architecture as a contextual response. As a post-modern resident of a classic city, it rightly has more than its fair share of critics, but if we believe, as architects, in an architecture of progress, then the boldness of the Dancing House is essential.
HWLK