Whatever the theoretical coherence (or incoherence) of the many writings of the cubist architects, the great achievement of the movement is, of course, the buildings themselves, a remarkable collection of aesthetically pleasing, dramatic structures which have made Prague justly famous as the most important home of a unique twentieth-century style. It may well be the case, as Dvorak maintains, that Czech cubism was a temporary digression in the development of modernism, something its early practitioners moved away from in the 1920's ("anti-modern" is his term for the cubist program in architecture, in part because it turned its back on the established tradition, culminating in modernism, that architecture has something to communicate). Nonetheless, the movement's legacy of some strikingly original buildings in Prague which visitors from all over the world flock to see attests to the imaginative vitality of one of the more curious moments in the history of architecture.
Images of Cubist Architecture in Prague
For a gallery of well-known examples of Cubist architecture in Prague, you might like to sample the photographs on the following page: Prague Cubist Architecture.
Rondo Cubism
World War I seriously interrupted the development of Czech cubist architecture, and after the war the newly independent Czechoslovakia recommitted itself to the search for a national style. This led cubist architects (Janák and Gočár among them) to alter their attitude towards ornament (Švácha, Architecture . . . 134) and to apply circles and decorative folkloristic elements to the facade of the building, in an attempt to affirm a new national style. This trend came to be called "rondo-cubism," "decorativism," or "national style (Moravánszky), and is most clearly manifested in Josef Gočár's Czechoslovak Legiobank, an explicit tribute to Czech soldiers in the war.
Earlier styles of cubism remained alive, but came under increasing attacks from the "austere, rationalistic, and pragmatic" demands of functionalism (Švácha, Architecture . . . 192) and from the hostility to ornament in the name of mathematical harmony and simplicity in purism (a movement launched after the war by Le Corbusier). In Prague in the 1920's the leading voice of the avant garde, Karel Teige, a committed Marxist (but not a Communist) urged a break with modernist styles from before the war and a rejection of monumentalism, in order to promote a "'new proletarian art . . . a kind of socialist Gothic,' which would have artists cast off the elitist conceit they had hitherto embraced and humbly come down to the level of everyday life . . . an art that would evoke in all people a sense of brotherhood and love for ordinary things (Švácha, "Before and After . . ." 109).
And with that shift the major artistic aim of the cubist architects in Prague, some of whom were now working in and teaching the new style, finally was overwhelmed by the emphasis on rational social hopes for progress enshrined in an architecture of scientific functionalism.
Works Cited
Blau, Eve and Nancy Troy. "Introduction." Architecture and Cubism. Edd Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997, 1–16.
Bois, Yve-Alain. "Cubistic, Cubic, and Cubist." Architecture and Cubism. Edd. Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997, 187–194.
Colomina, Beatriz. "Where Are We?" Architecture and Cubism. Edd. Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997, 141–166.
Dluhosch, Eric and Rostislav Švácha, edd. Karel Teige 1900–1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant Garde. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999.
Dvorak, Tomas. "A Charming Impasse: Czech Cubist Architecture." available on line here.
Mansbach, S. A. Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Moravánsky, Akos. "Architecture and Identity: Part Two: Czech Cubism." Available on line at the following URL Moravánky.
Mucha, Jiri. Alphonse Mucha: His Life and Art. NY: St Martin’s Press, 1966.
Murray, Irena Žantovská. "The Burden of Cubism: The French Imprint on Czech Architecture, 1910–1914." Architecture and Cubism. Edd. Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997, 41–58.
Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Švácha, Rostislav. The Architecture of the New Prague 1895-1945. Trans. Alexandra Büchler. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994.
---. "Before and After the Mundaneum: Karel Teige as Theoretician of the Architectural Avant-Garde." Trans. Alexandra Büchler. in Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Švácha, edd. Karel Teige 1900–1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant Garde. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999, 108–139.
