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Frank Gehry's exuberantly gestural new office building on the edge of the Vltava river is a bold symbol of Prague's architectural, economic and political renewal.
The history of the site now occupied by Frank Gehry's Nationale-Nederlanden Building on the edge of Prague's Vltava river, is as Byzantine as any plot devised by Kafka. In 1945 an American bomb devastated a handsome Neo-Classical apartment block on the corner of two streets (Jiraskovo namesti and Rasinovo nabrezi) narrowly missing the neighbouring Art Nouveau house of Vaclav Havel, the distinguished writer and future president of the Czech Republic.
During the post-war Communist era, the site where the bombed apartment block stood remained vacant and attempts to find a use for it only gained ground after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution of 1989. Havel, now president, expressed a wish to redevelop the plot to house an altruistic mixture of cultural and social functions, including a bookshop, gallery, multi-purpose hall and rooftop cafe. He discussed his ideas with Vlado Milunic, a Croatian architect living in Prague, who along with two other architects (Jan Linek and Vit Maslo) was informally invited to put forward development proposals. Of the three designs, Milunic's witty, symbolist creation perhaps best epitomised the carnival character of the Velvet Revolution. His sketches show an angular building, crowned by a high glass cupola, containing allusions to the Tatlin Tower and the neighbouring Art Nouveau house, built by Havel's grandfather.
Inevitably, perhaps, Havel and Milunic's philanthropic notions were trumped by the power of market forces, when in 1992 the site was acquired by the Dutch insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden, for development as an office block. Yet vestiges of the original concept remained, with the inclusion of shops at ground level, a basement cafe and a rooftop bar and restaurant. Seeking a suitably high-profile international architect for this important project in the new Eastern Europe, Nationale-Nederlanden eventually alighted on Frank Gehry, but Vlado Milunic was retained in a collaborative capacity, acknowledging both his familiarity with Prague and his initial work on the site. During meetings in Switzerland and California, Gehry and Milunic established a close working...