Chochol's Cubist Houses: Neklanova 30 and Kovařovic Villa
Why is it significant?
Stand back on the opposite pavement and look at the corner of the apartment house at number 30. The facade does not lie flat. It folds, it breaks into prisms and pyramids, the cornice juts out like the brim of a sharp hat, and the corner seems to have been carved out of a single crystal.
Key Facts
| Place | Chochol's Cubist Houses: Neklanova 30 and Kovařovic Villa |
|---|---|
| Address | Neklanova 30, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.06630, 14.42030 |
| Part of Walk | Vyšehrad: Princess Libuše, Cubist Houses and the Nation's Cemetery in Prague |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand back on the opposite pavement and look at the corner of the apartment house at number 30. The facade does not lie flat. It folds, it breaks into prisms and pyramids, the cornice juts out like the brim of a sharp hat, and the corner seems to have been carved out of a single crystal.
This is Czech Cubism, and Prague is the only city in the world where Cubism stepped out of the paintings and into architecture on this scale. Around 1911, a group of young Czech architects, inspired by Picasso and Braque in Paris, decided that a building, too, could be broken into planes and light. The most radical of them was Josef Chochol, and you have just walked past the proof. Down by the river, his Kovařovic villa, with its faceted facade and the triangular patterns of its garden and fence, and his triple house on the embankment, all three built within a couple of years of each other around 1912 and 1913.
Here, in Neklanova, he had a tight, awkward corner plot. So he turned the corner into the show: a sculpted, faceted edge with diamond shapes under the cornice, so that the house changes character as the light moves across it during the day.
The movement was astonishingly short. The First World War put an end to most building in 1914, and after it the style mutated into the rounder rondo-cubism of the young republic before giving way to functionalism. For decades these houses were simply flats, unloved, grey with soot. Only in the later twentieth century did the world wake up to the fact that Prague had something no other city has.
Look closely at the windows and doorways, too: nothing is quite rectangular, and nothing is quite random. Now leave the houses behind and follow the streets uphill and eastwards, along the foot of the old walls, to the outer gate of the fortress. The citadel you are about to enter is far older than the legends told about it... and far younger than the legends claim.