Mánes Building: White Modernism on the Water
Why is it significant?
Look at the long, low, white building stretched along the water, all horizontal lines and ribbon windows, and then at the stout old water tower beside it with its baroque onion dome. Two Pragues, centuries apart, standing shoulder to shoulder... and the young one is not at all embarrassed.
Key Facts
| Place | Mánes Building: White Modernism on the Water |
|---|---|
| Address | Masarykovo nábřeží 250, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.07730, 14.41340 |
| Part of Walk | Wenceslas Square to the Dancing House: Prague's Century of Revolutions, 1918–1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Look at the long, low, white building stretched along the water, all horizontal lines and ribbon windows, and then at the stout old water tower beside it with its baroque onion dome. Two Pragues, centuries apart, standing shoulder to shoulder... and the young one is not at all embarrassed.
The white building is the exhibition hall of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts, designed by the architect Otakar Novotný and completed around 1930. The society was founded in 1887 and named after the painter Josef Mánes, and long before it had a home of its own, it was dragging Prague into the modern world. In 1902 it brought Auguste Rodin and his sculptures to the city. In 1905 it showed the paintings of Edvard Munch, and a whole generation of young Czech painters walked out of that show changed for ever.
When independence came in 1918, the new republic wanted to look forward, not back. Czechoslovakia between the wars was one of the most industrialised countries in Europe, and by the late 1930s a democracy surrounded by dictatorships, and its architects answered with buildings like this: functional, clean, white, open to light and water. Even the embankment you are standing on carries the name of its first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.
That confidence lasted barely twenty years. Munich came in 1938, the occupation in 1939, and after 1948 a Communist regime that preferred heavier, more obedient styles. But the building outlived them all, a stubborn white rectangle in a grey century.
The water tower beside it, called Šítkovská, once pumped river water to the fountains of the New Town, and it is far older than anything else on this walk. Now turn left, away from the river, into Resslova street. A short way up the hill stands a baroque church with a small window at pavement level, surrounded by the marks of bullets.