House of the Black Madonna: The First Cubist Building
Why is it significant?
Stand at the corner of Celetná and Ovocný trh and look at the house with the folded facade: window frames pushed out like crystals, a roof broken into angled planes, and on the corner, a small black Madonna in a gilded cage. The Madonna is baroque.
Key Facts
| Place | House of the Black Madonna: The First Cubist Building |
|---|---|
| Address | Ovocný trh 19, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08700, 14.42550 |
| Part of Walk | Gilded Leaves and Crystal Facades: Prague's Art Nouveau & Cubist Walk |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the corner of Celetná and Ovocný trh and look at the house with the folded facade: window frames pushed out like crystals, a roof broken into angled planes, and on the corner, a small black Madonna in a gilded cage. The Madonna is baroque. Everything around her was, in 1912, the most radical building in Prague.
This is the House of the Black Madonna, designed by Josef Gočár and completed in 1912 as a department store for the merchant František Josef Herbst. It is considered the first Cubist building in Prague. Gočár was just over thirty, and he managed something cunning: he respected the height and rhythm of the old street, yet every surface vibrates with sharp diagonals. He even kept the statue of the Black Madonna from the house that stood here before, giving the new building its old name.
Go inside if you can and climb the staircase. The handrail, the lamps, the cast-iron banisters are all Cubist, and on the first floor waits the Grand Café Orient, the only surviving Cubist café interior in the world, with angular chandeliers, coat hooks and furniture designed by Gočár. It was closed for decades and reopened in 2005, faithfully reconstructed. Ordering a coffee here is the closest you can get to sitting inside a Cubist painting.
Czech Cubism lasted only a few years, roughly from 1911 until the First World War. The war stopped construction, and afterwards the movement softened into the rounded national style you saw at the Adria Palace. In the communist decades it was half forgotten. Today the upper floors house a museum of Czech Cubism, with furniture, ceramics and glass from those few feverish years.
Look up once more: from the outside the department store reads as glass and stone, but its structure is reinforced concrete, the newest technology of its time, wearing a costume of crystals. Now walk through Old Town Square and leave it at its north-west corner, into the wide, elegant avenue called Pařížská.