Bílek Villa: A Sculptor's House Built Like a Wheat Field
Why is it significant?
Stop in front of the dark red brick house on the corner and take a moment, because it does not behave like a house. Its front is a row of rough, tapering pillars, and the whole building bends gently, as if it had grown out of the ground rather than been built on it.
Key Facts
| Place | Bílek Villa: A Sculptor's House Built Like a Wheat Field |
|---|---|
| Address | Mickiewiczova 233/1, 160 00 Praha 6, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.09520, 14.40840 |
| Part of Walk | Letná & Holešovice: Prague's Hidden North Bank, from Stalin's Ghost to the Royal Game Park |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in front of the dark red brick house on the corner and take a moment, because it does not behave like a house. Its front is a row of rough, tapering pillars, and the whole building bends gently, as if it had grown out of the ground rather than been built on it.
This is the villa of František Bílek, sculptor, engraver and mystic, who designed it himself as his home and studio and moved in just before the First World War. Bílek is said to have imagined it as a field of ripe wheat: the pillars are the sheaves, the curved plan is the sweep of a harvester's blade. For him a house was not a box for furniture. It was a statement about work, bread and the human soul.
Bílek was one of the strangest and most original Czech artists of his time. He carved huge, elongated figures that seem to be stretching upwards towards the light, wrestling with pain and faith. His great wooden crucifix hangs in St Vitus Cathedral up on the castle hill, and visitors who expect a quiet Baroque Christ are startled by its raw, gaunt suffering. His closest friend was the symbolist poet Otokar Březina, and the two of them wrote and thought about art almost as a religious calling.
Inside, the rooms flow into one another around a tall studio that Bílek treated almost as a temple. The furniture is carved by his own hand, chairs and cupboards covered in symbols, so that even sitting down becomes part of the sermon. Today the villa belongs to the Prague City Gallery and keeps much of his work where he made it.
It is also the perfect doorway to this walk. Most visitors to Prague stay below, among the crowds of the Old Town and the castle. Up here, on the edge of the Letná plateau, the city is quieter, greener and full of things almost nobody comes to see. Cross the road and walk east along Gogolova, towards the river, to a grand villa behind a long garden fence.