Expo 58 Pavilion: The Glass Box That Beat the World
Why is it significant?
Through the trees you will see an unusual building of glass and slender white steel, like a box of light balanced on the edge of the hill. It looks almost too modern for its age. It was designed for a world's fair in Brussels in 1958... and it brought home the top prize.
Key Facts
| Place | Expo 58 Pavilion: The Glass Box That Beat the World |
|---|---|
| Address | Letenské sady 1500, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.09650, 14.43000 |
| Part of Walk | Letná & Holešovice: Prague's Hidden North Bank, from Stalin's Ghost to the Royal Game Park |
| Generated | Generated |
Through the trees you will see an unusual building of glass and slender white steel, like a box of light balanced on the edge of the hill. It looks almost too modern for its age. It was designed for a world's fair in Brussels in 1958... and it brought home the top prize.
Expo 58 was the first great world's fair after the Second World War, the one that gave Brussels the Atomium. Czechoslovakia arrived with a pavilion nobody expected from a communist country: light, witty and human, full of glass, puppets, film and design instead of tractors and propaganda. The jury awarded it the gold star for the best pavilion of the whole exhibition.
Inside, visitors queued for something completely new: Laterna Magika, a show that mixed film projected on moving screens with live actors and dancers, so that people stepped in and out of the picture. It was a sensation, and it later became a permanent Prague theatre, still running decades later. Czech glass, Czech animated film and Czech design were, for a moment, the talk of the world.
After the fair, the restaurant wing of the pavilion was dismantled, brought back and rebuilt here on Letná, overlooking the river. It became a fashionable restaurant in the optimistic years of the late fifties and the sixties. Then came 1968, the invasion, and the long grey decades of normalisation, when optimism went out of fashion, and the building slowly decayed with them. After 1989 it was restored and given a new life as offices.
It is a good symbol of that brief window, when Czechoslovakia showed the world how imaginative it could be. Now leave the park and walk down into Holešovice, along Dukelských hrdinů street, to an enormous white building with endless rows of windows, a palace built for trade fairs.