National Technical Museum: Flying Machines Under Glass
Why is it significant?
In front of you stands a long, sober building of pale stone, rows of identical windows and no ornament at all: functionalism, the architecture of the 1930s. Do not judge it by its face. Behind it is one of the most spectacular rooms in Prague.
Key Facts
| Place | National Technical Museum: Flying Machines Under Glass |
|---|---|
| Address | Kostelní 1320/42, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.09760, 14.42480 |
| Part of Walk | Letná & Holešovice: Prague's Hidden North Bank, from Stalin's Ghost to the Royal Game Park |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you stands a long, sober building of pale stone, rows of identical windows and no ornament at all: functionalism, the architecture of the 1930s. Do not judge it by its face. Behind it is one of the most spectacular rooms in Prague.
The great Transport Hall of the National Technical Museum is a glass-roofed space full of steam locomotives, early motorcycles and vintage cars, and above them, hanging in mid-air, aeroplanes, as if they had just taken off. Among the cars are early Laurin and Klement automobiles, the ancestors of Škoda, and streamlined Tatras of the 1930s that looked like spaceships when other cars still looked like carriages.
The museum was founded in 1908, and this building was designed for it in the 1930s, completed just as the Second World War was sweeping everything aside. After decades of service it closed for a long reconstruction and reopened in 2011, and the old giants came back out of storage, polished and gleaming.
This is a good place to remember how inventive this small country has been. In 1754 a village priest in Moravia, Prokop Diviš, built a lightning conductor, at almost the same time as Benjamin Franklin was experimenting in America. And in 1961 the chemist Otto Wichterle, working at home over Christmas, produced the first soft contact lenses on an apparatus he built from a children's construction set and a bicycle dynamo. Millions of people looking at the world through soft lenses owe something to that kitchen table in Prague.
Czechs tell those stories with a mixture of pride and irony, as if to say: imagine what we could have done with more luck and fewer occupations. Now walk east along the edge of the park, past the old Letná chateau and its terrace, to a strange building of glass and white steel that once won a world's fair.