Trade Fair Palace: Functionalist Giant, Hall of Departure

Why is it significant?

Step back far enough to take in the white building in front of you: long bands of windows, flat roof, not a single column or statue. It is the size of an ocean liner, and when it was finished in 1928 it was one of the largest functionalist buildings in the world.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step back far enough to take in the white building in front of you: long bands of windows, flat roof, not a single column or statue. It is the size of an ocean liner, and when it was finished in 1928 it was one of the largest functionalist buildings in the world.

Veletržní palác, the Trade Fair Palace, was designed by Oldřich Tyl and Josef Fuchs for Prague's sample fairs, where manufacturers showed off everything from machines to porcelain. Inside, a vast hall rises through several floors, wrapped in white galleries. Le Corbusier, the great prophet of modern architecture, came to see it in 1928, and he is said to have been both impressed and slightly provoked: the Czechs had built on a scale he had so far only drawn.

Then came the darkest chapter. During the German occupation, from October 1941, the Jews of Prague received summonses to a wooden exhibition hall on these trade fair grounds, beside the palace. They came with the luggage they were allowed, were registered, and waited there, often for days, before being marched to the nearby Bubny railway station and deported, first to the ghetto of Łódź, then to Terezín and on to the camps in the East. Tens of thousands passed through. Most never came back. At Bubny station, a few hundred metres east of here, a memorial now keeps their memory.

In 1974 a great fire gutted the palace, and for years it seemed lost. It was restored, and since the 1990s it has been the National Gallery's home for modern and contemporary art, from Czech Cubists to Picasso, Klimt and Schiele. For several years after 2012, Alfons Mucha's twenty huge canvases of The Slav Epic hung in its great hall.

So the building that once processed departures now holds some of the finest art in the country. Prague rarely lets a place have only one story. Now walk north along Dukelských hrdinů to the gates of the old exhibition grounds, Výstaviště.