Topič House & the Praha Insurance Building

Why is it significant?

Stand on the pavement of Národní and face the two narrow buildings side by side, glittering like a pair of jewellery boxes squeezed between their sober neighbours. On the left, gold mosaic letters spell out PRAHA across the top.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on the pavement of Národní and face the two narrow buildings side by side, glittering like a pair of jewellery boxes squeezed between their sober neighbours. On the left, gold mosaic letters spell out PRAHA across the top. On the right, a facade dripping with stucco garlands, wreaths and sinuous ironwork. Same architect, a few years apart, and together they are the perfect overture to this walk.

The man behind both was Osvald Polívka, one of the busiest architects of Prague's belle époque. The left-hand house was finished around 1907 for the Praha insurance company, and its facade is basically an advertisement in mosaic: the words worked into it advertise what the company was selling inside. Insurance companies loved Art Nouveau. A building that looked modern, rich and solid was the best argument for trusting it with your money.

Next door is Topič House, completed around 1910 for František Topič, a publisher and art dealer. His gallery, the Topič Salon, had been running since the 1890s, and it became one of the places where Prague first saw the young modernists, the painters who would soon be fighting over whether art should be pretty or true. For a publisher, a gallery on the ground floor was the best shop window imaginable: the books upstairs, the scandals of modern art downstairs.

Look closely at the details at eye level, the door handles, the lettering, the little faces. Art Nouveau in Prague was never only French whiplash curves. Here it was also a political style. Czech patrons wanted a new look that belonged neither to Vienna nor to the old Habsburg baroque, and Polívka also worked on the most famous Art Nouveau building in the city, the Municipal House, which you may already have seen by the Powder Tower.

So keep your eyes above the shop windows from now on. In the next hour you will watch Prague's architects go from gilded flowers to sharp crystals in barely a decade... a leap no other city in the world made in quite the same way. Walk east along Národní towards the big fortress-like palace at the corner of Jungmannova.