Gilded Leaves and Crystal Facades: Prague's Art Nouveau & Cubist Walk

From Národní to the Rudolfinum: Mucha's posters, a Cubist lamp post, a technicolour synagogue and the station that changed its name five times, in the city that turned Cubism into buildings

Prague · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Topič House & the Praha Insurance Building

   Národní 9, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   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.

2. 2. Adria Palace: Rondocubism on Národní

   Jungmannova 31, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Take in the whole corner building in front of you: battlements on the roof, a tower, stacked rows of windows framed in heavy, rounded stone, almost like a Venetian palace that has been working out. It does not look like anything else on this street, and that was exactly the point.

   This is the Adria Palace, built between 1922 and 1925 by Pavel Janák and Josef Zasche for an Italian insurer from Trieste, the Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà. That is where the name Adria comes from. Janák had been one of the fiercest young Cubist architects before the First World War. After 1918, in the brand new Czechoslovakia, he and his friends softened the sharp crystals into rounded arcs and cylinders, and invented what is often called Rondocubism, or the national style... an architecture meant to look Czech rather than Austrian.

   Look at the window frames: they are not flat surfaces but rhythms of half-circles and segments, almost like the folds of a fabric. It is heavy and theatrical, and some critics of the time found it far too much. But stand here for a minute and it becomes oddly hypnotic, a building that looks carved rather than built.

   The Adria also played a role in one of the great nights of Czech history. The theatre inside the palace was long associated with Laterna Magika, the multimedia theatre born from the Czechoslovak pavilion at the Brussels World Expo in 1958. In November 1989, during the Velvet Revolution, the Civic Forum led by Václav Havel set up its headquarters in that theatre, and for days the future of the country was argued over between the stage sets.

   Somewhere behind these walls, reached through the passages of the block, hides the quiet Franciscan Garden, one of the best rest stops in the New Town. For now, simply turn the corner into Jungmannovo náměstí, the little square behind the palace. Look for the strangest street lamp you have ever seen, standing right beside a tall church gate.

3. 3. The Cubist Lamp Post on Jungmannovo náměstí

   Jungmannovo náměstí, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Find the lamp post in the corner of the square, beside the gateway to the church: a column cut into sharp facets, like a crystal or a pencil sharpened by a geometry teacher, topped with a lantern. Most people walk straight past it, or lean on it to check their phone.

   It is, as far as anyone knows, the only Cubist street lamp in the world. It dates from around 1912 or 1913, and it is usually credited to the architect Emil Králíček. It is made not of carved stone but of concrete, which at the time was itself a modern, almost rebellious material.

   Why would anyone make a lamp Cubist? Because in Prague, Cubism was not only a way of painting. In Paris, Picasso and Braque broke apples and guitars into facets on canvas. In Prague, a handful of young architects, Gočár, Janák, Chochol, Králíček, decided that the same idea could shape houses, chairs, cups and even street furniture. They believed matter had an inner energy, and that a building could show it bursting out through crystal-like surfaces. Around the corner on Spálená, Králíček also designed the Diamant house, with a Cubist gateway framing an old baroque statue.

   Now turn towards the gateway beside the lamp. Behind it rises the Church of Our Lady of the Snows, founded by Charles IV in 1347. It was meant to be bigger than St Vitus Cathedral, but only the choir was ever finished, and it is still one of the tallest church interiors in Prague. In 1419 the radical preacher Jan Želivský led his congregation from here to the New Town Hall, where they threw the councillors out of the windows... the first Prague defenestration.

   In the middle of the square, Josef Jungmann sits in bronze, the man who wrote the great Czech-German dictionary and helped save Czech as a language of culture. From here, walk to Můstek, follow the wide boulevard of Na Příkopě and then turn right into Panská, a narrow street that leads to a baroque palace full of Art Nouveau women.

4. 4. Mucha Museum in the Kaunitz Palace

   Panská 7, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Walk up Panská to the pale baroque palace with the grand doorway, the Kaunitz Palace, and notice the posters on its walls: women with halos of hair, wrapped in flowers and swirling ribbons. You have seen that style a thousand times, on tea tins and tattoos and tarot cards. This is where it comes home.

   Alphonse Mucha was born in 1860 in Ivančice, a small town in Moravia, and spent years scraping a living in Paris as an illustrator. Then, at Christmas 1894, so the story goes, he was almost the only artist still at work in a printing house when an urgent order arrived: a poster for Sarah Bernhardt in the play Gismonda. His tall, narrow, almost Byzantine design went up on the walls of Paris at the start of 1895, and Parisians cut the posters down to take them home. Bernhardt signed him to a six-year contract, and overnight Le style Mucha was everywhere.

   But Mucha did not want to be remembered as a poster man. He spent nearly twenty years on the Slav Epic, twenty enormous canvases about the history of the Slavic peoples, completed in 1928 and given to the city of Prague. And when Czechoslovakia was born in 1918, he designed its first postage stamps and banknotes, famously without asking for a fee. The new republic carried his women in its citizens' wallets.

   The ending is dark. In March 1939 the German army occupied Prague, and Mucha, a famous Slavic patriot and Freemason, was among the first people arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. He was released, but he was nearly eighty and his health broke. He died on the 14th of July 1939 and was buried at Vyšehrad cemetery, among the great names of the nation.

   The museum opened here in 1998, run with his family. And if you visit St Vitus Cathedral at the castle, look for the stained-glass window he made in 1931... the same flowing lines, now in coloured glass and light. Back on the street, continue to the end of Panská and turn left towards the dark Gothic tower rising over Jindřišská.

5. 5. Jindřišská Tower: The Gothic Grandfather

   Jindřišská, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Tilt your head back at the slim dark tower standing on its own beside the church, with its steep pointed roof and little corner turrets like a crown of spikes. After all the gilded flowers, here is the grandfather of the neighbourhood, older than every Art Nouveau house around it by more than four hundred years.

   Jindřišská věž, the Henry Tower, was built between around 1472 and 1476 as the bell tower of the nearby church of Saints Henry and Cunigunde. It stands apart from the church, which was common in medieval Prague, and at around sixty-six metres it is the tallest free-standing belfry in the city. Bells, a clock and a watchman, all in one stone column above the rooftops of the New Town.

   The New Town itself was the big idea of Charles IV. In 1348 he laid out a whole planned city beyond the old walls, with vast market squares and wide streets, one of the most ambitious urban projects in medieval Europe. This parish, dedicated to an emperor-saint and his wife, served the craftsmen and traders who moved into it. The tower burned, was repaired, and in the nineteenth century was given a neo-Gothic makeover, which is why its silhouette looks so crisp and storybook-like today.

   And here is the link to the rest of our walk. When the Art Nouveau architects of 1900 rebuilt this district, they were not rejecting the Gothic. They were in love with it... with its vertical lines, its craftsmanship, its idea that every handle and hinge deserves to be beautiful. Look back from the tower towards Wenceslas Square and you can see the new houses reaching upward with gables and spires of their own, answering the old belfry.

   The tower has been restored in recent decades and opened to visitors, so the old watchman's world above the rooftops is no longer entirely off limits. From the foot of the tower, turn into Jeruzalémská, the side street running north. A few steps along it, prepare yourself for the most colourful facade in Prague.

6. 6. Jubilee Synagogue on Jeruzalémská

   Jeruzalémská 7, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Stop in front of the facade and let your eyes adjust: stripes of red, yellow and cream, horseshoe arches, a huge round window with a Star of David, little domed turrets... in a narrow side street of offices, as if a palace from Granada had been dropped into Central Europe.

   This is the Jubilee Synagogue, also called the Jerusalem Synagogue after its street. It was built in 1905 and 1906 to designs by the Viennese architect Wilhelm Stiassny, and named in honour of the jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph, who had marked fifty years on the throne in 1898. The style mixes Moorish Revival, popular for synagogues across Europe, with Art Nouveau ornament and colour.

   Why build a new synagogue here, so far from the old Jewish Town? Because of the clearance of Josefov, the old ghetto. From the 1890s the city demolished most of it in the name of hygiene and progress, and several synagogues were pulled down with the houses. Prague's Jews needed a new house of prayer, in the New Town where many of them now lived and worked. You will see the other side of that clearance later on this walk, on Pařížská.

   During the Nazi occupation, the synagogue was not destroyed. It was used as a warehouse for property confiscated from deported Jewish families... furniture, books, objects of daily life, stacked up in a house of prayer. Most of Prague's Jews were deported to Terezín and onwards to the death camps, and the great majority never returned. After the war the building returned to the small surviving community, and it is still an active synagogue today.

   Look above the main entrance for the Hebrew verse from the Psalms, about a gate through which the righteous shall enter. Inside, when it is open to visitors, the galleries glow with stencilled patterns and gilding, and there are exhibitions about the Jewish community of Prague. Now make your way east, past Senovážné náměstí, to the park in front of the main station. Beyond the busy road rise two towers crowned with glass domes.

7. 7. Main Station: Josef Fanta's Art Nouveau Gateway

   Wilsonova 300/8, 120 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Face the long facade with the two towers and the great arched window between them, crowned with glass domes and stone figures. And now notice the absurdity: a multi-lane highway runs right in front of it, so the most beautiful station in Prague has to be admired over traffic.

   The building was designed by Josef Fanta and built between 1901 and 1909, at the peak of Art Nouveau. Its first name was the Emperor Franz Joseph Station. In 1919, in the new republic, it became Wilson Station, in thanks to the American president Woodrow Wilson, who had backed Czechoslovak independence. The Nazis removed Wilson's name, the communists eventually settled on the plain Prague Main Station in the 1950s... and in 2011 a new statue of Wilson was unveiled in the park nearby. Every regime has left its fingerprints on this sign.

   Here is the story that matters most. In 1939, trains left these platforms carrying 669 mostly Jewish children to safety in Britain, organised by a young London stockbroker, Nicholas Winton, who kept quiet about it for almost fifty years. On one of the platforms a bronze statue of Winton holding a child stands among the commuters, unveiled in 2009. Most of the parents who waved goodbye here never saw their children again.

   In the 1970s the communist planners built the motorway across the front and dug a new concourse underneath, and for decades Fanta's dome hall was neglected. It has since been restored, and you can sit under the gilded dome in a café named after Fanta himself, surrounded by stucco and painted ornaments, while departure boards flicker below.

   Look for the sculptures on the facade and the ironwork of the great hall: this is Prague Art Nouveau in its most confident mood, a station that wanted to greet travellers like a palace. From the station, head back west and turn into Hybernská street, a straight line leading towards the Powder Tower.

8. 8. Hotel Central & Hybernská Street

   Hybernská 1001/10, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Walk along Hybernská until you spot a facade where gilded branches and leaves seem to grow out of the wall, spreading over the gable and around the name of the hotel. Among the grey neighbours it looks almost like a Viennese cake shop window.

   This is the former Hotel Central, finished around 1901 and counted among the very first Art Nouveau buildings in Prague. It was designed by Friedrich Ohmann, a Viennese professor teaching at the Prague school of applied arts, together with two of his students, Alois Dryák and Bedřich Bendelmayer. Those two students then went on to build the Hotel Evropa on Wenceslas Square, the most photographed Art Nouveau hotel in the city. So in a sense, this is the sketch, and Evropa is the masterpiece.

   Art Nouveau arrived late in Prague, around 1900, but it spread like wildfire. Within a decade the city had a new station, new hotels, new insurance palaces and a whole new boulevard, all wrapped in plants, women and gold. Hybernská shows the moment the style first stepped onto the street.

   The street has more stories than its quiet look suggests. Its name comes from the Hibernians, Irish Franciscans who had a monastery at the far end in the seventeenth century. And across the road stands the People's House, the old headquarters of the Social Democrats, where in January 1912 a conference of Russian revolutionaries was held, dominated by Lenin. For decades afterwards, the communist regime ran a Lenin museum there.

   The hotel itself has changed hands and functions over the century, and the facade has outlived all of them. Continue to the end of Hybernská and pass the Powder Tower and the Municipal House on your right, Prague's grandest Art Nouveau building, which deserves its own visit. Then walk into Celetná, the old royal route, and stop at the corner of Ovocný trh, by a house with a black statue of the Virgin in a golden cage.

9. 9. House of the Black Madonna: The First Cubist Building

   Ovocný trh 19, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Stand at the corner of Celetná and Ovocný trh and look at the house with the folded facade: window frames pushed out like crystals, a roof broken into angled planes, and on the corner, a small black Madonna in a gilded cage. The Madonna is baroque. Everything around her was, in 1912, the most radical building in Prague.

   This is the House of the Black Madonna, designed by Josef Gočár and completed in 1912 as a department store for the merchant František Josef Herbst. It is considered the first Cubist building in Prague. Gočár was just over thirty, and he managed something cunning: he respected the height and rhythm of the old street, yet every surface vibrates with sharp diagonals. He even kept the statue of the Black Madonna from the house that stood here before, giving the new building its old name.

   Go inside if you can and climb the staircase. The handrail, the lamps, the cast-iron banisters are all Cubist, and on the first floor waits the Grand Café Orient, the only surviving Cubist café interior in the world, with angular chandeliers, coat hooks and furniture designed by Gočár. It was closed for decades and reopened in 2005, faithfully reconstructed. Ordering a coffee here is the closest you can get to sitting inside a Cubist painting.

   Czech Cubism lasted only a few years, roughly from 1911 until the First World War. The war stopped construction, and afterwards the movement softened into the rounded national style you saw at the Adria Palace. In the communist decades it was half forgotten. Today the upper floors house a museum of Czech Cubism, with furniture, ceramics and glass from those few feverish years.

   Look up once more: from the outside the department store reads as glass and stone, but its structure is reinforced concrete, the newest technology of its time, wearing a costume of crystals. Now walk through Old Town Square and leave it at its north-west corner, into the wide, elegant avenue called Pařížská.

10. 10. Pařížská: The Boulevard Built on a Ghetto

    Pařížská, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

    Walk slowly down the avenue and look above the designer shop windows: turrets, gables, mosaics, balconies held up by stone figures, every apartment building trying to outdo its neighbour. Pařížská, Paris Avenue, is the most elegant street in Prague... and one of its most uncomfortable.

    Until the 1890s, this area was Josefov, the old Jewish Town, a dense maze of lanes, courtyards and crooked houses. After Jews gained full civic equality in the mid nineteenth century, many families moved out, and the poorest of Prague crowded into the ghetto. The city declared it a health hazard, and from the 1890s, under a slum clearance law, it was largely torn down. The Czech word for that clearance is asanace, which literally means sanitation.

    Not everything went. The Old-New Synagogue, a handful of other synagogues, the Jewish Town Hall and the Old Jewish Cemetery were spared, and you can glimpse some of them from the side streets. But hundreds of buildings disappeared, and in their place came a grid of wide streets and five-storey apartment blocks for the prosperous middle class.

    The architects of these blocks borrowed from everywhere: French boulevards, Viennese ornament, neo-Gothic towers and the new Art Nouveau. The avenue was first called Mikulášská, after the church of St Nicholas at its southern end, and took the name of Paris later, in the years when Czechoslovakia looked to France as its great ally. At its northern end, Čech Bridge, finished in 1908, carries lamp posts and bronze figures that belong to the same Art Nouveau moment.

    So enjoy the beauty, but read it twice. Every gilded balcony here stands where somebody's crooked house once stood, and the ghetto that inspired Kafka's darker imagination and the legend of the Golem survives only in a few precious buildings. From the middle of Pařížská, turn left into Široká and keep walking west until you reach the river and a broad square with a grand concert hall.

11. 11. Rudolfinum & the View from Mánes Bridge

    Alšovo nábřeží 79/12, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

    Here on the square in front of the Rudolfinum, you finally have the river in front of you. Behind you, a long neo-Renaissance palace with a balustrade full of statues of composers. Ahead, Mánes Bridge, and across the water the castle on its ridge.

    The Rudolfinum was built between 1876 and 1885 by Josef Zítek and Josef Schulz, paid for by the Bohemian Savings Bank and named after Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria. It is the older, more serious cousin of everything you have seen today, the style the Art Nouveau rebels were reacting against. On the 4th of January 1896, the Czech Philharmonic played its first concert here, with Antonín Dvořák conducting his own music. Between the wars, the building even served as the parliament of Czechoslovakia.

    Look up at the composers on the roof. During the occupation, the story goes, the Nazi authorities ordered the statue of Felix Mendelssohn removed, because he was of Jewish origin. The workmen did not know which statue was which, so they chose the one with the biggest nose... and it turned out to be Richard Wagner, Hitler's favourite. It is the scene that opens Jiří Weil's novel Mendelssohn Is on the Roof, and whether or not it happened exactly so, it has become part of the building.

    The square itself is named after Jan Palach, the student who set himself on fire in January 1969 in protest against the Soviet-led occupation. He studied at the Faculty of Arts, the building on the side of the square, where a memorial recalls him.

    Now walk onto Mánes Bridge, opened in 1914 and named after the painter Josef Mánes, and turn to face the castle. Somewhere inside St Vitus Cathedral glows Mucha's stained-glass window, and down here the river carries the reflections of a century of facades. You have crossed fifty years of Prague in one afternoon, from neo-Renaissance pride to gilded leaves to Cubist crystals. Stay for the light on the water... this is the best seat in town.