WHAT BEAUTY DOES

I had a remarkable art history professor in college, Sylvia Boone, who began the semester by asking each student to list five things that were beautiful. After sharing our responses she explained that what each of thought was beautiful revealed a great deal about us, and much less about those things themselves. The interior of Adolf Loos’ Muller House in Prague might be a litmus test for architects and interior designers, exposing their deeply-held cultural and intellectual leanings. Some will find it too rich and some too restrained. I found it poised – remarkable, precisely – between intellectual rigor and sensual abandon.

From the outside the house is famously austere, a white concrete cube with small punched windows. Their Braille-like groupings reveal its compressed inner structure, the way its rooms are impressed upon one another, like organs in the body. The Muller House is revered by architects as the finest exemplar of the raumplan, Loos’s idea that a building is organized by spatial relationships between rooms rather than a floor plan. The narrow, turning wood staircase at its center is the origin of the building, from which all of its rooms unfold. The Living Room, at the back of the ground floor, is its largest and most finely expressed space. It’s narrow and wide, with a row of tall windows overlooking the backyard, that slopes dramatically down to the main street.

The walls are finished with panels of dark stained mahogany and a richly figured green marble, the kind of materials that would be used theatrically in a McMansion. But here the wood and stone panels – undeniably voluptuous – are fiercely elegant. Their over-the-top textures and colors are, somehow, quieted by the disciplined symmetries and proportions of the room, and its modest furnishings: three battered oriental rugs, a loveseat, two tables, and half a dozen upholstered chairs. As preserved and maintained by The City of Prague Museum, the room rests right at the tipping point between Tasteful Bourgeois and Arriviste Splendor. Standing inside it, a visitor feels excited and also settled. The room is luxurious but no single feature is too bright or too large; nothing pulls the eye. This interior brings something close to inner peace.

Photo from Muller House.

August 27, 2017 by Nalina Moses

ARCHITECTURAL MOVEMENT

On my own, on a three-day vacation in Prague, I wandered the streets of the old city without a tour book, following pictographic tourist signs and the movement of the crowds. I was suitably impressed with the city’s castle, its bridges, and its impeccably maintained art nouveau facades. But what stopped me in my tracks was a large modern concrete apartment block just outside the Jewish quarter. It’s facade was made from triangulated concrete planes that tipped gently this way and that from the perpendicular, catching the light and holding the eye dramatically. This immense five-story building was charged with kinetic energy, alive with a hard, modern pulse.

Its architect, Otakar Novotný, is one of the best-known Czech Cubists. At the Czech Cubist Museum, a fifteen-minute walk away, there’s a charming permanent display of furniture, glassware, tableware, posters and painting, including works by architects Josef Gočár, Josef Chochol, and Novotný himself. These galleries are housed in a former office building by Gočár, that’s dressed in faceted panels of rich red sandstone.

The overall aesthetic of Czech Cubism is energetic and expressionistic, characterized by hard graphic lines, sloping planes, and attenuated lozenges. The furniture is kooky and eccentric, as if fabricated to decorate the set of a happy horror movie. It’s also bulky, with swollen profiles to accommodate the depth of the turning wood and glass planes. A tall cabinet with shimmering faceted glass doors can’t hold more than a few place settings, so compromised it its interior space.

Though only clumsily applied to smaller objects, Czech Cubist stylings suit buildings brilliantly, offering a rich technique to model large surfaces. I can’t think of another modern building that breaks its large planes as simply, boldly, and effectively as the Novotny apartment block. Architecture often stands on the sidelines of principle-driven artistic movements, hampered by cost, scale and utility. So it’s surprising that Czech Cubism finds its finest expression here, in buildings. It engages light, surface, and optics indelibly.

House in Neklanova, Prague, 1913-1914. By Josef Chochol.

August 22, 2017 by Nalina Moses

INNOCENTS ABROAD

To announce my arrival in Prague last month I posted a photo of Frank Gehry’s Nationale-Nederlanden Building, more popularly known as the Dancing House or Fred and Ginger, on social media. As intended, it made a splash. One friend, a talented architect, commented, “The ugliest building in Prague.” Another friend, also a designer, asked, “Is this building finished yet?”

Compared to other institutional buildings in central Prague, the NNB certainly stands out. This seven-story exhibition and event space occupies a prominent corner on Rašínovo nábřeží, the street that runs parallel to the Vlatava River, right across from the Jirasek Bridge. Cars and pedestrians swarm around it all night and day. Its outer corner is expressed as two slender volumes – a stiff cylindrical tower and a swooning, glass-enrobed cone that leans passionately into it. The building looks less like a signature Gehry structure – a heap of swirling metallic shards – than an illustration from Delirious New York rendered in three dimensions. This expression is, within the setting, brazen. Among the stately early twentieth-century apartment and office blocks along the street, whose staid facades are trimmed with neoclassical and art nouveau ornament, the NNB is cartoonish. Its scale and attributes are slightly overscaled, slightly exaggerated, and slightly garish.

The NNB is constructed from a concrete frame and lifted off the corner with chunky columns, all of which lends it a crude, workmanlike feeling when seen from the sidewalk below it. It lacks the lightness and the dynamism of Gehry’s more recent monumental work, and of the real Fred and Ginger. But the building is not a deliberate provocation. It retains an innocence in spirit, as if imagined by a child. In its simplicity and expressiveness it’s true to Gehry’s vision, an LA building dropped, with joy, inside the heart of an old European city. It’s not concerned with following the rules, and not concerned with breaking them either.

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

August 12, 2017 by Nalina Moses