Frank Gehry's exuberantly gestural new office building on the edge of the Vitava river is a bold symbol of Prague's architectural, economic and political renewal.
[1]The history of the site now occupied by Frank Gehry's Nationale-Nederlanden Building on the edge of Prague's Vitava river is as Byzantine as any plot devised Kafka. In 1945, an American bomb devastated the Neo-classical apartment block on the corner of two streets (Jiraskovo Namesti and Rasinovo Nabrezi) narrowly missing the neighboring Art Nouveau house of Vaclav Havel, the distinguished writer and future president of the Czech Republic. During the post-war Communist era, the site where the bombed apartment block stood remained vacant and attempts to find a use for it only gained ground after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution of 1989. Havel, now the president ordered the first architectural study from Vlado Milunic. Then the Dutch bank ING agreed to build a house there and asked Milunic to invite a world-renowned architect. Milunic first asked Jean Nouvel who rejected the invitation because of the small size of the site. He then asked Frank Gehry who accepted the challenge and had almost unlimited budget because ING wanted to create an icon in Prague. The construction started in 1994 and finished in 1996.
[2]In early sketches, Gehry envisaged the building as a scrummage of boxy and pillow-like forms, to which Milunic added a geyser-shaped tower. The site turns the corner, so a pivotal tower was a logical point of departure; corner towers are also characteristic of Prague's rich urban texture. However, Gehry apparently considered a single tower too overtly masculine, so the idea of a feminine counterpart evolved, a female yin balancing the male yang, giving rise to the analogy of a dancing couple, whimsically described by Gehry as 'Ginger Rogers and Fred Astair'. Each of the two towers is essentially a distorted cylinder; the diameter of the dominant, solid male tower expands as it extends upwards, while its glazed female partner is dramatically cinched at the waist like a melting hour-glass. A small forest of columns peeks out of Ginger's wispy transparent skirts, a fizzy froth of metaphorical legs and petticoats suddenly tumbling on to the street below, marking the entrance to the building on Jiraskovo namesti. Fred's more robust contours are clad in neutral stucco, animated by a wavy bas-relief pattern and undulating lines of windows that extrude slightly from the curving wall planes. A fractured mesh bauble resembling a traditional onion dome crowns the top of the tower. The syncopated external vocabulary of stucco and windows is carried around the corner into the Rasinovo nabrezi elevation overlooking the river; it also buttresses the gap between the ethereal hour-glass tower and Havel's Art Nouveau building on Jiraskovo namesti.
Behind the swirling facade is a relatively simple plan form based on a conventional relationship of lettable space organised around a compact, L-shaped circulation core. The generous protuberances of the towers provide convenient enclaves for meetings or conferences. Six floors of offices are topped by a bar and restaurant with stunning views of Prague. There are shops on the ground and lower ground floors, and a small cafe at pavement level, set back under the fat circular legs of the larger tower. By providing a degree of animation and public interaction at ground level, the building is much less insular than many traditional office developments, which consciously exclude the public.
[3]The building is an example of deconstructivist architecture, with an unusual shape.Construction is from 99 concrete panels each of different shape and dimension, each therefore requiring a unique wooden form.Its unusual shape and technical solutions caused a big public debate. Afterten years emotions are over, and the house has its place in modern Prague. In 2005 the Czech National Bank issued a gold coin with the motifof the Dancing House, as the final coin of the series "10 Centuries of Architecture."
References:
[1]Frank Gehry's Dancing House history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_House
[2]Frank Gehry's indepth of dancing house concept http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/is_n1202_v201/ai_20757187/?tag=content;col1
[3]Gold coin with the motif of the Dancing House http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/dancinghouse/index.htm
Pictures taken from :
http://blog.addicted2decorating.com/2008/01/architecture-dancing-house-prague.html
http://forum.globaltimes.cn/forum/showthread.php?p=30961
http://www.hotels-in-prague-czech.com/touristinformation_major_sights_of_prague.php
http://praguegallery.net/source/prague-dancing-house-3.html
http://www.berkshirefinearts.com/?page=article&article_id=1095&catID=26
