Dancing House

On the Vltava embankment in Prague, among rows of 19th-century apartment houses, one building seems to sway: a glass tower pinched at the waist leans against a solid partner whose windows bob up and down across a rippling façade. Nicknamed the Dancing House — or "Ginger and Fred", after Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire — it was designed by the Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić with Frank Gehry and completed in 1996.

The site has its own history. An apartment building stood here until it was destroyed in the American bombing of Prague in 1945, and the plot lay empty for decades. Next door lived the family of Václav Havel; Milunić, his neighbour, had discussed an idea for the gap as early as 1986, and after the Velvet Revolution made Havel president, the project gained momentum. The Dutch insurer Nationale-Nederlanden agreed to fund a building and asked Milunić to work with an architect of world standing. Jean Nouvel declined because the plot was too small; Gehry accepted, and from their first meeting in Geneva in 1992 the two developed Milunić's concept of a building in two parts, one static and one dynamic, as an image of Czechoslovakia's passage from communism to democracy.

The style is usually called deconstructivist, though its designers preferred "new Baroque". The curved shapes rest on 99 concrete panels, every one of them different, and the roof carries a twisted metal sculpture known as Medusa. The rippling mouldings and deliberately unaligned windows hide the fact that the building fits two more floors into the same height as its 19th-century neighbours, and the window frames project like picture frames to give the façade depth. The interior, largely by Eva Jiřičná, borrows from ship design to make the most of the narrow, asymmetric floors. When it was new, many saw the house as out of place in a city of Gothic, Baroque and Art Nouveau; it nonetheless won a Time magazine design award in 1997, and the Czech National Bank later put it on a gold 2,000-koruna coin in its series "Ten Centuries of Architecture". Today it houses offices, a hotel, an art gallery, a restaurant and a glass bar on the upper floors.

Getting there

The Dancing House stands on Rašín Embankment (Rašínovo nábřeží) in Prague's New Town, beside the Vltava. Václav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) is about 11 km away.