Homage to the Cube
by Tony Perrottet
Miraculously unscathed by two world wars, Prague is an enormous open-air museum of European architecture, with superb examples of Gothic, Romanesque, Baroque and Art Nouveau styles all crowded into one fairytale space. But the city’s quirkiest building may be the Modernist, box-like edifice that can be found in the heart of the Old Town, in a laneway called Ovocný trh – the world’s first Cubist building, an avant-garde creation from the early 20th century called the House of the Black Madonna.
Designed by artist Josef Gočár, the House was regarded as shockingly modern, even revolutionary, when it first opened as a department store in 1912 – and it still seems so in Prague today. For the last 10 years, it has been the home of the Museum of Czech Cubism, which is dedicated to the artistic movement that was embraced by Prague’s intellectuals and extended to all forms of the visual arts – including interior design, architecture, graphic design and photography.
The House itself, of course, is the prime exhibit: Its façade, which looks smooth from a distance, is actually fractured through the inventive use of oblique planes. Large bay windows protrude in the manner of giant quartz crystals. (The House’s poetic name comes from a 17th century statue of the Black Madonna and child, which was rescued from the previous house on the site, and is still poised like a figurehead on one corner). The museum inside is suffused with nostalgia: In its heyday, from 1912 to 1916, Cubism was hailed as a distinctively Czech artistic movement, and it is remembered today as an emblem of a golden age, when Prague was one of the wealthiest cities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its citizens enjoyed a creative renaissance. After the museum, visit the Cubist gift store (Cubist lounge chairs, anyone?) and the world’s only Cubist eatery, the Grand Café Orient, which was a bohemian artist’s hangout before the First World War. As you sip your coffee, waiters might quip that it was near Prague in 1843 that a certain Czech genius, Jakub Krystof Rad, invented the sugar cube. Cubism, it seems, was always in the Czech blood.
