Publication detail

Anatomy of demolitions: How we got to the Case Transgas?

JACKSON, L.

Original Title

Anatomy of demolitions: How we got to the Case Transgas?

Type

book chapter

Language

English

Original Abstract

Hotel Praha was a monumental building erected in a pre-war residential district of Hanspaulka between 1975 and 1981. The hotel was designed by two teams of architects: the creative team came from the Faculty of Architecture in Prague and consisted of esteemed as well as emerging architects: Jan Sedláček, Jaroslav Paroubek, Luděk Todl and Arnošt Navrátil. This team was later joined by a realisation team from Prague Design Institute (Pražský projektový ústav) and other colleagues from the Faculty. Hotel Praha was not supposed to be another luxurious hotel for tourists representing socialist modernism, it was an elite hotel for guests of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. After the revolution in 1989, the hotel was run by the City of Praha 6 District. After 1995, it was run by a jointstock company owned and controlled by the District. In the mid-1990s, the hotel went through minor economical struggles, partly due to some investments in the infrastructure and furnishing of the apartments as well as the ownership transfer. From 1997 up until its complete privatisation in 2001, the hotel was profitable. The demolition of the Transgas complex has been discussed since 2016. At the same time, the Ministry of Culture received the initiative to list the structure among the architectural monuments. At the beginning, there was a failure on the part of the National Heritage Institute in issuing a negative opinion that had not been discussed with the relatively new committee established to deal with the cases of post-war architecture. The opinion was later corrected by the director general herself, but the seed of doubt and the media image was already planted. A conservative minister of culture, Daniel Herman, who was also heavily involved in the structures around another major real estate developer, the Sekyra Group, also a sponsor of his party, decided on a refusal of heritage care protection for Transgas.

Keywords

architecture; 1980s; Hotel Praha; Transgas; brutalism; socialist architecture; Arnošt Navrátil; Václav Aulický

Authors

JACKSON, L.

Released

28. 10. 2020

Publisher

MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art

Location

Ljubljana

ISBN

978-961-95111-0-7

Book

Nonument!

Edition number

1

Pages from

264

Pages to

279

Pages count

16

URL

https://nonument.org/

BibTex

@inbook{BUT165805,
  author="Ladislav {Jackson}",
  title="Anatomy of demolitions: How we got to the Case Transgas?",
  booktitle="Nonument!",
  year="2020",
  publisher="MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art",
  address="Ljubljana",
  edition="1",
  pages="264--279",
  isbn="978-961-95111-0-7",
  url="https://nonument.org/"
}