The Dancing House was finished in 1996 on a corner of the Rašín Embankment that had stood empty since a bombing raid hit it in February 1945. Vlado Milunić, who lived next door, developed the idea with Frank Gehry: a rigid stone tower beside a glass one that narrows at the waist and leans on wavy columns, so the pair read as two figures. Gehry himself called the pair Fred and Ginger, and the name stuck abroad. Václav Havel, whose family flat was on the same corner, backed the project, and the objections at the time were about putting anything modern on a nineteenth-century embankment at all.
A photograph misses the main effect, because the building only works when you move past it. Walk along the embankment and the two towers slide past each other, the glass one appearing to turn as you go, so the building never presents the same shape twice. It holds offices, a hotel, a gallery and a bar on the roof, and the terrace up there looks up the river to the castle on its ridge. From outside, the composition lines up best from Jirásek Bridge, which meets the embankment right beside it.