Dancing House

Landmark · New Town / Rašín EmbankmentPrague,Czechia

A 1996 corner building on Prague's embankment, a rigid stone tower beside a leaning glass one that seems to turn as you walk past.

The Dancing House is a building you have to walk past to see. A rigid stone tower stands beside a glass one that narrows at the waist and leans on wavy columns. Walk along the embankment and the two slide past each other, the glass one appearing to turn, so the building never presents the same shape twice. A photograph misses all of it. Frank Gehry called the pair Fred and Ginger, and the name stuck abroad. Vlado Milunić, who lived next door, developed the design with Gehry and finished it in 1996, on a corner of the Rašín Embankment that had stood empty since a bombing raid hit it in February 1945. 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. 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. From outside, the composition lines up best from Jirásek Bridge, right beside it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Jirásek Bridge is where it lines up — from the bridge the two towers separate cleanly against the sky, while from the pavement below they collapse into one mass.
Keep walking while you look — the whole effect is in the movement, so the building rewards fifty metres of pavement far more than it rewards standing still in one spot.
Late afternoon flatters the glass — the west-facing curtain wall picks up the sun off the river while the stone tower beside it goes dark, which sharpens the pairing.
It is a working building, not a monument — visitors reach the basement gallery, the seventh-floor restaurant and the top-floor bar and terrace; the rest is offices and hotel rooms.

Things to do

1
Walk the block and watch it turn
Start upstream on the embankment and walk past slowly. The glass tower rotates against the stone one, the columns splay and straighten, and at one point about halfway along the two really do look like a pair caught mid-step.
2
Go up to the roof
The top-floor bar and terrace open onto the river. The view runs up the river to the castle on its ridge and down the line of bridges — the old city seen from the one building it spent years arguing about.