House of the Black Madonna

Landmark · Staré Město (Old Town), corner of Celetná and Ovocný trhPrague,Czechia

The first Cubist building anywhere to be finished, its Prague stone cut into planes, carrying the seventeenth-century statue saved from the house it replaced.

The House of the Black Madonna is the first Cubist building anywhere to be finished, and it stands on a busy Old Town corner with no curve on it. The stone is cut into planes, the dormers are angled like crystals, and the door grilles and staircase rail are folded rather than scrolled. This is the vocabulary painters had invented in Paris a few years earlier, worked at the scale of a department store with four floors of glass. Josef Gočár was thirty-one when he drew it, and it was finished in 1912. The name comes from a seventeenth-century statue of a black Madonna, saved from the house demolished to make room and set into the corner, so the newest building on the street carries the oldest thing on the site. Inside, the Grand Café Orient was fitted out by Gočár down to the dark oak bar and the chairs; it was ripped out in the 1920s and rebuilt from his drawings. The same architects turned after 1918 to a national style people call rondocubism.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Cross to the far pavement on Celetná before looking — On a corner, it reads as one crystalline mass from a distance; underneath you see a shopfront and miss the design.
Find the corner statue — a black Madonna from the seventeenth century sits in a gilded cage on the angle of the building, rescued from the house that stood here before this one was built.
The first-floor café is part of the exhibit — The same architect designed it down to the bar and chairs; it was rebuilt from his drawings, and needs no museum ticket.

Things to do

1
Read the corner from across the street
Stand on the opposite pavement of Celetná where both faces of the building are visible at once. The mass is cut into planes, the dormers are angled, the cornice steps. From here it is obviously one crystalline object; from underneath it dissolves into shop windows and you would walk past it.
2
Take the stairs slowly
Go up the main staircase inside and put a hand on the rail. The banister, the grilles and the lamps are all folded into facets, the same geometry as the outside, applied to things you touch. This is where the building stops being a facade in a style and becomes a whole design.