Municipal House (Obecní dům)

Historic · Náměstí Republiky (Old Town)Prague,Czechia

Prague's Art Nouveau showpiece of 1912, its concert halls, ballrooms and café made as a single work by the country's leading artists, Mucha among them.

The Municipal House is a whole building designed as one work of art, and it is still in use as one. A green dome caps the front, and above the entrance the mosaic Homage to Prague curves across the facade. Inside are concert halls, restaurants, ballrooms and a café, with sinuous ironwork, stained glass, mosaic floors and chandeliers dropping through the stairwells. At its centre is Smetana Hall under a glass dome, where the Prague Spring festival opens each May with Smetana's Má vlast. The leading Czech artists of the day were commissioned together, and Alfons Mucha took the Lord Mayor's Hall. He filled its pendentives with eight civic virtues personified by figures from Czech history, and its walls with panels of Slav youth. The house was finished in 1912 on the site of the Royal Court, where Bohemian kings lived through most of the fifteenth century. Czechoslovak independence was declared from inside it on 28 October 1918. The ground-floor café still works, without ceremony, as a café.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Mucha's room is the reason to go inside — the Lord Mayor's Hall is the only Prague interior he designed entirely, down to the textiles, and only the guided route reaches it.
The café asks nothing of you — the ground-floor room under its glass ceiling, with the fountain and the brass, is open to anyone who walks in and sits down.
Cross the road before you go in — the mosaic over the entrance and the figures flanking it only compose from the far pavement; from the doorway you stand too close to see any of it.

Things to do

1
Sit in the café under the glass
The ground-floor café is a complete Art Nouveau room still doing its original job: marble, brass, a fountain along one wall and a glazed ceiling overhead. Take a table near the window and give it half an hour. Nobody hurries you out.
2
Take the route to the Mayor's Hall
The ceremonial rooms open only on the guided circuit, and the payoff comes near the end. Mucha's hall is small, dense and completely his — ceiling, walls, windows, textiles — and it looks like nothing else in the building.