Municipal House (Obecní dům)

Historic · Náměstí Republiky (Old Town)Prague, Czechia

The Municipal House was finished in 1912 on the site of the Royal Court, the palace Bohemian kings lived in through most of the fifteenth century before moving back to the castle. What replaced it was a civic building rather than a museum: concert halls, restaurants, ballrooms and a café, commissioned as a single work of art from the leading Czech artists of the day. A green dome caps the front, and above the entrance the large mosaic Homage to Prague curves across the facade. Czechoslovak independence was declared from inside on 28 October 1918. Every surface has been designed — sinuous ironwork, stained glass, mosaic floors, chandeliers dropping through stairwells. Alfons Mucha decorated the Lord Mayor's Hall alone: eight civic virtues in the pendentives personified by figures from Czech history, wall panels of Slav youth, curtains and door handles included. At the centre of the building is Smetana Hall under a glass dome, which opens the Prague Spring festival each May with Smetana's Má vlast. 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 interior in Prague he designed entirely, down to the textiles, and it is reached on the guided route rather than from the café.
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.