Prague City Museum, Main Building and the Langweil Model

Museum · Florenc / Na Poříčí (Prague 8)Prague,Czechia

A paper model of Prague cut by hand over eleven years, showing two thousand buildings most of which were demolished soon after.

The Prague City Museum's centrepiece is a paper model of a city that was later torn down. Antonín Langweil cut it out of paper and card between 1826 and 1837, at a scale of 1:480. It covers the Old Town, the Lesser Town and the castle: more than two thousand buildings across about twenty square metres, each one drawn and painted by hand. You look down on roofs, shop signs and chimneys, at the height a bird would have had. Langweil was a doorman at the university library who had failed at every trade he tried, and he died poor; the model was bought for a token sum. What makes it the most valuable object in the building is what happened next. The streets he recorded were cleared at the end of the century, most drastically in the old Jewish quarter, where all but a handful of buildings came down. His paper city is what the demolition men found. The museum shows it without narrating the clearance, as evidence rather than argument.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Get down to the model's eye level — it was made to be looked into rather than down on, and the shop signs, courtyards and chimneys only resolve when your head is level with the roofs.
Look for the streets that are gone — the quarter he recorded most fully is the one the city demolished sixty years later, so parts of the model have no surviving original anywhere.
It is right at Florenc — the metro and the long-distance bus station are next door, which makes this the one museum in Prague that is genuinely easy to do on the way in or out.
Everything here is the city's own record of itself — excavated objects, models, signs and street furniture, rather than a national collection, and the difference in scale is the point.
Remember the scale of the labour — one man, eleven years, paper and paint, working from drawings he made in the streets, with no commission and no buyer waiting at the end of it.

Things to do

1
Put your eye level with the roofs
Get as low and as close to the model as the display allows and look along a street rather than down at the whole. At this scale the buildings are a few centimetres tall, but the signs, gates and chimneys are all painted, and the city stops being a plan and becomes a place with corners you cannot see round.
2
Find a block that no longer exists
Work over to the part of the model showing the old Jewish quarter and pick a lane. Almost none of it survives: the clearance took all but a handful of buildings. You are looking at the only three-dimensional record of streets that thousands of people lived in and that nobody alive has walked.
3
Compare the model with the window
After the model, look at the museum's material on how the city has been altered since: excavations, street furniture, plans. The point of a city museum, as opposed to a national one, is that its subject is directly outside the door, and that comparison is available in no other collection here.