Celebrating the hidden oddities of the Czech capital
IT WAS on my street in Prague that I decided to become a world-famous influence. Or, rather, when the profession chose me.
Petřínská: walking home to my flat, I saw a man. One I'd never seen before but one who'd always been there. He must have eyed me coming and going a hundred times, just waiting to be spotted. If I never had, there was little wonder why. He was a good metre above my eyeline, the size of my thumb, and inconspicuously carved into a tenement door.
Furrowed brow, face plump and pouting. Glaring down at passers-by as if each and every one had displeased him in some way. I don't think I'd ever seen something so detailed in a place so insignificant; he should be in a gallery, and yet here he was on Petřínská Street, tucked out of sight. He was so odd, so wonderful and out of place, that I had to share him with everyone I knew—nay, share him with the world. So there, the social media muse descended all in an instant. I would become an influencer: a propagator of paying attention to the faces carved on doors. The interest was, admittedly, niche. World fame would take some time. But that didn’t stop me from setting up an Instagram account and calling it Prague Up Close.
Ever since I’d moved to Prague I’d been noticing hidden faces like that—noticing kings peeking out of niches, cherubs dancing on balconies, animals perched high up on walls. There were the vivid mosaics too, and the sculpted floral patterns growing over the façades of apartment buildings. Prague Up Close, I decided, would have a simple premise: to celebrate the city's miniscule details wherever they were found.
I was throwing myself into a saturated market; the Czech capital has inspired no small number of Instagram accounts. But let others sing the praises of the Castle and its sweeping vistas: I set about photographing doorhandles and cobblestones. My interest wasn’t so much in uncovering a hidden Prague as in directing attention to an overlooked one. I wanted to search out the unseen oddities and intricacies that formed the backdrop to the life of your average Pražák on their way to work.
It became a minor obsession. Soon I couldn’t be taken anywhere without stopping every few metres to snap another detail that had caught my eye. And Prague always offers you more. Here a spatchcocked fish under a bay window, there a bust of Einstein fixed to a shabby tenement. Just when I thought there was at last nothing new under the sun, I’d stumble across a stucco spiderweb, or—eh?—an owl carrying a lobster by someone’s front door.
Online I would always present my finds the same way. First a shot of the detail up close, then, on a second slide, a photo from further back showing it in context. Because context is everything. That grumpy face on my street would have been intriguing enough just carved onto a piece of wood; but it’s the placement, how it communicates with the world around it, which gives it its strange power. It’s the fact the face is seen—and was surely designed to be seen—out of the corner of your eye, taking you by surprise as you trudge home from work.
For me, it’s moments like these that had forged my connection with Prague. Surprise, admiration, or just plain confusion: something springs from a chance encounter and forces you to confront the space around you. Forces you to engage with it in a kind of conversation. A great city is one you can’t walk through passively, and Prague rarely leaves you be. Every building jostles to offer you something different: a little scrap of history maybe, or simply an intricate pattern on a wall. In return these buildings demand, if not your understanding, then at least your attention—after all, you should always look your interlocutor in the eye. Prague Up Close encouraged its (handful of) followers to give up that attention happily and enthusiastically. It's promise was that you'd always find something worth looking at.
Except, of course, when you didn't: when there was nothing at all worth looking at. Because—and it pains me to say it—there exists another Prague to the one I captured on Prague Up Close. A Prague of uncompromising straight lines and flat, unadorned facades. A Prague I tried purposefully to ignore. The Czech Republic might be one of the great European capitals of Rococo and Art Nouveau, but so too is it a spiritual home of their great aesthetic nemesis: Functionalism.
LET'S BLAME Adolf Loos. A militant modernist and native of Brno, the Czech Republic’s second city, the designer was one of the most influential early voices in the drive to scrub clean the built environment. Today he is best remembered for his manifesto Ornament and Crime, the title of which leaves you in little doubt as to his tastes. In it he writes that “the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects,” and that such embellishments are even “a crime against the national economy that [result] in the waste of human labour, money, and material.” He was clearly no fan of owls carrying lobsters, nor pouting faces hidden in doors.
Prague Up Close was, in its small way, my attempt at a rebuttal to Loos’s manifesto. You might hope time would have already administered him one, but almost a century after his death and his ideas have long been the mainstream. Baroque excess is outdated, while anything sleek and reflective is still labelled as "modern". Ornament is crime more than ever: look at the majority of buildings going up today and you’d certainly think architects risk hard time for adding a bauble or trinket.
Which is not to say that Loos’s arguments are bulletproof—or even particularly well thought out. Far from it. As for ornament being a crime against the economy, you only need look at the success of Prague’s tourism industry. Had the City of a Hundred Spires been built according to Loos's aesthetic principles (i.e. with all the decoration of an electrical substation) it’s hard to imagine that the Czech capital would inspire people to cough up quite so much as they do today for a chance to visit.
And what about Loos's whole underlying premise, that ornamentation has, by its very nature, no use? On the contrary: the utility of the useless should be evident, inasmuch as joy is still a handy thing to carry around in your pocket. Alain de Botton famously argued in The Architecture of Happiness that beautiful designs change our mood; and there's even evidence that the "scenic-ness" of our environment has an impact on our health.
Of course, beauty and what makes an environment scenic are in the eye of the beholder, but I would argue they're not to be found in contemporary design's cold “Loosian” asceticism. A touch of ornamentation might very well cure you, but it's been quite some time since architects en masse have dosed out that particular medicine. It’s perhaps the reason why the designer Thomas Heatherwick talks these days of the profession suffering a “global blandemic”.
Prague itself is not immune to the disease. The city remains beautiful, but its newest landmark projects are familiar glass and metal tubes belonging everywhere and nowhere. The new Masaryčka business district, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, is a prime example. Due to be completed in the coming years, it is sure to be tastefully designed, unimpeachably practical—and utterly, soul-crushingly dull.
Does it have to be like that? Are we damned to be surrounded by useful objects without ornament, like Loos always dreamed? Frivolity is an easy word to roll your eyes at, but there’s power in the frivolous. Edwin Heathcote, the architecture critic for the Financial Times, puts it much better than I could when he writes that “ornament is the language through which architecture communicates with a broader public. Each remove puts another degree of separation between the profession and the public.”
Sadly, with much contemporary architecture there is (literally and figuratively) nothing for the public to grab hold of. “Prague won’t let you go,” Kafka once wrote, “the little mother has claws.” But the Prague being built for the next generation is one that, like the Masaryčka development, is so flowing and streamlined as if intentionally designed to slip from the public consciousness. This is not to say that what Hadid Architects have designed won't impress for a few years. But it seems inevitable that it will become yet another faceless development which fills the gaps between the Municipal House and the Archa Palace—buildings in the centre of Prague that are, by contrast, so spectacularly knotted and curlicued as to really get stuck in the Czech imagination.
In my mind, it’s simple: I always go back to that little carved face on my street. That stern, self-righteous look made more of an impression and built more of a connection than any high-concept engineering marvel ever could. It’s design on a human scale and satisfying a very human need. Not a need for grand concepts with painfully thought-out philosophies, but one for a cheap laugh walking down the street. Because what is that little face, if not a joke whose punchline still lands over a century after it was told?
IT'S A JOKE that lasted far longer than my influencer aspirations, at any rate. Even if you were interested, you wouldn't find Prague Up Close online anymore. It was no surprise whatsoever when I learned I had neither the skills nor the personality to be a minor influencer, much less a world-famous one. The account lasted a year or so before quietly falling into disuse... Oh well. Even if it was only from some unvisited corner of the Internet, I still got the chance to lay out my case. And, if nothing else, it gave me a reason to walk the city I love and find even more reasons to love it.
The motto of the account was “Take a closer look”. It's something I still try and do, wherever I find myself living. Buildings—good buildings—are always trying to tell you something. While not all cities are quite as talkative as Prague, it's always worth paying attention and listening to what they have to say.
Unless stated otherwise, all photos are copyright of 14 Degrees East