Ten years ago, the controversial Hotel Praha in Dejvice fell to the ground

Prague - The spacious Hotel Prague in the midst of a residential area in Prague's Dejvice evoked both resistance and admiration simultaneously. At the time of its inception, the bold building was constructed for the needs of the Communist Party and the Czechoslovak government between 1975 and 1981. The hotel, which was used, for example, for the accommodation of foreign delegations, changed owners after the regime change and was eventually acquired by the PPF group of Petr Kellner. The company then decided to demolish the building. On June 7, it will be ten years since the completion of the demolition, which elicited both negative and positive reactions from the public and experts.

According to the original plan, a park was to be restored on the site of the hotel, and in the lower part of the land, where the former hotel garages were located, a new school was to be built. Later, the family foundation of Petr Kellner and his wife Renáta announced that on part of the land of the former Hotel Prague, there would be an outdoor gallery instead of a primary school and an eight-year grammar school Open Gate II.

Hotel Prague was created according to the designs of architects Jaroslav Paroubek, Arnošt Navrátil, Radek Černý, and Jan Sedláček. The project was based on the characteristics of the sloping plot, the former Petschk's garden, covering an area of 100,000 square meters. The footprint of the hotel followed the contours, and the five-story building naturally transitioned into the adjacent expansive garden. The construction utilized the highest quality domestic technologies and materials available at the time. Each piece of furniture was made according to an original design. The building, with a footprint of approximately 9,000 square meters, offered among other things 136 unusually spacious rooms, including a nearly four-hundred-meter presidential suite with a view of Prague Castle.