Prague – The large Hotel Prague in the middle of a residential area in Prague’s Dejvice aroused resistance and admiration at the same time. At the time of its creation, the bold building was eventually built for the needs of the Communist Party and the Czechoslovak government between 1975 and 1981. The hotel, which was used for accommodation in foreign delegations, changed owners after the regime change and was acquired by PPF’s Petr Kellner group. The company then decided to demolish the building. Five years have passed since the completion of the demolition, which provoked a negative and positive opinion of the public and experts.

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

Hotel Praha was designed by architects Jaroslav Paroubek, Arnošt Navrátil, Radek Černý and Jan Sedláček. The project was based on the properties of a sloping plot, the former Petschk Garden, with an area of ​​100,000 square meters. The floor plan of the hotel followed the contours and the five-storey building naturally merged into the adjacent large garden. During the construction, the highest quality domestic technologies and materials available at the time were part of it. Each piece of furniture was according to the original design. The building with a built-up area of ​​approximately 9,000 square meters offered, among other things, 136 unusually large rooms, including an almost four-hundred-meter presidential apartment with a view of Prague Castle.