Thirty years ago, the Brussels Pavilion in Prague burned down. The fire then caused almost ninety million Company News Pražská Drbna
For more than three decades, the Brussels Pavilion was one of the dominants of the Prague Exhibition Grounds, before its fire destroyed it on October 25, 1991. Sadly, the work of architects František Cubr, Josef Hrubý and Zdeněk Pokorný, which in 1958 hosted a Czechoslovak exhibition at the famous Expo 58 in Brussels and since 1960 has served mainly for a number of short-term exhibitions. During the General Czechoslovak Exhibition in 1991, for example, a moonstone was exhibited on its premises.
The cause of the fire was negligence in the use of the electrical appliance. The damage reached 84 million crowns, according to other sources 40 million crowns.
The building, like the entire Czechoslovak exhibition in Brussels, was proof at the time of its construction that even during the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovak culture or industry did not lose contact with the world. On the outside, the pavilion had a strictly geometric layout, but inside, the architecture receded into the background to highlight the carefully prepared exhibition. Today, however, it is possible to perceive the concept of the building only from films or photographs, because after the fire, the torso of the building standing at the northern edge of the Exhibition Grounds had to be torn down.
At the same time, the Brussels Pavilion was not the only building that was destroyed by fire at the Exhibition Center after 1989. In 2002, a children’s pavilion, which served as a warehouse, succumbed to fire, and in 2005 the Globe Theater burned down. With a wooden replica of the Elizabethan theater built in 1999, the fire was completely destroyed. The biggest damage was caused in October 2008 by the fire of the Art Nouveau Industrial Palace, the dominant feature of the complex.
