Like a hundred years ago. Restorers are completing repairs to the interior of Fanta’s building at the main railway station in Prague | iRADIO
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The north wing of the Fanta building at Prague’s main railway station has been closed for more than a year. Workers and restaurateurs work there. In an art nouveau gem from the beginning of the 20th century, they discovered, for example, a unique state coat of arms from the First Republic. The first people will probably get in next September.
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Art Nouveau foliage, mascarons or the restored gilded state coat of arms will already be admired by passengers at Prague’s main railway station next year. In the northern wing of the building by architect Josef Fanta, restorers are now working on restoring the interiors. The most valuable spaces of Prague’s main railway station now have almost their original appearance.
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It’s almost done in the great hall. “This was originally a third-class waiting room. It was leaking, so there was a lot to repair,” says František Bouda, chief engineer of the building, showing the vaults, ceilings and restored stained glass in the windows.
However, the art nouveau paintings, which are dominated by leafy green, are particularly eye-catching. “We tried to adapt the hall to what it was originally designed for. We tried not to emphasize the colors, to leave them as the art nouveau wanted,” he says.
The construction of the railway station, which then bore the name of Emperor František Josef, began in the summer of 1901 and lasted eight years. The prototype for Josef Fanta’s design was, as for most station buildings in Europe, the West Station building in Paris.
Restorers are now restoring the works of the masters of the beginning of the last century. The authors of the sculptures or ornaments are Ladislav Šaloun or Stanislav Sucharda. The Great Hall is dominated by ten masquerades in the form of girls’ faces, each one different.
National emblem for Masaryk?
Probably the biggest surprise awaited the restorers on the front wall of the great hall. Under four layers of enamel, they revealed the defaced national emblem of the First Republic. “It probably dates from 1918 to 1920, which is the year it was canonized,” claims restorer Petr Svoboda, who spent more than a quarter of a year cleaning the coat of arms.
Now he completes the preserved parts of the coat of arms. “I am currently working on the sentence Truth wins, which the socialist-realist craftsmen destroyed by running electrical wiring through it,” he confides.
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The restorers do not know the author of the coat of arms. He only suspects that his first admirer was President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk himself. “When he returned from exile in December 1918, perhaps he wanted to introduce him here, at the then Wilson station, as the first,” speculates František Bouda.
Tight construction
Together with the Great Hall, workers are also repairing the connecting corridor and the original first-class waiting room. It will become a VIP lounge. About half way through the work, workers are now in another rare, so-called pillared hall. In it, they had to demolish several non-original ceilings from fifty years ago to expose the original skeleton of the building.
This part of the reconstruction continued the first phase, which ended in the spring. That’s when workers repaired the shell and roof of Fanta’s building.
According to František Bouda, the building deserves to live on. “Consider that she survived the various inexpert interventions she was able to cope with. And it coped with the dynamic stress from the highway and the other side from the railway,” I think.
Reconstruction of the interiors of Fanta’s building for 360 million crowns, even though the original estimate was sixty million less. The first people could get to the halls, which will serve the Railway Administration primarily as a representation, using the new escalators from the station’s check-in hall next September.
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