"Particular and characteristic." Awakening the heritage consciousness against the backdrop of the Prague development plans of the early 20th century
Abstract
The history of the transformation and perception of the historic center of Prague was fundamentally influenced by development plans (zastavovací plány) from the beginning of the 20th century. The plans emerged as a result of the initial heated debates on the value of the historic old town and the degree to which it should be preserved.
The precursor to the plan was the Prague Sanitization Project (pražská asanace), which involved the general demolition of Josefov and a large part of the Old Town. From an urban and architectural perspective, the project was guided by an idealized vision of a block city which would completely replace the preserved historic structure and refer to the past only by preserving the most important sacral buildings and historicizing references on the façades of newly built apartment buildings.
The turning point was the demolition of buildings on the northern side of the Old Town Square; this evoked a sharp rebuke from the cultural public and ultimately led to the establishment of the Old Prague Club (Klub Za starou Prahu), which in 1900 became the main mouthpiece for the emerging movement of modern heritage care. The demolition of historic buildings, however, went beyond the buildings earmarked for "sanitization" and encroached into the remaining parts of the Old Town and the Lesser Quarter, the unique historical and architectural qualities of which were quite obvious by this time.
The "development plans" were to provide a way out of this quandary - they would clearly identify the buildings to be preserved as well as the methods by which the remaining parts of the individual quarters were to be constructed. A competition for the development plan for the Old Town (and part of the New Town) was announced in 1901, and the winner was the architect Josef Sakař.
The Lesser Town competition had been announced a year earlier with the architect Antonín Balšánek as the declared winner. In both cases, the competition led to the establishment of a regulatory office where a detailed plan was drawn up under the winner's supervision and was subsequently put forward for public comment.
The plans themselves are crucial to understanding the approach at the time, but so are the period commentaries by Luboš Jeřábek, who both glossed out both resulting plans. Sakař's plan for the Old Town was directed by the idea of preserving a large part of the main streets (the "Royal Route") between the Powder Gate and Charles Bridge, i. e.
Celetná and Karlova Streets. He saw the remaining parts as less valuable, and in the marginal areas admitted the possibility of a complete reconstruction in the spirit of the principles of sanitization.
Antonín Balšánek saw the regulation of the Lesser Town as an architectural role; one in which new interventions would rather supplement the historical structure which would be replaced in the riverbank areas by monumental buildings. These would then form the new base of the Hradčany panorama.
In the end, neither plan was directly realized. Sakař's regulations were partially implemented, but practical circumstances and the growing social awareness of the value of the Old Town prevented its overall application and the sanitization of unaffected areas.
Plans for the reconstruction of the Lesser Town were finally challenged by the author Antonín Balšánek himself, who, after terrain tests and drawings into photographs, admitted that any taller buildings would irreversibly damage the unique panorama of the Prague Castle. The significance of these plans is indisputable, however, because for the first time, the historical areas were understood as distinct organisms with their own historical and artistic qualities that must be taken into account before undertaking any modifications.
The inertia of some of the urban ideas captured in the plans is also indisputable, having returned both in competitions and projects (Lesser Town) and in common interventions into the historical structure of the city (Old Town). Discussions on the plans undoubtedly contributed to the fact that after 1918, both historical districts were now seen as heritage units that should be spared any significant traffic or other utilitarian interventions.
The plans thus created a significant division between the mechanical regulations that followed a set of building rules and resulted in constructional sanitization projects and the more controversial interventions of the end of the 19th century, and the artistic and architectural approach that led the more comprehensive urbanistic perspectives of the 1920's and 1930's. Despite all the legitimate criticism, these plans are an extremely important milestone which in many ways prompted a new chapter in the architectural understanding of the historic city; without them, the city's destiny would likely have taken a completely different direction.