ABSTRACT
Seeking to transform Prague Castle from a symbol of Habsburg domination into a ‘castle fit for a democracy’, in 1920 Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), president of the newly created democratic republic of Czechoslovakia, appointed Slovenian architect Jože Plenik (1872-1957) to serve as Castle Architect. Plenik’s protracted search for architectural forms capable of embodying the cultural spirit of his fellow Slavs led him, during the years following World War I, to transform the landscape of Prague Castle in a manner that is unique in twentieth-century architecture. Despite a conscious evocation of the milieu’s cultural history in his designs, Plenik encountered considerable criticism for his work in Prague Castle that ultimately led him to resign from his post. This paper examines the political motivations underlying the interventions Plenik made in Prague Castle between 1920 and 1935 and suggests reasons for the opposition that this work sustained during both the early democratic and succeeding communist eras in Czechoslovakia. Plenik’s architecture is difficult to classify. Like many of his Modern Movement contemporaries, Plenik sought forms that were new, yet grounded in human experience and cultural memory. Unlike his functionalist counterparts, Plenik anticipated the dangers of severing architecture from the nourishment of the past; he sought an organic relationship with history, whereby historic forms would continue to have meaning, albeit
transformed, in the present. His method of incorporating historical references is largely without precedent. While eschewing established formal means, Plenik produced elements that rely on specificity rather than abstraction. He based the unity in his work on discontinuities rather than connections; inverting the expectations of classical architecture to embody the whole in part, he posited a new relationship of part to whole wherein an individual form, while complete in itself, is understood as an element of an incomplete and implied whole. Starting from the symbolic potential of an architectural fragment, he initiated a process of reconstruction, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This expanded power of the individual architectural gesture facilitated Masaryk’s cultural aspirations-the construction of a national identity for the new democratic Czechoslovak republic.
