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July 7th, 2008
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Rent pushes out Cubist bookstore

Clothing store moves into House of the Black Madonna

By Markéta Hulpachová
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 7th, 2008 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
The bookstore left after rent for the building's ground floor jumped from 250,000 to 900,000 Kč a month.
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A steady crowd of shoppers bustles through a newly opened casual clothing store on Old Town’s touristy Celetná street.
It’s filled with American-brand sneakers, hooded sweatshirts and other skate-inspired garb, drawing throngs of young customers and window-shoppers.
Given the store’s inventory, which is uncannily similar to the trendy streetwear shops generously peppered throughout the city, the foot traffic appears largely due to the purveyor’s prominent location. Rather than getting tucked into one of the area’s newer shopping malls, the shop occupies the House of the Black Madonna, a historic building revered as a gem of Prague’s Cubist architecture.
The staid Black Madonna Bookstore closed in the same location last year in the ground-level corner space, after its owner couldn’t afford the skyrocketing rent. With its quaint interior and a rich assortment of art books, the former bookstore underlined the building’s status as a cultural monument.
It is sorely missed, according to Zdeněk Lukeš, an architect and one of the country’s most respected urban historians.
“That [clothing store] is definitely not the most fitting shop to have in that location,” he said. “Every landlord has the right to pick his tenants as he chooses, but it was nice when the bookshop was there. It sold books on Cubism, so it had a cultural link with the rest of the building.”
The bookshop’s former operator, Jiří Jirásek, could not be reached for comment by press time. Lukeš said rising rents were most likely to blame for the store’s closing.
Jirásek paid around 250,000 Kč ($15,430) per month for the 600-square-meter space. The projected rent for the new tenants was set at around 900,000 Kč, Culture Ministry spokeswoman Marcela Žižková told the daily Právo.
The House of the Black Madonna is just one of many monumental Prague establishments that have struggled to retain their original look, Lukeš said.
While a handful of legendary cafés, such as the Art Deco–styled Grand Café Slavia, have survived throughout the decades, most iconic shops — like the U Adama luxury tailor shop on nearby Na Příkopě street —have been lost forever.
“Today, there’s a mobile phone store there,” Lukeš said of the former tailor shop. “A majority of the interior is completely different.”
The House of the Black Madonna was designed by iconic architect Josef Gočár and was built in 1912 as a multifunctional building with shops, apartments and offices.
Today, the building is regarded as the city’s most significant showcase of early 1900s Cubism, a style whose use in architecture is considered a Czech phenomenon. The Madonna of the building’s name is a unique religious statue on the corner of the structure looking down on passers-by from the second story.
In the early years of its existence, the building housed the famous Grand Café Orient, a lavish café designed by Gočár. In 1920, the café closed after the Cubist style went out of architectural fashion, and its interior was subsequently gutted.
 The building was reconstructed in 1994, after serving as the headquarters of the National Construction Company during communism.
Since then, the structure has returned to its Cubist roots under the ownership of the State Cultural Fund. The Grand Café Orient on the second floor was reconstructed and reopened in 2005, and the top floors of the building now house a permanent exposition of National Gallery Cubist paintings.
“It has become a meeting spot for art connoisseurs and admirers of Czech architecture,” said Grand Café Orient Marketing Director Renata Hendrychová.

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com


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