I prefer to shut up today.

Not in the mood for writing, so I'll just leave you with a few pictures, taken the past few days.

Staroměstské náměstí (Old Town Square). A square in the middle of the Old Town of Prague. It is usually packed with tourists, who are closely watching the Orloj (Astronomical Clock). I was there on Thursday morning at 6 am, and it was almost completely deserted.....

Yesterday, I walked there again, noticing the beautiful facades at the buildings surrounding the square again (and the fiercely blue/grey sky). How I'm gonna miss this kind of architectural beauty...

The TV Tower however, is another story. Located in Žižkov, an area that used to be very rough and working class, it's one of the ugliest buildings I've ever seen. It stands on a plateau in the middle of a residential area, and can be seen from almost everywhere in town. It's 216 metres high. In 2001, sculptures of babies by Czech artist David Černý were attached to it.

Let's dance.

Although Prague is famous for it’s classical Barok and Jugendstil architecture, and there are some breathtaking buildings to be found here, one of my favourite buildings in town is a modern one (or even a ‘post modern’ one, oh that dreadful P-word!). It’s the Dancing Building (Tančicí dům), often referred to as 'Fred and Ginger'. It was designed as a collaboration between two architects: the Czech Vlado Miluniç and the American Frank Gehry (one of my favourite architects of all time, who designed the beautiful Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain).

Fred and Ginger have been dancing on the bank of the Vltava river since 1996. As you can see, there is a dent in the glass façade on the left side; apparently, this was done so that one of the neighbours would not lose his view on the Prague Castle, which is on the other side of the river. I don’t know if this is true, but it sounds pretty good, and ever since I saw Gehry design his buildings (in the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry), which basically comes down to folding strips of silver coloured paper and attaching them with paperclips, it wouldn’t surprise me if this is indeed true.

(A thorough and slightly pretentious essay on Tančicí dům , written by an art historian who did know what he was talking about, appeared in the German art mag Kunst & Kultur in 1997 and can be read here.)