The Bellevue apartment building, which is the last in the block of buildings on Dvorakovo nabrezi towards Novotný lávka, is a unified building whole in its construction and external appearance. It was built, like the entire front, in connection with a significant change in the level of the Prague riverfront between the Charles Bridge and the Chain Bridge in 1841-1845, according to the project of the builder Konstantin Mracka, at the same time as the neighbouring house cp. 330.
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Location
- Praha 1
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Project works
- 2024 - 2025
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Client
- EP nemovitosti s.r.o.
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Cooperation on projects
- Marek Tichý
- Hana Pokorná
- Lukáš Soukup
The construction of the houses themselves destroys the original medieval growth of the embankment, so there is no gradual transformation that would leave older layers of style in the cores of the houses, as is typical of Prague’s building development. The buildings are founded as completely new, with a vision to serve the new form of the city and urban society. This resulted in the development of luxurious tenement houses, collectively completed in 1893. Their unique view of the Prague Castle panorama gives them the name Bellevue.
The construction of the house and its facade, identical to the building on the neighbouring plot, are uniform. The distinctive tectonic façade of eclectic historicist architecture with a dominant corner tower has certain qualities mainly in its craftsmanship and precise segmentation. In terms of building craft, on the other hand, it is a rather ordinary, almost banal two-tract building with an unclear courtyard layout. This is probably also due to the fact that the building was built as two houses, only to be unified into a single building during construction. As a result, two staircases were preserved, which from the beginning created an unorganised and complicated layout of the courtyard section. This contrasts quite considerably with the street or quayside tracts, which are characterised by large rooms of high order, often decorated with historical art and craft.
The concept of the reconstruction of the house is based on highlighting its original purpose – a luxury residence with a restaurant, preserving and reconstructing all significant parts, especially the external facades and the entire roof landscape, which are visually exposed and form an important part of the front of the buildings on Smetanovo Nabrezi. All of the modifications have been implemented only in the courtyard tracts, which, as mentioned above, are strongly influenced by the heterogeneous building process at the time of construction. In particular, the layout is opened up in the direction of the courtyard, associated with the creation of a new public vertical communication – a hall with a lift facing the courtyard. This allows the character and scale of the city-facing rooms to be restored, creating well-organized and spacious apartments of a quality appropriate to the original intent. The restaurant is re-established on the ground floor facing Smetanovo nabrezi, the retail space also returns to the ground floor level facing Karolína Světlé Street, and the remaining basement will be used for technical facilities and, newly, a small automatic traffic loader.
The transformation of the building is thus practically invisible when viewed from the outside, yet it represents a significant improvement in the usability of the building, the quality of housing and technical facilities that meet current requirements..
