The functionalist building of the Electric Companies is repaired. Has the monument lost its authenticity or is it a show-stopper?

The repair of one of the most important functionalist monuments, the building of Elektrické podnikas in Prague's Holešovice, is over. The reconstruction according to the project of TaK Architects took two and a half years and cost 1.3 billion crowns. By the end of the year, companies from the world's largest advertising concern WPP, which signed an 18-year lease, will move into it. Listen to the series about the building, which used to be a showcase of Czechoslovak interwar architecture.

The former administration building of the Elektrické podnikas, which operated public mass transport in Prague and was also responsible for the production of electricity, was completed in 1935. It was the work of the then budding architects Adolf Benš and Josef Kříž, who designed a generous functionalist building with reinforced concrete construction and ceramic, creamy white cladding. That is why it was one of the buildings that were nicknamed "tile factories".

"This building was the biggest promotion of electricity in the whole of Czechoslovakia, hence its generous architecture and light color, which evokes purity," says the theorist and architectural historian Radomíra Sedláková. And he adds: "Unfortunately, it took a long time to build, so the icon of Czech functionalism has meanwhile become the General Pension Institute in Žižkov, today called Radost." But if the Electric Works building had been completed, say, three years earlier, it would undoubtedly have been her."

High-end equipment of the multifunctional palace

Benš and Kříž designed a new type of office building with ultra-modern equipment. "In addition to its aesthetics and urban planning, the building was important mainly from a technological point of view. It literally became a modern office machine, which was - often for the first time - equipped with sophisticated technologies, led by Carrier air conditioning," says architectural historian Jakub Potůček.

From the beginning, the building met the basic condition – it had to be able to serve all visitors right from the ground floor. Therefore, there were also two halls next to the entrance hall. In the building, we would find not only offices, but also a gallery of electrical appliances, workshops, a lighting consulting room, warehouses, archives, a transformer station, a telephone switchboard, a spa or one of the first large-capacity American-style canteens in our country. And also cafes, shops and social halls.

The overall reconstruction of the functionalist monument began in autumn 2018 according to the project of TaK Architects, led by architect Marko Tichý. “We tried to clean up the generous and exceptional architecture, but on the other hand we tried to make the house continue to serve its purpose. The advantage was that the new program is again an office building. Nevertheless, we tried to break the original, rigid structure of small offices and made a compromise - we kept the structure intact on the first floor, but the layout loosens up on the others. As a person walks through the building, the partitions gradually recede and the spaces merge until they merge into a space lit from both sides," explains architect Marek Tichý.

How was the restoration of the building technically demanding and why was the shell and its ceramic cladding replaced by a copy? How do architecture historians Radomíra Sedláková and Jakub Potůček evaluate the reconstruction? And what use is planned for the repaired tiled palace? Listen to the entire series of Mosaics.