Abstrakt
The rebuilding of Josefov and Old Town in Prague was the most dramatic urban intervention into the structure of the historic city in its modern history. Its aim was the widespread demolition of the former Jewish ghetto and adjacent parts of the Old Town.
In their place, a modern quarter was to be created, which would be connected to the then centre of the city, the Old Town Square. A competition was launched to obtain the redevelopment plan, which was won by Alfred Hurtig, Matěj Strunc and Jan Hejda.
Their plan envisaged the demolition of the entire Old Town, but only those parts that were flooded in 1845 and thus exempted from taxes were implemented. The redevelopment plan followed the existing street network, thus allowing the new parts to integrate seamlessly into the existing urban fabric.
Its axis was the new Mikulášská (Pařížská) Avenue, which connected Old Town Square with the Vltava embankment. The demolition of the houses on the north side of Old Town Square was a prerequisite for the realisation of the avenue.
This intervention provoked the outrage of Prague's cultural public, which only now realised the losses that the area's redevelopment would necessarily lead to. The impossibility of saving even the most valuable houses, or at least parts of them, led to the emergence of a strong heritage awareness that made further similarly radical interventions impossible.
With the passage of years, it has became clear clear that even the newly created district has its own qualities. Its architecture is a valuable witness to the change in contemporary taste from historicism to Art Nouveau and modernism.
Its urban structure inventively combines the Parisian concept of boulevards with the Viennese principle of building public buildings around the "Ringstrasse", whose role in Prague is played by the Vltava River. It is this peculiar combination that is one of the most remarkable urban moments of the Prague rebuildnig enterprise, which is therefore undoubtedly one of the most interesting achievements of European urbanism in the second half of the 19th century.
