Cultural halls of Fanta building
Prague 2 – Main railway station
Design of interiors of the Fanta building cultural halls
author: CAMA - Dagmar Andělová, Lenka Chromíková, Žaneta Mlodziková, Anežka Zákopčaníková
visualisation design: 2022
The Fanta building at the main railway station in Prague is the largest Art Nouveau building in the Czech Republic. This cultural monument was created between 1901 and 1909. The author of the building was the important architect Josef Fanta, authors of the sculptural decoration were the equally important sculptors Ladislav Šaloun and Stanislav Sucharda. Since 1977, there has been a gradual decay of the building caused by the construction of the expressway. It was not until 2012 that the building began to be reconstructed, the central part of the station, the new check-in hall and the restoration work were restored.
In 2021, we won an invited competition to design the interiors of cultural halls. Specifically, there are five rooms - a two-storey cafe, a large congress hall, a columned hall with preserved mosaics, a small lounge and a connecting corridor. Our design is based on the concept of a journey through time, where we accompany the visitor from the present to the past, to the Art Nouveau. The journey begins in a modern lobby, passes through an underground café, enters generous rooms and ends in a luxurious hall and lounge.
We fully respect the rich restoration decoration of the rooms and sensitively complement it with selected furniture, atypical products, lighting fixtures and textiles. We connect all spaces by placing plants, which we perceive as a symbolism of a living Art Nouveau. In the café, in the elevated space above the staircase, we design hanging wire sculptures with a reference to the Art Nouveau figural decoration of the building and thus let art penetrate the interior, an element typical of Art Nouveau. In the Great Hall, we design furniture in light soft tones and make the space stand out, while the Column Hall and the lounge are supported by a careful selection of quality and luxurious materials reflecting their uniqueness, and we divide the space to create smaller and more intimate subspaces. People here should feel calm and as if they have moved back in time to the la belle époque period.