A new English-language book celebrates 150 years of Prague architecture

Prague’s Gothic spires and Baroque facades have long had their due. That’s the message of a new tome celebrating 150 years of modern Czech architecture, one of the most comprehensive surveys in the English language to date.

Prague Uncovered: A Local’s Guide to Modern and Contemporary Architecture, published by non-profit initiative Mapamátky and released this month, maps 70 buildings across 17 neighborhoods that tell a completely different story about the Czech capital.

The book is devoted to the real Prague, the one where people live, work, and shape the future, the authors say.

“Tourism in Prague often stops at the Castle and the Old Town,” says Marie Zákostelecká, chairman of the association. “But there’s another city out there, full of stories, experiments, and ideas, where even the smallest architectural details influence us every day.”

The brutalist cultural centers of Holešovice, the functionalist villas of Dejvice, and the contemporary interventions transforming former industrial zones are all featured in the new book, which depicts a city of architectural experimentation that has never stopped evolving.

While millions of visitors photograph the same dozen landmarks each year, Zákostelecká says they’re missing Karel Prager’s monumental New Building of the National Museum, for example, a brutalist masterpiece that locals either love or hate with equal passion.

They’re overlooking Josef Gočár’s stunning modernist Church of St. Wenceslas in Vršovice, where clean lines and spiritual space merge in ways that would have scandalized his Baroque predecessors.

The 172-page book traces six major architectural movements that shaped modern Prague: Cubism (yes, architectural Cubism; Prague is one of the few cities where this movement flourished), Rondocubism, Functionalism, International Style, Brutalism, and Postmodernism.

“We wanted to show the best of Prague’s architecture from the last 150 years, not as isolated objects, but as part of a city that keeps transforming,” said Štěpán Beneš, an architect who directed the book's content, in a press release. “Each building tells something about the time, the people, and the vision that shaped it.”

That evolution includes Prague’s complex relationship with the Vltava River, examined through projects such as the Podolí Waterworks, various embankments, and new bridges that are finally reconnecting the city to its waterfront.

For decades, the river was treated as an industrial thoroughfare rather than a public space. Recent projects, such as the Štvanice Footbridge in Karlín, demonstrate how this is changing and how contemporary architecture is helping to reclaim overlooked parts of the city.

Written by local experts in architectural education and heritage, Prague Uncovered is designed to function as three things at once, say its authors: a practical walking guide, a coffee-table book you’ll actually read, and a resource that explains why these buildings matter. (If you’ve ever yearned to know why functionalist architects obsessed over light and air in the 1920s, you’ll find out here.)

The book also doesn’t shy away from Prague’s architectural contradictions.

Communist-era brutalism sits alongside ambitious contemporary projects in former industrial zones like Karlín, where the Forum Karlín complex represents the kind of large-scale redevelopment that’s changing (and complicating) the city’s identity.

While the organization has previously hosted guided tours and exhibitions, this is Mapamátky’s first English-language book dedicated exclusively to the city’s modern and contemporary buildings.

“We’re inviting people to see Prague through local eyes,” Zákostelecká says.

Prague Uncovered: A Local’s Guide to Modern and Contemporary Architecture is available at shop.mapamatky.cz for CZK 590.