Building of the National Assembly

Since the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, there were plans for a parliament, which at that time was temporarily meeting in the Rudolfinum. The Letná Plain was to become the site for the new parliament. In the first architectural competition for the design of the new parliament, held in 1928, Josef Štěpánek (a student of Plečnik and Kotěra) won with a purely functionalist design. The modern style was meant to represent the newly emerging democracy. However, Štěpánek's project was never realized, and the Letná Plain remained available for a second competition for the parliament building in 1947, in which the proposal by František Čermák and Gustav Paul won. The communist coup in February 1948, however, halted plans for the construction of the parliament once again. From that moment on, the republic continued to be governed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The parliament occupied the former Engel's Ministry of Railways on the Vltava riverbank, but this institution did not have much significance in the atmosphere of fear. Antonín Engel is, by the way, the author of the reconstruction of the Rudolfinum from a chamber back to a concert hall. During the warming of the social climate, the importance of the parliament also grew, until a limited competition for the reconstruction of the former stock exchange for the needs of the parliament was announced at the turn of 1965/66. The originally neoclassical Prague Stock Exchange was designed by Plečnik's student Jaroslav Rössler in 1938, located near the massive National Museum designed by Josef Schulz and the much smaller neo-Renaissance State Opera by Alphonse Wertmüller. The stock exchange palace and surrounding buildings did not allow architects to respond to the context. Jiří Voženílek, at the time the chief architect of Prague and a professor of architecture at ČVUT, commented on the individual competition projects as follows:
Bohumil Kříž and Evžen Syrovátka, late functionalist architects, decided to continue the classical extension of the mass to the rear. In the same dimension as the stock exchange, they attached a "department store".
František Cubr, Josef Hrubý, and Zdeněk Pokorný, authors of the Brussels Expo 58, added a lower longitudinal wing in front and a higher transverse wing at the back. The tall rear tower only accentuated the unbalanced cluster and compositional confusion.
Jaroslav Fragner, then a professor at AVU, added a mass as high as the stock exchange, which he clad in a modern glass curtain wall. He then lifted a mass at the back, equal in height to Schulz's museum.
Stanislav Hubička, the author of the Nusle Bridge, did not conceal his brutalist tendencies.
Věra and Vladimír Machonin, who had won the competition for the Karlovy Vary Thermal a year earlier and four years later the competition for the Kotva, completely denied the character of the original building and surrounded it entirely.
Karel Prager found the best solution for the given location among all competitors. The jury recognized the uncompromising approach and distinctive mass composition as the best handling of a difficult context and justly awarded the project first prize. Karel Prager, in collaboration with architects Jiří Kadeřábek and Jiří Albrecht, cleaned, reconstructed, and completed the stock exchange building between 1966 and 1974 with a two-story Vierendeel bridge structure supported by four slender columns.
In 1968, Prager, along with Miroslav Masák, wanted to establish an independent association of architects, which earned him the designation persona non grata from the communist regime. He was also able to silence the loud dissent of preservationists with strong political interest. It was forbidden to publicly discuss the construction. After completion, the building was not published in the Czech professional press. Prager himself described the project as "a house above a house," in which one can see the influence of utopian studies by Yona Friedman and his ideas about suspended cities. At that time, the Czech translation of the book Where Will We Live Tomorrow by French visionary Michel Ragon also came out. The building of the National Assembly is far from being Prager's only project where a massive cube hovers on a slender stem. Just mentioning the complex of buildings in Emauzy (1968) or the unrealized design of the State Library of Czechoslovakia at the Negrelli Viaduct (1984) suffices.
The building was ahead of its time in many ways. The targeted suspension of glass on the facade was the largest of its kind in the world. At the turn of 1969-70, the French magazine L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui featured the building. Generally, the structure garnered more international attention than Hubáček's tower at Ještěd.

What followed
The building was intended as a provisional structure for the National Assembly, with subsequent use as a multicultural facility in the center of Prague. An exhibition hall was planned on the upper floor to operate simultaneously with the National Assembly; however, the emergence of the federation, and thus the Federal Assembly in 1968, influenced the architectural design, and instead of the planned exhibition hall, a Hall of Nations was created here. The Federal Assembly operated in the building until 1992. Since 1994, the facility has been leased to the radio station Radio Free Europe, which moved at the end of 2008 to a new building in Prague's Hagibor, and on June 1, 2009, the building came under the management of the National Museum.