The department store Kotva was opened 40 years ago

Prague - The Kotva Department Store in Republic Square in Prague, one of the most interesting Czechoslovak buildings of the 1970s, has had to face competition from modern shopping centers in recent years - one of which has even sprung up in close proximity to Kotva. However, when it opened 40 years ago, on February 10, 1975, it was the most modern facility of its kind in Czechoslovakia. It was not until two months later that the equally progressive Máj on National Avenue opened.
    Unlike Máj, which has belonged to the British Tesco since 1996, Kotva never became part of a large Western retail chain and had to rely more on the goodwill of its customers. However, the operation and especially the development of the department store were complicated by disputes over shares, which became the subject of police investigations and court cases. Better times for Kotva began to emerge only in March 2005, when the building was purchased by the Irish company Markland, which began significant renovations of the department store.
    In the following years, the owner, along with tenants, invested nearly 200 million CZK into the restoration of Kotva, allowing the traditional department store to continue attracting customers despite competition from the opposite Palladium, which opened in October 2007. During the crisis, when it was difficult to rent out especially the upper floors of Kotva, plans emerged for the reconstruction of the sixth and seventh floors into offices, which, along with the restoration of the façade and the entrance square, should begin soon.
    The façade is - along with the distinctive hexagonal floor plan - the most prominent feature of the department store designed by the husband-and-wife team of Věra and Vladimír Machonin. The hexagons allowed the architects to deal with the spatial constraints of the gap in the northern corner of the square and thus offer as large a sales area as possible despite the relatively small plot. The department store, commissioned by the Prior company in the 1960s, also fits quite well into the surrounding development due to the solution used.
    In fact, Věra and Vladimír Machonin proposed other interesting buildings in the second half of the 1960s (before normalization made further free creation impossible for them), but public and expert acceptance was not always unequivocal. Evaluations are perhaps most divergent in the case of the Thermal Hotel in Karlovy Vary, with the Machonins also designing the massive building of the Czechoslovak Embassy in East Berlin or the former House of Housing Culture at the Budějovická metro station.
    However, the Kotva department store is generally received positively; architectural historian Zdeněk Lukeš even ranked it at the top of the list of socialist architecture in the Czech Republic years ago. There have even been calls for Kotva to be listed as a cultural monument, "even though its irregular shape introduces a disorder into the medieval layout of Prague," as said by Lukeš's colleague Rostislav Švácha. In contrast to the nearby Máj, which has been an official monument since October 2006, such attempts have so far remained only efforts.
    The architectural design of the department store came from a domestic environment, but construction work was entrusted to the Swedish company Sial (the Swedes also built Máj). After an archaeological survey uncovered remnants of a settlement belonging to the royal city court at the site of future Kotva, the foundations began to be laid in April 1972, which also included space for a novelty - a large-capacity underground garage. The construction proceeded incredibly quickly for its time, and the department store was completed in less than 30 months.
    The grand opening of Kotva was, of course, attended by the then representatives, alongside eager customers, who had to be held back by soldiers from the nearby barracks (which today houses the competing Palladium). The ribbon was cut by the powerful head of the Prague organization of the Communist Party, Antonín Kapek, with Minister of Trade Josef Trávníček in attendance. However, there was no place left for the authors of the building; Věra and Vladimír Machonin had to be satisfied in the 1970s just to be able to exercise at least authorial supervision over their buildings.