Artists and theorists are complaining to the ministry about the Hotel Prague

Prague - A complaint against the inactivity of the Ministry of Culture (MK) regarding the assessment of potential heritage protection for Hotel Praha will be submitted on Tuesday by a group of artists and theorists. They disagree with the owner's intention to demolish the hotel and build a new structure in its place. This has been made possible, among other things, by the ministry, which has not initiated proceedings to declare the hotel a cultural monument. The financial group PPF announced in June that a publicly inaccessible park for the Open Gate school would be built on the site of the hotel.
    Since then, several protest actions have taken place, and the professional community has expressed support for the preservation of the hotel. The complaint against the alleged inactivity of the office will be delivered to the ministry by representatives of more than 150 of its signatories. The petitioners are convinced that under the law on heritage protection, the conditions for declaring the building a cultural monument have been met, and therefore the ministry was obliged to initiate the relevant proceedings and inform the hotel owner of the obligation to protect it from damage.
    The ministry received a proposal for the declaration of the hotel as a monument in February of this year. It announced in June that it would not even initiate proceedings. According to the authors of the proposal, the MK contributed to the fact that the hotel lost its furnishings due to its delay.
    At the time the proposal was submitted, the building was almost intact; the authors of the proposal indicated that there were several works of art inside, and thus the hotel represented a unique comprehensive work of art. They also informed the ministry that the then-owner was planning to vacate the hotel and demolish it. "The purpose of initiating proceedings is precisely for the owner not to be able to dispose of the object until a decision is made, especially to carry out irreversible actions," remind the experts.
    The hotel was still in an unblemished form at the time when its documentation was being prepared by the National Heritage Institute. The MK commission for cultural monuments also recommended the declaration at the end of May. However, since no administrative proceedings were initiated, the former owner vacated the hotel at the beginning of June. This happened more than 90 days after the proposal was submitted; according to the administrative code, proceedings should be initiated within 30 days; if the opinions of other authorities are needed, then within 60 days.
    Only then did the employees of the heritage conservation department of the city hall examine the hotel. In their opinion, they stated that the hotel is a quality modernist building. However, its dimensions reportedly deviate from the given part of Dejvice and cannot be "unequivocally and unreservedly assessed as an architectural-urban contribution of its time".
    "The architecture of Hotel Praha is absolutely exceptional. It follows the contours of the slope and responds to the terrain with its shape. Buildings that honor a space in this way are almost nonexistent in our country, except for the comparably bold television transmitter Ještěd. Above all, the southern side of the hotel is in the style of so-called organic architecture, thus surpassing, by decades, for example, the world-renowned architect Jan Kaplický," states Pavel Karous, one of the proponents of the hotel's cultural monument status.