The Industrial Palace Opens for Seventeen Days, Then Goes Back to Work

The Industrial Palace at Výstaviště is finished. After a renovation costing more than three billion crowns, the building opens to the public from 25 September to 11 October, on guided tours run by Výstaviště Praha and Prague City Tourism. Prague Morning reported the dates on 11 September.

Seventeen days is the whole of it. Výstaviště Praha says the palace will not stay open to the public on a regular basis afterwards; it goes back to being a venue for exhibitions, trade fairs and scheduled events. The first large one is the Designblok festival in early October, which means the building has barely a fortnight between being shown and being used.

The tour lasts about an hour and costs 91 crowns — a price set to point at 1891, the year the palace first opened. Tickets are sold through the Prague City Tourism website, places are limited, and some dates have already sold out.

Why it took this long

The fire was on 16 October 2008. Items left on an electric hot plate caught, the left wing was destroyed, and the person responsible was never identified. Reconstruction of the burnt wing, and with it the renovation of the rest of the building, did not begin until February 2022 — more than thirteen years later.

Even then the work ran over. Under the original plans it was to have been finished last year. Once the foundations, floors and suspended ceilings of the right wing were uncovered, the condition of the historic structure turned out to be worse than expected, and the additional work pushed the completion out by about a year.

What is being shown

The palace was built for the Jubilee Provincial Exhibition of 1891 to designs by the architect Bedřich Münzberger, and it was the first building in the Czech lands whose architecture was based on a prefabricated iron structure. Contemporary records say 450 workers put it up in ten months, through flooding and hard frosts on the exhibition grounds.

Set that against the recent schedule and the comparison makes itself: ten months in 1891, four and a half years now — though one was a new building on an empty site and the other a repair of a protected structure that had burned. The palace was meant to be temporary, and has instead outlasted the state that commissioned it. Between 1952 and 1954 the communist government had its main hall converted into a social and dance hall, renamed the building the Congress Palace, and folded it into the Julius Fučík Park of Culture and Recreation that then occupied the grounds.

The tours are a narrow window, and the reason they are a window rather than a door is that Výstaviště is a working exhibition ground rather than a museum. What the seventeen days offer is the one chance to see the hall empty — before the stands go up.