Eighteen Years After the Fire, the Industrial Palace Is Whole Again

The Industrial Palace at Výstaviště opened again on Thursday, with all three of its parts standing for the first time since the night of 16 October 2008, when fire gutted the left wing. Both Prague 7 and ČT24 put the building work at more than four and a half years and roughly three billion crowns. The centre hall and the right wing were restored; the left wing was rebuilt from nothing.

That distinction is the whole project. The right wing and the middle hall were a conservation job on a structure that had taken more than 130 years of successive alterations, in-fills and technical retrofits, much of it undocumented. The single biggest obstruction was the Smetana in-fill from the 1950s, which had covered the original steel and in places blocked access to it altogether. The builders also met unmapped utilities and foundations in poor condition — which, along with a windstorm in 2017 that tore the roof off the middle hall and drove it into the stained glass, is what the client gives as the reason the job ran long.

What the numbers are attached to

The restoration was granular in a way the cost figure alone does not convey. The wooden ceiling of the main hall covers about 2,737 m² and is made of 1,232 separate boards arranged in 77 fields, each marked so it could go back where it came from. The stained glass runs to 5,023 glazed panels over 2,256 m², assembled from more than 107,700 individual pieces of glass, taken down and restored at the Kolektiv Ateliers glassworks in Nový Bor.

One of those panels has a story of its own. The oval painted window on the side elevation of the left wing carried a Ploughing and Hunting motif made to a design by Mikoláš Aleš, and the fire destroyed it. According to ČT24, it could be reconstructed only because a photograph surfaced in response to a public appeal. The replacement measures roughly 5.8 by 3.3 metres, with about 19 m² of painted surface made from some 980 pieces of glass.

The clock tower — around 51 metres and roughly 26 tonnes — was given particular attention, down to the historic movement, the dials and the hands. The façade is no longer the yellow it was before the works but a light beige.

The rebuilt wing is not a copy

Tomáš Hübl, chairman of the board of Výstaviště Praha, is plain that the wing that burned has not come back as it was.

The entire left wing is fully cellared, which is an enormous difference from the original state. Because the palace has moved qualitatively into the twenty-first century, it demands enormous back-of-house for current technology.

— Tomáš Hübl, chairman of the board, Výstaviště Praha

The wing is designed as a separate fire compartment, with detection, pressure mist systems, underfloor heating and escape exits below the windows that the building never had. Seventy boreholes for heat pumps serve as a secondary source for heating and cooling; the reconstruction is co-financed by the European Union through the Modernisation Fund, to up to 293.5 million crowns.

Adam Zábranský, the city councillor for property, called the work "one of the most demanding projects in my portfolio" and its completion "the settling of a debt to future generations". Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda framed the point of the day as the building's recovered wholeness.

After eighteen years we are not opening merely a reconstructed building for Prague. We are giving it back the Industrial Palace as a whole.

— Bohuslav Svoboda, Mayor of Prague

What happens in it now

Guided tours run from 25 September to 11 October and are already sold out, with further dates to be published. The outdoor exhibition Obnova v rukou mistrů, on the work of the craftspeople and restorers, has been open since 24 September, and from 5 to 19 October the piazzetta in front of the palace carries a project by Barbora Šlapetová and Lukáš Rittstein called Jak se dotknout nebe. The first large event inside is Designblok, in early October.

Up to 2,000 people worked on the job, which began in January 2022 under a consortium led by Metrostav CZ with SYNER and AVERS. The building they finished was designed by Bedřich Münzberger and Antonín Wiehl and put up for the Jubilee Exhibition of 1891, and the three-part iron structure under all the glass was, in its day, a strikingly advanced piece of engineering.