Mosaic saved from Prague Brutalist building set for demolition
One of Prague’s iconic Brutalist structures, the Central Telecommunications Building in the district of Žižkov, is gradually being demolished. However, some valuable art pieces from its interior have been saved, including a large-scale mosaic created by Italian artist Sauro Ballardini out of hundreds of pieces of glass.
The Central Telecommunications building with its unmistakable tower is known among Praguers as Mordor, a reference to Lord of the Rings. It was built between 1972 and 1979 and at the time, it was the tallest building in Czechoslovakia and the tallest telecom building in Europe.
The communist planners commissioned a number of art pieces for the then state-of the-art building, including a huge mosaic made by Sauro Ballardini, who also did the mural at Florenc metro station.
The work cost half a million Czechoslovak crowns, a substantial sum of money at the time, and depicts the gilded plaque carried to the planet Jupiter by the NASA Pioneer 10 space probe as a message to alien civilizations.
Magdalena Kracík Štorkánová is one of the people who helped save the unique artwork:
“The name of the mosaic is ‘Man Conquering the New Horizons of the Universe’ and it actually depicts a silhouette of a spacecraft. It also portrays a man and a woman and planets of the solar system, originally depicted on the golden plaque, which is still floating somewhere in space.”
The mosaic, which is four metres high and nine metres wide, was made out of hundreds of pieces of glass, cut out of large glass plates, she explains:
“It is in fact a traditional mosaic technique that was used already during the fourth century A.C, during the first Christian era. In this case, the artists used Czechoslovak glass and combined it with golden Italian pieces, known as tesserae.”
Mrs. Štorkánová first visited the building in 2015, when it was still used by the O2 company, with the aim to save the impressive work of art:
“At the time it was covered by a board, so we made little probes to see if the mosaic was still there and what condition it was in. Then we went through a long administrative process and we came back in 2019, when the owner Central Group already knew the building would be demolished and agreed on saving the mosaic.”
The mosaic has been dismantled into smaller piece and stored in a warehouse but, according to Mrs. Štorkánová, it will hopefully go on display in the near future:
“We have already found an investor, the Prague-based Eleutheria foundation. They have a collection consisting of around 8,000 objects of art made in Czechoslovakia after WWII and they are planning to build a museum, with the mosaic being their biggest piece of art.
“However, there is another mosaic that we managed to save this year. It is a ceramic piece that placed near Ballardini’s work of art and in this case, we are still looking for a suitable place.”
