Trade Fair Palace
Functionalist landmark of 1928 holding the National Gallery's modern and contemporary art collections.
The Trade Fair Palace was built between 1925 and 1928 to designs by Oldřich Tyl and Josef Fuchs as an exhibition hall for the Prague Sample Fairs. Its reinforced concrete frame, ribbon windows and seven-storey glazed atrium made it the largest functionalist building of its kind when it opened, and Le Corbusier, who visited in 1928, took it as evidence that the new architecture could be realised at scale. It remains one of the defining works of the Czech inter-war avant-garde.
A fire in August 1974 gutted the building; reconstruction ran for two decades, and the palace opened as a gallery of the National Gallery Prague in 1995. It now houses the gallery's collections of art from 1796 onwards, arranged in chronological displays that cover the long nineteenth century, the First Czechoslovak Republic, post-war architecture and art up to the present, alongside French modern painting and a programme of temporary exhibitions.
Highlights
- Seven-storey glazed atrium of the 1928 functionalist hall
- National Gallery collections of Czech and international modern art
- Chronological displays running from 1796 to the present
- ATLAS, a free studio and reading space on the first floor
