Brutalism in the Czech Republic

Czechoslovak architecture of the late 1960s and 1970s produced a distinctive fusion of brutalism and technological expression, much of it by the husband and wife team Vladimír Machonin and Věra Machoninová. Their Hotel Thermal (1976) in Karlovy Vary and the Kotva Department Store (1975) in Prague are key works of the era, designed in the brief liberal window before 1968 and completed under normalization.

Václav Aulický co-designed the Transgas Building (1978), a machine-like complex demolished in 2019 despite protests, while Karel Prager built the New Stage of the National Theater (1983) and the Federal Assembly. The style remains contested in the Czech Republic, admired by preservationists and associated by others with the communist decades.