Origin of Hotel Jalta

The then president, Antonín Zápotocký, promoted the construction of the hotel on the plot of a house bombed in 1945. The original project for merely an ordinary hotel soon changed to one for a first-class hotel. Architect Antonín Tenzer was given a free hand in designing the building up to the last detail, without the use of standardized elements. Most of the items were tailor-made, for example, the taps and wash basins.

Hotel Jalta on Wenceslas Square in Prague is a very interesting building. It is a typical example of socialist realism, so-called sorela (Stalin's baroque), but it also shows some elements of the emerging, so-called Brussels fashion (derived from the style of the Czechoslovakian exhibition hall at the very successful World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958 that symbolically returned our architecture back to civilized Europe after its trip to Moscow).

The building, including its sculptural decorations (professor Jiříkovský), also bears signs of stalinistic architecture, but there's also a motif of spiral stairway in the hall, "Brussels" lamps and functionalistic doors. Fortunately it was prevented from being reconstructed in the 1980s, so a lot of the original details have remained.