The Dancing House (Czech: Tančící dům) or Fred and Ginger is the nickname given to the Nationale-Nederlanden building in Prague, Czech Republic, at Rašínovo nábřeží (Rašín's riverbank). It was designed by the Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić in co-operation with the renowned Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry on a vacant riverfront plot. The building was designed in 1992 and completed in 1996.
The very non-traditional design was controversial at the time because the house stands out among the Baroque, Gothic and Art Nouveau buildings for which Prague is famous and it does not accord well with these architectural styles. The then Czech president, Václav Havel, who lived for decades next to the site, had avidly supported this project, hoping that the building would become a center of cultural activity.
Gehry originally named the house as Fred and Ginger (after the famous dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers – the house resembles a pair of dancers) but this nickname is now very rarely used; moreover, Gehry himself was later "afraid to import American Hollywood kitsch to Prague", so refused his own idea.
Read more about Dancing House: Origin, Structure, Controversy, Awards
Famous quotes containing the words dancing and/or house:
“I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one’s tongue don’t move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.”
—Jules Henri Poincare (1854–1912)