PRAGUE PAST & PRESENT

Getting familiar with Czech Republic architecture, glass, food, beer and angst at an annual design fair in the country’s most famous city.

“PRAGUE NEVER LETS YOU GO . This little mother has claws,” author Franz Kafka said about his hometown when Czechoslovakia broke away from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and that may still be true.

After a hundred years of travails that also encompassed the country’s breakup 25 years ago into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Prague is blossoming — and celebrating — once again. The jaw-dropping, elegant European capital on the banks of the Vltava River is awash with spectacular crystal chandeliers and some of the most astounding Gothic, baroque, art nouveau and cubist architecture spanning more than 1,000 years, but it also has a vibrant restaurant scene, ever-flowing and literally cheaper-than-water pivo or beer — especially along the riverbank — and new design that pulls you back again and again.

I felt the tug.

Within the span of a month I went first for the 19th annual Designblok fair, which this time had food as its thematic conceit — think gigantic cakes and carousels and joyrides with Vitra furniture as seats — held at the late 19th-century steel-and-glass Industrial Palace (inspired by London’s 1851 Crystal Palace), on the Vystaviste Fairgrounds, in the Holesovice area. And then, I returned for a voyage of architectural discovery, spas and, of course, more food.

Paces away from the spare, nicely restored, functionalist, Soviet-era 10-story Park Hotel, whose comically stiff staff still seems to suffer from a Soviet-era hangover, Designblok, founded by Jana Zielinksi and Jiri Macek in 1999, in 2017 featured internationally and locally renowned modern talents, including Dutch industrial design impresario Richard Hutten, Vienna-based artist and furniture designer Patrick Rampelotto, and Czech designer Maxim Velcovsky, who recommended the food theme and is the award-winning, mold-breaking art director associated on and off with ace crystal lighting companies Preciosa and Lasvit. With over 300 exhibitors and events at this unique window into Central European design, there was a lot more to see and do, but a freak storm blew a section of the roof off the

Industrial Palace and after day three brought the five-day fair to a screeching halt.

With time to spare, I left town. Two hours west of Prague, near the 12th-century Loket Castle, the Bohemian spa towns Mariánské Lázně and Karlovy Vary were getaways in the late 19th century, when rejuvenating hot thermal springs bordered by raised colonnaded walkways were the rage.

Karlovy Vary, named after king Charles IV, who founded it around 1350, is seeing a major revival, with the Imperial Sanatorium as a standard-bearer for potentates’ spending a few weeks regrouping.

Spas are of course intended to be therapeutic and so the no-nonsense style of the nurse-like masseuses I encountered at the Savoy Westend Hotel was fitting, but if you are unused to such brusqueness, a shot of the local Becherovka liqueur and a bit of the paperthin Karlovarské oplatky wafer sets you at ease. The town is also where an international film festival takes place, but a courtyard outside the Grandhotel Pupp adorned with names of Hollywood stars still comes as a surprise. The incredible Moser Glass factory nearby is a design destination with its own gallery.

Back in Prague, taking streetcars and walking the cobbled streets was a good way to explore famed Wenceslas Square, where half a million protesters gathered to shed the Communist yoke in 1989; discover the Soviet-era Zizkov Tower, intended for surveillance; and, not far from it, see the 1920s National Monument on Vitkov Hill, a World War I memorial and former mausoleum that once displayed the macabre embalmed and refrigerated