Hotel Praha

Hotel Praha was built over a six-year period between 1975 and 1981. An example of postmodern and brutalist architecture, it was designed by architects Jaroslav Paroubek, Arnošt Navrátil, Radek Černý, and Jan Sedláček.^[1] The hotel featured 136 guest rooms, all of which had views of Prague Castle; as well as a swimming pool with ceramic tiles, a winter garden, a movie theater, and a bowling alley. The lobby of the hotel had a distinctive grand circular staircase.^[1]

During Communist rule of Czechoslovakia, the hotel played host to senior Communist Party officials, and also served as a venue for them to welcome high-ranking foreign dignitaries, including Leonid Brezhnev, Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi.^[3][4][5] After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, it was opened to the general public and classified as a five-star hotel.^[6]

Tom Cruise stayed in the hotel during the filming of Mission: Impossible.^[7][5] It was also used by the Czech national football team until 2007, when its players was found to have partied there with prostitutes after a victory. The team was made to pay a million Czech koruna in disciplinary fines.^[8]

In 2013, Hotel Praha was acquired by billionaire Petr Kellner, founder and majority shareholder of the PPF Group. He decided to demolish the hotel in order to build a campus of Open Gate, a private school he had founded, on the land.^[2] The previous owners of the hotel had considered it unprofitable due to high costs of maintenance.^[9] The decision to demolish was controversial and met with protests, as some Prague residents considered it a historical and architectural landmark worth preserving. Attempts to make the hotel a protected heritage site were unsuccessful.^[9][2]

The demolition of Hotel Praha was completed in June 2014.^[10] Kellner's school was never built,^[4] and he died in a helicopter crash in 2021.^[11]