Zvuky Prahy / Sounds of Prague

“Lucerna Palace situated off the Wenceslas Square, and established by civil engineer, designer and builder Vasclav M. Havel in 1907, was the first multi-purpose arcade of its kind ever to be built in Czechoslovakia. Walking through the main skylit concourse, past the incongruous mixture of shops, coffee houses, cinema and music halls you get a sense of being time locked somewhere between the prosperous Secession period and the modernist styles of the First World War era”.It is not clear, if Benjamin ever visited Palace Lucerna, but his thoughts from Passagenwerk (or Arcades Project) are relevant. It was an unfinished project written between 1927 and 1940: quote “Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, 'all that is solid melts into air.'There are dozens of doors in the labyint-like system or corridors, all leading to hidden back stage areas, mostly locked.photo: Richard Biegel