Looking up to your left, you will spot an unmistakable silver steel tower consisting of three massive cylindrical pillars supporting rounded observation pods and topped with a red-and-white striped antenna. This is the Žižkov Television Tower, a bold piece of high-tech architecture, a design style that proudly displays a building's internal workings and technological elements right on its exterior. Designed by architect Václav Aulický and engineer Jiří Kozák, it was built between 1985 and 1992. Weighing 11,800 tonnes, it reaches 216 meters high. The design rests on a triangle, with those three double-walled steel tubes filled with concrete supporting nine functional pods. The whole project cost nineteen million dollars.
Dropping a massive metallic rocket ship into Prague's historic skyline was controversial, but the outrage was not just about aesthetics. The tower's foundation was dug straight through a centuries-old Jewish cemetery. Heavy equipment crushed tombstones and sent human remains to a landfill. Because official criticism was impossible at the time, locals unofficially lambasted the project's megalomania. They gave it sarcastic nicknames like Baikonur, after the Soviet cosmodrome, or Jakeš's finger, mocking the Secretary General of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
Over the decades, the city's relationship with the tower softened, partly thanks to a brilliantly bizarre addition. Look closely at the pillars and you will notice sculptures of giant babies crawling up the metal. Created by Czech artist David Černý in 2000, these fiberglass Babies were meant to be temporary, but people loved them so much they became permanent in 2001. The ones you see today are exact duplicates installed in 2019 after the originals needed structural replacement.
Beyond transmitting data, the tower houses a meteorological observatory, a restaurant, and even a luxury one-room hotel added in 2013, complete with a freestanding bathtub overlooking the city. While our last stop at the Woodrow Wilson Monument focused on early twentieth-century diplomacy, this tower stands as a stark monument to late-communist ambition. It is a fascinating piece of engineering that forces you to reckon with Prague's complex modern layers. Let's continue to our next destination.
