Like a David Caspar Friedrich painting, this monument stands atop the mountain at Ještěd, near Liberec, North Bohemia, the former Sudetenland and centre of Bohemian crystal manufacturing.
Searching for snowscapes we travelled up the mountain to Ještěd at the summit of which stands a futuristic tower designed by the architect Hubáček during the Communist era in 1963 and opened in 1973. It looks like the sort of building one might find on Mars, or at this frozen time of year, perhaps Uranus.
The hyperboloid Ještěd tower designed in 1963, is a futuristic structure within and without, like something out of Kubrik’s 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968). Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, made his Vostok mission into space in 1961, the first ever.
A Cosmonaut sat at our table,
while outside sat a lost, freezing, weeping Martian.
The central staircase column is studded with solid Bohemian crystal glass lamps designed by Libensky and Brychtová to look like meteorites zooming through the cosmos. This was designed in the late sixties, at the height of Soviet-American competition in space. The tower boasts a hotel and restaurant, a giant pendulum, as well as TV transmitter.
If you would like to do a Bohemian Winter Workshop please get in touch.
