Dancing building: deconstrctuvist aesthetics

Abstract

This article seeks to provide a historical overview and
an aesthetic understanding of the Dancing Building,
a landmark of Frank Gehry’s deconstructivist architecture.
Located in Prague, the capital of the Czech
Republic, the office building was designed and built
in the 1990s, in the context of the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. Although the building is now considered
an inseparable reference to Prague, its emergence
sparked intense debate in local society due to the
election of a disruptive party in the midst of a specific
aesthetic environment. Our effort to understand the
work is divided into three parts: first, we situate the
building in terms of its historiography, highlighting
the controversy surrounding its emergence; then,
we view the building according to Heinrich Wölfflin’s
methodology of conceptual pairs; finally, we observe
how this building responds to concepts typical of contemporary
architecture, especially in the dimension
in which art and architecture dissolve and merge.