Dancing House

The Czech architect Vlado Milunić had lived next door to the bomb-cleared corner lot for years and had already sketched a "yin and yang" pair of towers for it when his upstairs neighbour, freshly elected president Václav Havel, backed the project and helped bring in Gehry as a co-designer able to get an ambitious modern building built in a historic riverfront row. The two towers Milunić and Gehry built together read as a couple mid-step: a static glazed cylinder, nicknamed Ginger for its flared "skirt" of curved glass, leans into a rigid stone-toned tower nicknamed Fred, its waist pinched by a structural steel column embedded in the glass facade. Getting the tower's compound curves built at all required casting ninety-nine reinforced-concrete panels, no two alike, from custom formwork. The design split Czech opinion on completion in 1996 — a building this playful, on a site that still remembered wartime bombing, struck some critics as disrespectful of Prague's historic skyline — but it has since become one of the most photographed buildings in the country and appears on a 2005 Czech commemorative coin.