Kotva Department Store, Prague

Věra Machoninová and Vladimír Machonin, a married couple who ran their practice jointly, planned Kotva around a single repeating cell: a hexagon, multiplied and interlocked so that the whole footprint reads as a honeycomb rather than a block, with no facade oriented the same way as its neighbour. Five storeys rise above Náměstí Republiky and roughly as many descend below it for parking and a supermarket, threaded by ten escalators in two shafts, an unusually generous circulation for a Prague department store. The exterior hangs pressed aluminium panels and dark glazing from a reinforced concrete frame, faceted at every hexagon edge so the building reads as crystalline rather than smooth. Built with the Swedish contractor SIAB, unusual for Czechoslovakia at the time, it opened on 10 February 1975 as the largest department store in the country, publicly framed as proof of socialist abundance even as supply shortages already strained the shelves behind its glazing. It was declared a Czech cultural monument in 2019, after an earlier bid for protection had failed in 2007.