Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord, Prague

Plečnik had been working at Prague Castle for a decade when the archdiocese asked him for a parish church on the new square at Jiřího z Poděbrad. He gave Vinohrady something that reads at a distance as a Roman basilica and up close as nothing of the kind. The long walls are faced in dark brown brick into which grey stone blocks are set proud of the surface at regular intervals, a chequer he is said to have thought of as ermine, so that the whole building resembles a robe rather than a masonry box. Above it runs a broad white cornice like an entablature that has slipped its columns. The east end is a single flat tower forty-two metres high, split by a glazed clock 7.6 metres across — still the largest in the country — with a ramped stair climbing through the wall behind it. Inside there is one undivided hall, a coffered timber ceiling and a white marble altar carrying six patrons of Bohemia.