Sacred Heart Church (Prague)
The Prague Sacred Heart Church , formally Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord ( Czech : Kostel Nejsvětějšího srdce Páně ), a Roman Catholic Church on the George of Podebrady Square in Prague district of Vinohrady . It was built from 1928 to 1932 according to plans by the Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik .
Building history
draft
Those in charge of the Prague suburbs, where there were two parishes and a church, turned to Jože Plečnik in 1919 to build another church. This rejected the project for the time being. After further discussions, Plečnik agreed and in 1921 put forward a number of proposals that avoided a controversial issue of location. The planning of the church, which lasted six years, turned out to be just as difficult as the construction of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Vienna .
The first planning phase was determined by the building committee's wish for a monumental parish center. On the outside, Plečnik's design no longer showed any particular resemblance to an ancient temple. Large arches gave a view of the core of the building and rich decorations with figures of saints were planned. He wanted to decorate the roof tape with an antique tape ornament. The 25 meter high church was to dominate the building block with schools, rectory and apartment buildings . This variant was interrupted because of lack of money and the unclear property situation.
Various variants followed, until an interesting project emerged in 1925. The church is significantly lower than the previous designs, has an extraordinarily wide bell tower and, unlike in the Viennese Hl.-Geist-Kirche, no height caesur at the transition from the nave to the presbytery .
execution
Plečnik chose the square for the coffered ceiling and the circle for the terrazzo floor as the basic pattern . To make the church look more monumental, he moved the church to the center of the square and placed the almost church-wide bell tower between the nave and the sacristy. The height of the tower corresponds to the length of the nave.
Since the foundations were carried out much more elaborately than planned, Plečnik simplified the ornamentation in the upper area of the facade in order to save costs, dispensed with expensive angel figures and replaced the originally intended stone portal and window borders with cheap, white plaster. The large round windows opposite (the clock tower can be seen from the outside ), with which he only broke through the wall in the last variant, are directed like a cyclops eye towards the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Prague , St. Vitus Cathedral in the middle of Prague Castle .
The large and clear nave forms the counterpart to the relatively small crypt . The shell of the church, completed in 1930, was consecrated in May 1932, although the inside was still almost completely empty. The main altar was completed in 1939, apart from a few details. The facade sculpture as well as the furnishing of the crypt and the sacristy did not begin until the Second World War , but the church could never be completely completed.
Web links
- Parish website
- Sacred Heart Church (towers in Prague)
Coordinates: 50 ° 4 ′ 40.9 ″ N , 14 ° 27 ′ 2.4 ″ E