The Thermal Hotel complex in the spa center of the city Karlovy Vary is considered an extraordinary achievement of 1960s Czechoslovak architecture. It was conceived of by its creators as a center for the famous International Film Festival that would be open to the city. One of the pinnacles of domestic Brutalism, it is in its essence a total work of art, in which diverse artistic disciplines from architecture to design to typography and fine art complement each other harmoniously.

In the mid-1960s, an architectural competition was announced for the construction of the Thermal Hotel. The jury selected a design by the husband and wife team of Věra and Vladimír Machonin, prominent Czech architects working at the time at Ateliér Alfa. The entire hotel and festival center complex, built between 1968 and 1977, was conceived as a composition of differently sized and differently designed parts. The most striking of these is the 16-story reinforced concrete tower, 65 meters high, which houses 273 hotel rooms. It connects harmoniously to the horizontal convention area, which serves as a social and cultural center. In addition to the Grand Hall for 1,148 people, which today functions as the main stage for the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the complex includes two other high-capacity convention and theatre halls for 250 and 300 people. This clear scheme of the division of functions reflects modernist ideas about the building’s clearly-defined operational plan and its formal distinction. The horizontal convention space, accessible from all sides, connects with the surrounding streets thanks to staircases and gently sloping ramps. It thus forms an ideal city-building element that becomes a dynamic social and cultural center, especially during the aforementioned film festival. The hotel also includes an outdoor swimming pool and an attached spa restaurant pavilion with subtle forms contrasting with the massiveness of the main convention building.

It is the monumental concrete and steel architecture that is the building’s most characteristic visual element. The circular volumes of the individual halls form their distinctive formal character, which gives off an almost sculptural impression. In the form of rough concrete surfaces, the influences of the transformations of the era’s modernist architecture resonate, from rational tendencies towards the plasticity of brutalism, defined by the aesthetics of "béton brut" (raw concrete) of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier or British brutalist artists such as Denys Lasdun or Peter and Alison Smithson. This raw aesthetic of concrete and steel was the result of the designers’ efforts to make the materials and their surfaces as authentic as possible, without any excess aesthetic or decorative embellishment.

But the Thermal Hotel design is not only exceptional due to its architecture. It is closely intertwined with other art forms to create a resulting total work of art (gesamtkunstwerk). The harmoniously integrated appearance of the hotel is thus completed by the interior design, furniture and lighting design, navigation system and finally distinctive artworks. Věra Machoninová was in charge of the design of the interior elements, especially the furniture and light fixtures, and she imprinted her specific design signature of sculptural shapes, technical details and lively colour solutions. Massive upholstered armchairs of different sizes and colours were placed in various areas of the hotel in different configurations. Věra Machoninová’s unique creations are remarkable for their massive design, which is entirely characteristic of Czechoslovak representative interiors of the 1960s and 70s. The custom-designed furnishings bring expressive liveliness to the brutalist architecture. In keeping with the integrity of the artistic intent, the designers did not forget about integrating an unmistakable navigation system, placed on specially-designed attached tubes, announcement signs and direction signs. Its graphic design, including specific pictograms and a bespoke typeface, was the work of the leading Czech graphic designer Jiří Rathouský, who at the same time designed the navigation systems for the Parkhotel and Hotel Intercontinental in Prague. 

At the time, valuable works of art were an integral part of the interiors of various public and administrative buildings, including the Thermal Hotel. For example, glass sculptures by Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský were placed at the colonnade in front of the building itself. The monumental chandelier, made of bent glass rods by René Roubíček, was another distinctive element of the hotel’s public areas. Other valuable artistic elements include sculptures by Miloslav Chlupáč, Vlastimil Květenský, Slavoj Nejdl, Arnošt Paderlík, and others.

Despite inconsiderate alterations, reconstructions and the destruction of some of the art designs of the past three decades, the original architecture and the hotel’s design are still legible and worthy of monument preservation. 

 Text by Adam Štěch 

(born in Děčín in 1986) has been active in the fields of design, architecture, fashion and graphic arts as a theoretician, journalist and curator since 2006. He is editor of Prague-based design magazine Dolce Vita and contributor for several international magazines including Wallpaper, Cool Hunting, Damn, A10, Mark, Frame and much more. He teaches at Scholastika in Prague.

Hotel Thermal history
Pictures from the archive of Moravian Gallery in Brno and Hotel Thermal.

Special thanks to Vladimír Novák