Hello and dobrý den!
It is a snowy winter day, and I’m on a tram in the Czech Republic.
And I’m here with my old schoolfriend Andrew
who is making his first appearance on the channel since 2019
when he famously said this:
*ROUSING CLASSICAL MUSIC* ("Morning Mood" by Grieg)
“I’ve seen worse views”
And we’ll have more of Andrew’s insights later.
But today’s video is not about Andrew,
and it’s not about a tram.
Today’s video is about a hotel built in the late 1960s
on the outskirts of the city of Liberec.
But Tim, since when has your channel done hotel reviews?
Well it turns out it does…
when the hotel looks like THAT.
Welcome to Hotel Ještěd.
So why have come all this way to see some old hotel from communist-era Czechoslovakia?
Well it’s not just because it looks like an alien spaceship
crash-landed into the secret mountain lair of a 1960s Bond villain.
This is one of the most famous buildings in the Czech Republic,
but because most foreign visitors only ever go to Prague,
people from outside Czechia don’t seem to know about it.
And today we’re going to try and change that.
All we need to do now, is figure out how we get up there.
- What’s it say?
- We’re obviously here, because it says you’re here.
So, we follow the road that way, it takes us over here.
And then, I guess, back round up here in the end.
- Yeah…
- I don’t think there’s any scope for short cuts.
- Going straight up would seem like a bad idea.
- Yeah, let’s just follow the road, makes sense.
There used to be a much quicker way of getting to the summit;
but sadly, the Ještěd cable car is not running at the moment,
following a serious accident in 2021.
So we’ve decided to hike all the way to the top.
Which means we’re going to need... a montage!
CUT!
And while we’re doing that,
let me tell you a bit more about Hotel Ještěd.
It was designed at the height of the sixties space race,
with construction starting in 1966,
but it was only after seven years of technical challenges, and engineering magic,
that it finally opened in 1973.
During which time Czechoslovakia had seen two regime changes,
one Soviet invasion,
and the first American astronauts stepping on the moon.
- I think this is it!
(It’s traditional for me to say “I think this is it” when it’s very obviously it.)
Yes, we have reached the summit!
And today the hotel is very much inside a cloud,
despite what this poster might tell you.
- 1012m!
In a rare moment for this channel, we’ve climbed an actual mountain.
I’m knackered.
Er… shall we go in here?
When the hotel first opened its doors, 50 years ago,
it was the most strikingly modern building in the country.
But if you came here 15 years ago,
it was already a run-down and tired old relic of its time
– I found one article saying the hotel looked like it had gone through
“the seven stages of grief”.
But that all changed in 2015,
when a group of locals stepped in to try and save it.
They launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise a bit of money
and then worked together with the original interior designer
to bring everything back to its 60s-70s glories.
And the business is still run by the same group of people who revived it.
But never mind that,
what does some random bloke from Reading think about it?
It is time for Andrew’s exclusive hotel review...
- [ANDREW] Haha.
Well, it’s colourful.
That is certainly a look.
I’ve got a sink... which is good.
I’ve got a wardrobe, which is... good.
It’s very 70s.
It’s quite cool.
It’s a big room as well.
- [TIM] Just about big enough for you?
- [ANDREW] I’m happy.
Well, by Andrew’s standards, that is a pretty glowing review.
But what about my room?
And… I have different wallpaper!
Otherwise it’s pretty much the same.
Oh, I’ve got better wallpaper!
I do like it.
I mean it’s very Thunderbirds.
It’s very International Rescue.
I think I’m slightly in love.
But while we’re here,
let’s just imagine what this place would have looked like
to the average Czechoslovakian in 1973.
Ok, we’re going to have some generalisations and simplifications here,
but in the days of Communism,
many of the places where you stayed on holiday might have looked quite uniform
- at least on the inside, if not the outside -
with the same cheap mass-produced products that you saw absolutely everywhere.
Of course, that’s not unique to 1970s Czechoslovakia,
but you get the point.
Aww, it’s just like back home, innit Mildred?
Odkdy mluvíš anglicky?
So when the first guests came through the doors of Ještěd,
and saw the custom-made space-age furniture,
the custom-made space-age fittings,
and the custom-made space-age plates and glasses they gave you at dinner time
– I think it would have blown their minds.
What we’re looking at is an explosion of creative freedom and individual expression
that feels like it happened despite the authoritarian regime of the time
rather than because of them.
So how did anyone get away with building it in the first place?
Well it’s a long story,
and it starts with a hotel caretaker and an accident with a blowtorch.
You see, this is not the first Hotel Ještěd.
The original Hotel Ještěd was a grand wooden lodge
that stood on top of the mountain since 1906,
but one cold evening in January 1963,
the caretaker attempted to defrost some pipes using a blowtorch.
One thing led to another,
and he accidentally burned down the entire building.
And this led to a competition to design a replacement.
The rules of the competition were fairly simple.
They required architects to submit designs for two separate buildings:
a new replacement hotel, and a new television transmission tower.
But one architect, a man called Karel Hubáček, decided that rules were for losers;
why not simply put the hotel in the transmission tower?
And he produced a stunning design straight out of 1960s science fiction.
It took a while, but public support for his crazy plan gradually grew and grew,
until the authorities said, alright then, if that’s what you want,
we’re going to let you build it.
Problem was, now he actually had to do it.
Hubáček woke up the next morning knowing that his design was a brilliant idea on paper.
But constructing it on top of a real-life mountain,
in real-life weather conditions,
was going to be a whole other question.
And as if that wasn’t enough to be dealing with, it’s now 1966,
and quite a lot is about to happen in Czechoslovakian politics.
The leader at the time was a guy called Antonín Novotný,
an authoritarian hardline communist who’d been in charge since the early 50s,
and honestly, I’m not sure exactly why someone like him allowed Hubáček to go ahead
with such an extravagant and maverick building project.
Maybe he genuinely liked it,
maybe he just thought it was going to make him look good,
or maybe he was under pressure from a public
who were demanding more democracy and more freedom.
If you’re Czech or Slovak, and you know more than I do,
I would love to hear what you think.
But what I can tell you is that by 1968, Novotný was out,
replaced by the much more liberal Aleksander Dubček.
And he starts a programme of reforms and liberalisation,
in a period you may know as the Prague Spring.
If anything, this was good news for Hubáček,
who came out publicly to support even more radical reforms.
But of course, it didn’t last.
A few months later the Soviet Union sends in its troops,
chucks out Dubček,
puts a stop to all the reforms,
and installs a new leader to return things to what they call “normal”.
But while all of that was going on,
back at Ještěd, Hubáček was trying to build a hotel.
And to the surprise of structural engineers absolutely nowhere,
the architect ran in to technical problems almost immediately.
But to be fair: Hubáček knew what he was doing,
by which I mean he brought in some engineers who knew what they were doing.
First, there was the extreme cold of the winters up here,
which was a problem not just for the hotel
but also for the delicate tv equipment,
so they ended up giving the building
custom-made laminated protective cladding
and then there was all the snow and ice that would crash down
from the top of the tower as soon as it thawed,
so they also had to import special reinforced windows from Belgium.
And then there was the wind.
Hubáček had made the top part of the tower so thin,
that the moment there was any sort of wind,
it began to suffer from worrying wobbles.
Some people might call them "transverse oscillations" but they’re probably just showing off.
The problem could have been easily solved
by adding great big industrial-style strengthening bars,
but the architect didn’t want to ruin the beauty of his design,
so he was going to have to try a more experimental idea.
His chief engineer looked at the tower swinging about like an upside-down pendulum
and said "well, what if we try hanging some sort of pendulum inside the tower"?
If we get the weight and the dimensions exactly right,
it might just balance everything out.
And if you want all the juicy nerdy detail of how they did it,
then I can highly recommend the website fenomenjested.com,
but long story short,
Ještěd was one of the first towers in the world
to have what’s called a "tuned mass damper",
a giant weight mounted on springs that counteracts any wobbles.
These are now relatively common in large skyscrapers,
particularly the ones in earthquake zones,
but the team at Ještěd were doing this in 1960s Czechoslovakia,
using some shock absorbers they’d found in a nearby car repair shop.
And in 1969, Karel Hubáček was awarded the Perret prize,
- basically the Olympic gold medal of architectural innovation -
for his outstanding use of technology,
and of course, his breathtaking original design.
But it’s now 1969, and that means there is a new Soviet-approved government
who do not approve of Hubáček
or anything that he stands for.
And in a spectacularly petty move, they confiscate his passport
so he can’t fly to Argentina to go and collect his prize.
It remains probably the greatest award ever given to a Czech architect.
Well, at least I made one successful Czech inn.
By the time the hotel finally started operating in 1973,
Hubáček was so out of favour with the government
that he wasn’t even invited to the opening,
and had to be smuggled in through the back doors.
By this point, you can imagine, people were already nostalgic
for the late-1960s moments of freedom and optimism
that this place represented for them.
And the fact that the government hated that
only made the tower more popular.
In the year 2000, a national survey of experts voted Ještěd
"the most important Czech building of the 20th Century."
And in 2023, it celebrates 50 years
of surviving everything that nature and politics could throw at it
while still looking pretty darn good.
Having said that...
in some places the design does show its age,
and I’m not going to pretend that everything is brilliant by modern standards.
For a 4-star hotel, the elevator is extremely cramped,
there’s no gym or pool or anything like that,
and the rooms that we stayed in didn’t even have their own bathrooms.
But I guess when you try and fit an entire hotel into a tv transmission tower
there are some things you just don’t have space for.
And ultimately, if you’re lucky enough to be able to come up here,
and look at this view...
I’m not sure any of that really matters.
- [TIM] Sooo, Andrew.
What do we think about this view?
Are we going to go beyond “not bad”?
- [ANDREW] We might.
- [TIM] Are we going to go as far as “quite good”?
- [ANDREW] Hahaha yeah.
- [TIM] Ladies and gentlemen: that is a quite good view.
If you’d like to visit Hotel Ještěd,
Liberec is only one hour from Prague by bus, or two and a half by train,
and we took the number 3 tram to the end of the line and hiked up to the top,
but you could just get a taxi the whole way.
An economy double will set you back about €100 a night,
but be aware that because of the tight space, accessibility is limited at best.
Even in the summer when they open the nice big ramps up to reception level,
you’ve still got to use that tiny elevator to get to any of the rooms.
Anyway, as always,
thank you all for watching,
and I’ll see you soon.
- [TIM] ...well it turns out it does, when the hotel looks like THAT.
It's in a cloud...
- turns out it does
when there isn't a car.
Well it turns out it does, when the hotel
looks like THAT oh it's gone.