Qualla: Ještěd Tower

Ještěd Tower: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 9999NUKO, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the spring of 1969 the International Union of Architects awarded the Auguste Perret Prize to Karel Hubáček for a building that was still a construction site. Scaffolding stood on the summit of Mount Ještěd above Liberec, in what was then Czechoslovakia, and the concrete cone rising there was four years from opening. It remains the most significant award a Czech architect has ever won. What the jury could already read in the drawings is the idea the whole design turns on: from any distance, the tower does not sit on the mountain. It finishes it. The hill tapers upward, the concrete picks up the same curve, and the eye finds no seam between the two.

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Image: 9999NUKO | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ještěd Tower: A Lodge Burns Down

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Thalion77~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5. The commission came out of a fire. Two wooden lodges had stood near the summit, one from the middle of the nineteenth century and one added in the early twentieth, and both burned to the ground in the 1960s. When the second went up in January 1963, Restaurace Liberec, the company...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Thalion77~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 2.5

Ještěd Tower: The Shape of the Hill, Continued

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ajemmirek, CC BY-SA 4.0. The form is a hyperboloid in reinforced concrete, and it was chosen for two reasons that happen to agree with each other. It extends the silhouette of Ještěd, which climbs to 1,012 metres and is the dominant landmark of the whole North Bohemian skyline. It also sheds the summit's...

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Image: Ajemmirek | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ještěd Tower: Two Cylinders and a Hanging Floor

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chmee2, CC BY 3.0. Underneath the curve, the engineering is straightforward and unusual at once. Two concentric reinforced concrete cylinders carry the load, with inner diameters of 4.4 and 12.5 metres and walls thirty centimetres thick; the narrow one stands 42.4 metres, the wider outer one 22.5 m...

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Image: Chmee2 | CC BY 3.0

Ještěd Tower: Sleeping Inside a Transmitter

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit O. Mejsnar, CC BY-SA 3.0. Otakar Binar designed the interiors, and the arrangement is genuinely strange when you think about what is stacked above your head. Engine rooms and stores fill the basement. The first floor is shared between administrative offices, the restaurant kitchen and the television trans...

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Image: O. Mejsnar | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ještěd Tower: The Silhouette on Everything

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paporroibo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Liberec has taken the shape as its own. The tower's outline appears on the region's flag and coat of arms, on the local university's logo, and on the badge of the football club FC Slovan Liberec; it turns up in the Czech film Grandhotel, adapted from Jaroslav Rudiš's novel. The M...

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Image: Paporroibo | CC BY-SA 4.0