In 1791 the First Industrial Exhibition was held in Prague’s Klementinum – it was the first not only in Bohemia, but in the whole of Europe.
One hundred years later, the Provincial Jubilee Exhibition in Prague in 1891 was held at Výstaviště in Holešovice to commemorate Czech industry and entrepreneurship. (A few decades later, in the 1920s, we were the 9th strongest economy in the world in terms of industry and ranked from 15th to 20th overall in the world.)
The Industrial Palace was built for this exhibition. It was a very progressive building – even the first building made with steel structure in combination with glass in the Czech lands.
Next one hundred years later, in 1991, the palace was the venue of the Czechoslovak General Exhibition, but it didn’t have mass response – it was a year and a half after the Velvet Revolution and there were a lot of another interesting topics in society.
In the first photo you can see that the palace is missing its left wing. It burnt down in 2008, and the firefighters investigation concluded that the cause was probably an electric stove. The fire was extinguished in an hour and a half, the total damage was CZK 1 billion. A few years ago, preparations began for the restoration of the Industrial Palace…
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