But there is no music to be heard as the couple dances, because in reality “the dancers” are actually a  Frank Gehry creation officially known as the Nationale-Nederlanden building. 

The building has been dubbed “Fred and Ginger” by appreciative critics because of its resemblance to the famous dancing pair of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Like-minded Czechs tend to call it tancinsky d?m, or, The Dancing Building, while less appreciative viewers have names for it like: “terrible“ and “looks like a crushed can of Coke“ to name but a few. 

The American Gehry, known to many as the King of Pop Architecture, has won world-wide acclaim (and occasional derision) for his unusual and seemingly gravity-defying designs throughout the world, including the new Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and the Guggenheim Bilbao art museum in Spain. In architectural circles he has long been known as “the other Frank”, alluding to the universally known American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. 

In 1992, Gehry teamed up with Yugoslav-born Czech architect Vlado Milunic to create the seven-story office building for the Dutch National Bank. Since its completion, people throughout the worlds of art and architecture have been staging a long-running argument over its apparent merits and faults.

In a 2005 interview with Radio Praha, Milunic discussed how the project was born: "In 1990 I got the original idea and I was contacted by my friend Paul Koch, who was a representative of the Dutch company National-Nederlanden. And, he liked my project but we decided that we would not be able to receive all the necessary approvals. We decided to associate with another architect, someone known with 'authority', who would help approve this project. The first architect we tried was Jean Nouvel, but he refused this collaboration because he said that 500 square meters was too small for two architects. And, in '92 with Paul Koch we visited Frank Gehry in Geneva. When he saw my first sketches Frank accepted the idea of having two different parts." 

Milunic continued: "I wanted the building to reflect the situation of the Czechoslovak society during the Velvet Revolution. Two parts. Like a society that forgot its totalitarian past - a static part - and a society that forgot its totalitarian past but was moving into a world full of changes. That was the main idea. Two different parts in dialogue, in tension, like plus and minus, like Yang and Yin, like man and woman." 

While most of Prague was spared any damage related to the destruction caused by the bombing and fighting in the European theater during World War II, the site of the Dancing Building was once home to a Neo-Renaissance house dating back to the 19th century but was destroyed on February 14, 1945 by an errant American bomb that most believed was destined for the fire bombing of Dresden during the final stages of the war. The remnants of the destroyed building were cleared away in 1960, leaving a gaping hole next the neighboring house which was co-owned by Czech ex-president Vaclav Havel, who lived there from his childhood until the mid-1990s. 

From this literal and figurative depression, the Dancing House would someday spring, and its creators were determined to honour its historical foundation.

Construction began in 1994 and was quickly finished in two years time, despite the fact that the building is made from 99 concrete panels each of different shape and dimension, which meant that each panel required a unique wooden form in order to ensure proper construction. According to www.galinsky.com: “Gehry had an almost unlimited budget, because ING wanted to create an icon in Prague. “ 

When the construction was completed, ING had its icon, but not necessarily the one they were looking for Gehry to create.

Some critics, like Simonetta Carbonaro, have called the building a 'Dancing Palace,' 'a new jewel of the city's architecture [...] that is adding a new aspect to its history.' Josef Singldinger's comments are similarly positive: he said that “Fred and Ginger” marks a clear contrast to the rather boring recent architecture found elsewhere in Prague. He classifies Gehry's construction as an example of 'catastrophe design,' which is similar to deconstruction design in that the creations of both are usually borne from the ashes of destruction: in this case, from the errant American bomb. 
On the other hand, critics like Wilfried Dechau, the editor of a German architectural magazine, states that the building reminds him of a 'crushed can of Coke.' He believed that the American architect should not have marked this corner of Prague with his 'scent,' for “this gap torn by American bombs at the end of the war should have been closed with utmost formal restraint in order to preserve (at least from the outside) the homogeneous impression of this street.”
While the argument may forever rage over Gehry's decisions to imbue his own unique interpretation into the space, at least one critic believes that his achievement struck the right chords in both form and function.
In his wonderful essay on the building, Joseph Pesch states: “'Fred and Ginger' is anything but an alien American element in a Central-European city. On the contrary: the building is to remind Europeans of the darkest chapter in their history. As a deconstructive building it represents the apocalyptic destruction of historically grown physical structures and thus refers to the violent annihilation of a significant part of European cultures, Jewish cultures in particular. To make invisible such memories with a restorative style of building, to pretend that 'nothing has happened' here, would have been true vandalism.”

In keeping with the theme of remembrance for the darker times, it is interesting to note that the building's large dome, which sits atop the corner of the building, harkens back to a catastrophic event which took place thousands of miles away from Prague's bustling streets but is nonetheless connected to Prague's history of sadness.

Pesch believes that “this empty dome alludes to the steel structures of the dome of the Hiroshima A-bomb memorial building. This and other similarities in the structures of both buildings are too obvious to be coincidental. However, in Hiroshima - and Nagasaki - destruction was so complete that no restorable facades or ensembles were left: both cities and most of their inhabitants disappeared in apocalyptic fires. I see local reference in this allusion to destruction on a much larger scale, captured in a building occupying a site of a house also destroyed at the end of the war. Furthermore, the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, built in 1915, was designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel (1880-1925). 'Ginger and Fred' thus becomes a nodal point linking the local to the global across time and space. In the light of these references I am certain that Prague - a city that had to suffer the consequences of German aggression and occupation for so much longer than many on this side of the Iron Curtain - could not have wished for a building more apt, more right for its city centre than Gehry's elegant memorial.” - Article and more photos continued below -