Fred and Ginger and Frank

Dagmar Sedlakova’s discerning nose turns up at the mention of the new building on Jiraskovo Square that was co-designed by Los Angeles-based architect Frank O. Gehry.

Her words are judicious, but they carry the reproach of a schoolmarm admonishing a band of truants. Disrespectful. Unsuitable. Where is the self-restraint?

“Prague is changing too quickly,” Sedlakova lectures from her 18th century office in the heart of this medieval city. “We risk losing the spirit of our city. I am afraid it can’t survive many more buildings like this one.”

Sedlakova is a top pamatkar, or preservationist, in the Prague department of cultural and historic conservation, where new developments are scrutinized for compatibility and historic integrity. She and her 75 colleagues are sentries of the Old World--architects and art historians who are charged with protecting 11 centuries of building in the former Eastern Bloc’s most stunning capital.

As Sedlakova tells it, the job has caused her mostly heartache in the freewheeling 1990s, as Prague has emerged from four decades of repressive Communist isolation only to be overrun by a free market that knows no bounds.

More than 50 million tourists jam the city’s cobblestone streets each year, and big-spending Western investors roll through town like drunken cowboys trashing Dodge City. As a result, Sedlakova says, Prague’s fairy-tale visage is left with an indelible black eye.

But as the debate over the $15-million Jiraskovo Square project illustrates, the line between sanctity and heresy in architecture is difficult to discern in a city where the late 20th century building frenzy follows a millennium-long tradition of municipal make-overs.

Sedlakova says that she knows where the line falls and that the Gehry building and a dozen or so other disputed projects are on the wrong side of it. Other prominent architects, however, say they are less certain and warn against sacrificing Prague’s legendary architectural diversity in the elusive pursuit of historic purity.

“The city has been a sleeping beauty, and suddenly the prince arrived and we are alive again,” said Ivan Plicka, director of foreign relations for the Prague municipal development authority. “But we are facing a completely new situation, and we still don’t know how to react.”

Prague’s greatest capitalist expansion, during the mid-19th century, left it with splendid Neo-Renaissance tenement houses that were dolled up in later booms in prevailing Neo-Baroque, Neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau fashions. Thousand-year-old Romanesque rotundas and 80-year-old Cubist offices are cherished historic treasures. Even an acclaimed church from the 1970s has been afforded protection.

Where the pamatkar see travesty, proponents of construction see opportunity. The Gehry building, for example, has already become a draw for tourists and a mecca for young Czech architects. A chronic black eye, builders say, is a small price to pay for a rejuvenated city; the worst of the construction, in any event, has been far removed from the most historic neighborhoods, which are crowded into three square miles. “Why not?” said Zdenek Lukes, an architect on the staff of President Vaclav Havel, when asked about the Jiraskovo Square project. “The history of Prague is a never-ending story of new dominance in architecture, and we have entered a new period of the free market. There will be some bad construction, but to stop the process is to kill the city.”

Situated on a magnificent riverfront road adorned by 19th century Art Nouveau apartment houses, the deconstructivist Gehry building is as inconspicuous as a punk rocker crashing high tea.

It has a twisting glass tower, pinched at the waist and slouching into an adjacent concrete tower, giving the building the popular nickname “Fred and Ginger” after the dancing duo of American movie fame. Gehry has objected to the Hollywood moniker for its kitschy connotations, but the name has stuck.

The roof over Fred is capped by a cupola of unruly metallic hair. Ginger’s skirt flares over the sidewalk, and her concrete legs descend into what can best be described as a pedestrian obstacle course. The uneven windows ripple.

“Fred and Ginger” was approved by city officials after the design was modified 13 times and the developers collected 65 permissions. The building Is expected to open this month as offices for its owners, the Dutch insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden, 10 years after it was conceived.

Despite such scrutiny, Sedlakova will always regard “Fred and Ginger” as one that got away. Preservationists failed, she said, because city officials were “swept away by the revolutionary euphoria” that followed the collapse of communism. In keeping with the country’s new enthusiasm for the free market, she said, city officials have come to believe that less regulation is better.

Jiri Kotalik, who heads a panel of independent experts that reviews building proposals for their appropriateness, said the approval reflects the shift of power in 1990s Prague away from strong historic preservation toward commercial interests. His volunteer group, the Prague Gremium, or board, began meeting two years ago in hopes of restoring a balance through moral suasion.

“The pamatkar are both arrogant and weak,” said Kotalik, vice president of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. “They are arrogant about little things like windows and paint color, but they are weak when it comes to big projects that involve a lot of money and political pressure. For me, the [Gehry] building is OK, but it is less about architecture than attracting attention and free publicity for the Dutch insurance company.”

Havel, who owns the apartment building next door and who spent much of his childhood there, has given his blessing to “Fred and Ginger,” although he has also wondered aloud whether the building “is too much,” said Lukes, the presidential palace architect.

The president’s support was deemed crucial, because Havel has publicly fretted about the surge of unsightly development in the city center. In a letter to Prague municipal authorities, he complained more than a year ago about “the danger of insensitive encroachments,” and he helped nix plans for an oversized Four Seasons Hotel on the riverfront last year.

“The president has many friends who are architects, and his grandfather was an architect and builder,” Lukes said. “A week ago we had a discussion, and he said that architectural discussions are still more interesting to him than politics.”

Croatian-born Vlado Milunic, an architect and one of Havel’s longtime friends, dreamed up the Jiraskovo Square project in the 1980s while living in Havel’s apartment building and sunning himself on a terrace that overlooked the then-vacant lot.

Havel was in prison at the time, but Milunic said that the dissident playwright got him thinking about the site and that the two men shared wild hopes for its distant development. Years later, at the insistence of the Dutch builders, Milunic sought out a foreign collaborator, first turning to French architect Jean Nouvel--who declined--and then persuading Gehry.

“We needed a world-class architect,” Milunic said. “There was no other way to receive all the permissions for such a crazy project.”

The building was unusual even before Gehry, who is renowned for his daring and often bizarre designs, took over the drafting table.

One of Milunic’s early sketches, still displayed in his cavernous studio in central Prague, is based on a striptease. A red cloak of totalitarianism slips off the main structure, symbolizing the end of communism. Another version shows a building “with big energy bursting its seams,” a reference to the human ability to change a seemingly unmovable world.

The political themes were dropped, as was Havel’s original notion of devoting the building to culture, including cafes, bookshops, coffeehouses and meeting rooms for writers and artists. With a price tag that ballooned to nearly double its original budget, “Fred and Ginger” is firmly rooted in the commercial world.

In the end, Milunic insists, the design falls well within “the normal goulash of styles” that has made Prague one of Europe’s richest architectural laboratories.

Its energy and dynamism are inspired by the Baroque era, he said, while the polygon patterns of the glass tower are rooted in Cubism. The figurative concrete legs have Art Nouveau influences, and the cupola mimics a Renaissance tower downriver. The concrete exterior panels are derived from panelaks, the prefabricated mainstay of Communist-era construction, and even the distinctive curves simulate the twisting embankment of the nearby Vltava River.

“I can’t make something from the last century. I live in 1996, and I am making a building of 1996,” said Milunic, who has lived in Prague most of his life. “Every architect in Prague’s history has made buildings that reflect his age.”

The problem, Sedlakova and other “Fred and Ginger” critics say, is that Prague has never undergone an age quite like the 1990s, when virtually every available lot in the most popular--and historically significant--neighborhoods is a target for construction.

With a handful of glaring exceptions, the Communists had little interest in or money for tampering with Prague’s relatively compact historic center, choosing instead to concentrate on its sprawling outskirts, where most of its 1.2 million residents live.

Even this century’s two World Wars left the city’s architectural legacy largely unscathed. “Fred and Ginger” stands on one of the few sites flattened by war, and even that damage was accidental. Several clusters of buildings were destroyed when Allied bombers, apparently off course, mistook Prague for nearby Dresden.

But during the last few years, foreign investors have come to Prague with more money than they know what to do with. Developers have been grabbing real estate for hotels and offices at a dizzying pace, not always with noble intentions or tasteful results.

A massive glass and steel office complex, the largest and most costly in Prague, is being built by French developers on one of the city’s quaint pedestrian malls, and an Austrian hotel that resembles an oversized birthday cake with pink frosting opened last year at the gate to the New Jewish Cemetery, the resting place of writer Franz Kafka.

On historic Wenceslas Square, where the revolutions of 1848 and 1989 played out, a Canadian investor has made use of several stories of a 19th century facade in a halfhearted attempt to conceal a modern office building. The yellow plaster facade is sandwiched between floors of marble, glass and steel.

Near Prague Castle, a modern Austrian-built hotel lurks behind a faux facade, and another Austrian hotel across town at the entrance to Mozart’s 18th century villa looks like a kaleidoscope of low-budget motels stacked atop one another.

“Prague is a romantic place full of mysteries and surprises, and that provides great inspiration,” said Vlastimil Vagaday, who is part of the city’s new generation of architects. “But the difficulty Prague faces is finding designs that respect its long historic tradition but are also suited for the end of the century.”

During the early 1990s, the building surge was checked by protracted disputes over land ownership. But by last year, the pamatkar office had processed 20,000 requests for modifications to historically sensitive locations, and the number is expected to grow by 5,000 this year.

More than 260,000 square feet of new or reconstructed office space was built in 1995, and an additional 200,000 square feet is expected this year, according to Copenhagen-based European Construction Research. Prague planners estimate that demand for new and renovated office space over the next 15 years will be nearly 6 million square feet, of which only a fraction now exists.

Svatopluk Vodera, a professor of architecture at the Czech Technical University and co-author of a book on the city, said conflicts over construction will continue until municipal authorities develop--and enforce--clear rules on building. Officials are drafting a new city plan, but almost everyone acknowledges that it won’t do the job.

“Architecture has always been the poetry of Prague,” Vodera said. “Every era has its mistakes, but the good news is the city has been released from its shackles.”