Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský

Even Captain Nemo, in his submarine the Nautilus, served wine in glasses made of genuine Czech crystal. At least that is what the French writer Jules Verne writes in his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea from 1869–1870. However, it took many more years before glass evolved from a consumer good into a work of art. Much of the credit for this goes to the duo whose works transformed Prague into a city of light.

The future spouses Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský first met in 1954, and it was an extraordinarily fortunate encounter—for them personally, for the world of art and for Prague. Throughout their lives, they worked together in a fruitful collaboration advancing the art of fused glass, becoming pioneers of global significance in this field. To this day, their names remain synonymous across the world with the success of modern Czech artistic glassmaking. They discovered previously unimagined innovative possibilities for glass objects, particularly in the use of light, colour transformations and organic integration with architecture.

Their works have won an impressive array of awards, such as the Grand Prix at the Expo 58 world fair in Brussels, and are exhibited in the most prestigious museums, galleries, and private collections around the world.

Prague is not just a city built of stone, brick and concrete. In the twentieth century, the city gained yet another dimension—one of glass. And it was Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský who were responsible for this.

They achieved something that had seemed impossible until then: they transformed glass from a fragile material into a monumental work of art. Their sculptures are not mere objects, but captured light—translucent artifacts that change their appearance depending on the time of day and the viewer’s perspective. Where others worked with stone or bronze, they built with rays of light.

Their work illuminates even the most sacred space in Czech history—the Gothic chapel above the tomb of Saint Wenceslas in St. Vitus Cathedral at Prague Castle. It consists of a pair of seven-meter-high windows with abstract stained-glass designs from 1964–1968, in which both artists employed a unique technique of built-up glass relief, in which pieces of glass are fused together in open moulds.

Using the same technique, Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský also created a two-part window for the Chapel of St. Anne in the nearby Basilica of St. George between 1974 and 1975.

The entrance hall of the historic Old Town Hall building is adorned by a monumental glass installation measuring 8.2 by 7.3 meters, simply called The Window. The sculpture was created during the first half of the 1980s until 1990 and consists of cut and fused glass elements assembled into a single unit. You can view it from both inside and outside the building; as the sun moves across the sky, the sculpture looks slightly different each time.

Perhaps the most visible work by this duo in Prague is the iconic cladding of the Brutalist building housing the New Stage of the National Theatre, made of blown glass blocks. Each of the 4,306 piece measures 80 × 60 × 40 cm, weighs about 40 kilograms. They are made of a special borosilicate glass, making them resistant to chemicals and high temperatures.

Thanks to Jaroslava Brychtová and Stanislav Libenský, Prague has become one of the world’s centres of modern glass art. It is also a city that shines, for it is built of light.