DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

This guide to the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague opens with a question: why a forty-two-meter wood-and-steel airship hovers above an old factory roof in Holesovice. It traces the building's life as a machine works from around 1901, making parts first for a locksmith firm and later for an airplane manufacturer, before communist nationalization left it a rusting relic by the 1990s. A Czech emigre named Leos Valka, back home after fifteen years abroad, bought the derelict halls in 2002.