Dejvice is Prague drawn on a drawing board. The whole quarter was planned in the 1920s by Antonín Engel — radiating avenues, a round central plaza, monumental civic blocks — and then capped, decades apart, by two of the city's strangest buildings. Three and a half kilometres, mostly gentle, with a climb at the end and a view worth it.
Start at Dejvická and walk into Vítězné náměstí, the great roundabout the locals call Kulaťák. Six avenues spoke off it; the university faculties ring it like a stage set of interwar ambition. Head north past the engineering blocks to the Grand Hotel International, the 1956 Stalinist skyscraper that wanted to be a Moscow tower and largely succeeded — red star, wedding-cake tiers, sincere to a fault.
Then up the hill to Baba. The osada (settlement) is a 1932 Werkbund colony of thirty-odd functionalist villas, each by a different architect — a built argument about how a modern house should work, still lived in. Walk the lanes and finish at the northern edge, where the hill falls away to the river valley and you see exactly why they built up here. Bus 131 from Baba runs you back down.
