DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

Right here is a building where workers once assembled Avia aeroplanes, now transformed into the largest private contemporary art center in the country. Look up. That giant wooden zeppelin perched on the roof? It is real. You are standing outside DOX, housed in a former industrial factory in the Holešovice district. From 1925, this place manufactured Avia aeroplanes. Later came locksmithery and plumbing supplies. By the 1990s, the factory sat empty. In 2002, Leoš Válka bought it. Válka had fled Czechoslovakia in 1981 and spent 15 years in Australia running a company that did high rise maintenance work using mountain climbing equipment. When he returned in 1996, he saw something different in these factory walls. Six years later, with architect Ivan Kroupa, he transformed them into exhibition spaces. DOX opened in October 2008. But Válka wanted something more. In 2016, he and architect Martin Rajniš added that 42 meter Gulliver Airship to the roof. Made of wood and steel, it is inspired by the early zeppelins of the 1920s. Inside? A reading room and literature space. The name DOX comes from the Greek word doxa, meaning opinion or conviction. That is exactly what this place became: a space where art challenges how people see the world. From factory floor to cultural crossroads in less than a decade.