The housing cooperative Sever in Liberec is preparing a retrospective exhibition

Liberec - The Building Housing Cooperative in Liberec is preparing a retrospective exhibition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding. They want to show how the way of life of the residents of Liberec and the culture of their housing have changed over the years. The general public can also get involved in the preparations for the exhibition; the cooperative is mainly interested in archival photographs, but also in original objects. The exhibition will open on August 29 at the Forum shopping center, said Petr Černý, director of SBD Sever, to ČTK today.
    Cooperative housing construction has a long tradition in the Czech Republic. The first cooperatives began to form as early as 1873 and by 1939, they had built around 100,000 apartments. SBD Sever in Liberec was established by cooperators in 1965. Later, other smaller housing cooperatives joined it, such as Máj, which built the first apartments in Králův háj, the Tesla workers' cooperative, or Svoboda and Ještěd. Today, according to Černý, the organization manages more than 8,600 apartments, a large part of which is already owned by people.
    The organizers of the exhibition aim to capture the construction of panel housing estates in Liberec; they are also interested in all well-known public places, the interiors of panel apartment buildings and apartments, as well as long-disposed equipment and everyday consumer items. "Witnesses will likely reminisce, and the youth will probably be entertained by the household items from that time," said Černý. Today, according to him, young people find it hard to believe that in the 70s or 80s, people could only choose from two colors of tiles and that getting a gas boiler was nearly a Herculean task.
    "Regarding those objects, we will be more cautious, as we might gather so many that we wouldn’t have space to display them. But we are very interested in photographs," he said. According to Černý, some materials have already been successfully gathered. "For example, we have a complete living room set from the GDR that is about 45 to 50 years old," he added. The exhibition should not only showcase photographs but also display several typical rooms in a panel apartment, including an enameled kitchen or a plastic bathroom.
    Interested parties can find more information about the upcoming exhibition on the website http://vystava.sbdsever.cz.