Exterior exhibition: The story of the panel house in the Karlovy Vary Region

From January 12 to March 14, 2017, an outdoor exhibition titled The Story of Panel Buildings will be presented in Karlovy Vary, which will shed light on the history and present of selected housing estates in Karlovy Vary (Tuhnice, Drahovice, Čankovská, Růžový Vrch) and in Ostrov. This exhibition, freely accessible to the general public near the Fontána shopping center, is the eleventh exhibition in a traveling cycle dedicated to selected panel housing estates in individual regions of the Czech Republic.

“We would like to show that not all housing estates are the same, that they do not necessarily have to be monotonous clusters of boxes designed by an anonymous team in a design institute,” explains the main author of the project Lucie Skřivánková (Zadražilová) from the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague. “Panel housing estates have their past, present, and in many cases, development potential and represent home for their residents. It would therefore be a mistake to close our eyes to the individuality of many of them and to be influenced by one-sided judgments,” she adds.

According to the latest census, 38% (i.e., 108.5 thousand) of the residents of the Karlovy Vary region live in panel houses. The outdoor exhibition introduces visitors to four panel housing estates directly in the regional capital and one estate in Ostrov, built for employees of the uranium mines in Jáchymov. The primary impulse for starting panel construction in Karlovy Vary was the reconstruction of the historical core for spa purposes and the need for new apartments for the original residents of the houses in the center. Not a lack of housing units for the city's residents, as was the case in most cities in the Czech lands. The Tuhnice housing estate from the 1960s is the oldest panel residential complex in Karlovy Vary. In the design of the urban solution of the slightly younger Drahovice, architect Bohumil Kuba had to deal with the significant slope of the terrain. The result is free urbanism and the use of height contrasts of the buildings. A similar solution, contrasting high residential buildings with low horizontal objects of civic and technical amenities, was chosen for the youngest estate in our selection, Čankovská, built during the 1980s. However, in this case, successful implementation was disrupted by directives “from above,” which enforced cost-saving measures and expedited the construction process. A particularity of the small housing estate Růžový Vrch, built in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, is the urban solution that consciously connects with the pre-war construction destroyed by bombing at the end of World War II.

The core of the housing estate Nový Ostrov, with its extensive square and monumental cultural house, was designed in the 1950s by architect Jaroslav Krauz in the spirit of socialist realism – drawing on the urban plan by Ladislav Kozák. The construction of the housing estate took place in a total of 18 phases from 1947 to 1976. With some exaggeration, one might say that it is an encyclopedia of the technological development of mass standardized construction, from wooden houses through brick tenements to panel buildings.
Very skilled architects often participated in the realization of these housing estates, creatively developing the ideas of architects and urban planners of the interwar avant-garde. The exhibition also addresses issues of urbanism, apartment layouts, artistic decorations of the estates, and construction technologies. It does not overlook the question of the age, educational, and professional structure of the local residents and how it has changed since the time of construction. “Through examples, we show what is happening with selected panel housing estates today, whether regeneration interventions have contributed to improving the living environment or, conversely, have disrupted the genius loci of these complexes,” adds Lucie Skřivánková.

The grant project Panel Housing Estates in the Czech Republic as Part of the Urban Living Environment: Evaluation and Presentation of their residential potential is a five-year research and exhibition project involving nearly two dozen architectural historians, urban planners, heritage preservationists, demographers, and other experts from museum and academic institutions. The expert guarantor is art historian Professor Rostislav Švácha, and the project is institutionally supported by the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague. The Czech Ministry of Culture supports the project as part of the grant program for research and development of national cultural identity (NAKI).

In addition to a comprehensive Czech-English monograph on the issue of housing estates and individual academic texts and publications, the main output of the project is a series of thirteen exhibitions in individual regional cities, culminating in a collective exhibition in Prague in 2017. The exhibition cycle is intended for interested parties among both professionals and the general public. The exhibition, designed by the architectural studio A1 Architects (Tereza Schneiderová, Lenka Křemenová, David Maštálka), takes the form of a stylized panel town. Six freestanding elements made of lightweight concrete were custom-made for the project by the company LIAS Vintířov. The author of the graphic design is Štěpán Malovec.

Panel housing estates represent an important urban, architectural, and historical phenomenon. Although they were the most typical and widespread form of mass residential construction from the 1950s to the 1980s, and today nearly three million residents of the Czech Republic live in these estates, research into their significance and socio-cultural role is just beginning. After years of one-sided criticism and rejection, we are now witnessing a growing interest in the topic of panel housing estates, not only among experts but also among contemporary artists.

Date: January 12 – March 14, 2017
Address: in front of the Fontána Shopping Center, Chebská 370, Karlovy Vary

www.panelaci.cz