Exterior exhibition: The story of prefabricated buildings in the Moravian-Silesian Region

From October 15, 2015 to January 3, 2016, an outdoor exhibition titled The Story of Panel Housing in the Moravian-Silesian Region will be presented in Ostrava, bringing closer the history and present of selected panel housing estates in Ostrava (Zábřeh, V. district of Poruba, Jindřiška), in Karviná (Ráj), and in Havířov (Podlesí). This exhibition, freely accessible to the general public in Husovy Sady, is the sixth exhibition of a traveling series dedicated to selected panel housing estates in various 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 also developmental potential, and represent a home for their residents. It would therefore be a mistake to close our eyes to the uniqueness of many of them and to let ourselves be influenced by one-sided condemnations,” she adds.
The outdoor exhibition introduces visitors to three panel housing estates located in the regional capital and one housing estate each from Havířov and Karviná. One of the oldest domestic housing estates is located in Ostrava-Zábřeh. Its history began in 1946 when significant interwar architect Jiří Štursa designed the functionalist Exemplary Housing Estate near Bělský Forest with comfortable apartments. Over three decades, it grew to the size of a district town, various panel systems were implemented here, and today it is home to more than twenty thousand residents. The fifth district of Ostrava-Poruba represents a housing estate of late modernism from the early 1960s with a rectangular composition of slab and point houses that display a visible panel structure. The Jindřiška housing estate, located in the city center, is dominated by a twenty-two-story prefabricated residential building built as an experiment in the second half of the 1960s.
The largest monitored housing estate in the region, Karviná's Ráj, was built from the second half of the 1950s as a mining housing estate, and today it is home to approximately half of the city's population. In the 1960s, atypical high-rise residential buildings and civic amenities were designed that highlight important places of the housing estate. The Havířov housing estate Podlesí from the 1960s refers to Scandinavian inspiration both through thoughtful placement in the landscape and by incorporating a ravine with a forest park into the structure of the residential complex.
The realization of these housing estates often involved very capable architects who creatively developed the ideas of interwar avant-garde architects and urban planners. The exhibition also addresses issues of urbanism, apartment layouts, artistic embellishments of the housing 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 residential environment, or conversely 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 twenty historians of architecture, architects, urban planners, conservationists, demographers, sociologists, and other experts from museum and academic institutions. The expert guarantee is provided by art historian Professor Rostislav Švácha, and the project is institutionally supported by the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague. The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic 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 expert texts and publications, the main output of the project is a series of thirteen exhibitions in various regional cities, culminating in a collective exhibition in Prague in 2017. The exhibition cycle is intended for interested parties from both professional and lay public. The exhibition design, created by the architectural studio A1 Architects (Tereza Schneiderová, Lenka Křemenová, David Maštálka), takes the form of a stylized panel town. Six free-standing elements made of lightweight concrete were custom-made for the project by the company LIAS Vintířov. The graphic design is by Štěpán Malovec.
Panel housing estates represent an important urbanistic, architectural, and historical phenomenon. Although they were the most typical and widespread form of mass housing construction from the 1950s to the 1980s, and today nearly three million residents of the Czech Republic live in housing estates, research on their significance and socio-cultural role is still in its infancy. 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 and residents of these housing complexes but also among contemporary artists and people interested in the development of the modern city from various aspects.

Date of event: 
October 5, 2015 – January 3, 2016
Address:
 Husovy Sady, Ostrava
Organizer of the exhibition: Museum of Applied Arts in Prague
Further information: www.panelaci.cz