Exterior exhibition: The story of the panel house in the Olomouc region

Panel Buildings in Olomouc

From April 28 to July 10, 2015, an outdoor exhibition titled "The Story of the Panel Building in the Olomouc Region" will take place in Olomouc, which will bring closer the history and present of selected panel housing estates in Olomouc (Norská, F1 on Nová Street, housing estate on Svatý Kopeček, Lazce) and in Přerov (Šířava). This exhibition, freely accessible to the general public at the intersection of Národních hrdinů Square and třída Svobody, is the fourth exhibition from a traveling series 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 Zadražilová from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. “Panel housing estates have their past, present, and in many cases also developmental potential, and they represent a home for their residents. Therefore, it would be a mistake to close our eyes to the individuality of many of them and to be influenced by one-sided judgments,” she adds.

The outdoor exhibition will present a diverse quartet of Olomouc housing estates and will be complemented by a portrait of one from Přerov. The Norská housing estate, built using traditional technology, represents the first concentrated post-war construction in Olomouc. In the second half of the 1960s, projects for the F1 housing estate on Nová Street and a smaller housing estate on Svatý Kopeček were created. The first represents a characteristic composition of point and slab buildings distinguished by the dominant residential water tower. The second, made of bricks and featuring gable roofs, clearly distances itself from panel prefabrication. The twilight of housing estates, but at the same time innovation in urban planning and types of construction systems, is illustrated by the Lazce complex from the early 1980s. The selection is complemented by the Přerov housing estate Šířava from the first half of the 1960s, a twin of Olomouc's třída Kosmonautů.

These housing estates were often realized by very capable architects who creatively developed the ideas of architects and urban planners of the interwar avant-garde. The exhibition also addresses questions of urbanism, apartment layouts, artistic decoration of housing estates, and construction technologies. It does not overlook the question of the age, educational, and professional structure of the local inhabitants and how it has changed since the time of construction. “We show through examples what is happening with selected panel housing estates today, whether regeneration interventions have contributed to the improvement of living conditions or, on the contrary, disrupted the genius loci of these complexes,” adds Lucie Zadražilová.

The grant task "Panel Housing Estates in the Czech Republic as a Part of Urban Living Environment: Evaluation and Presentation of Their Housing Potential" is a five-year research and exhibition project that involves nearly two dozen historians of architecture, urban planners, conservationists, demographers, and other experts from museum and academic institutions. The academic guarantor is art historian Professor Rostislav Švácha, and the project is institutionally supported by the Museum of Decorative 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 issues of housing estates and individual expert texts and publications, the main outcome of the project is a series of thirteen exhibitions in individual regional cities, culminating in a comprehensive exhibition in Prague in 2017. The exhibition cycle is intended for interested parties from both expert 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 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 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 more than three million residents live in these estates in the Czech Republic, the research of their significance and socio-cultural role is still in its early stages. After years of one-sided criticism and rejection, we are, however, witnessing a growing interest in the topic of panel housing estates not only among experts but also among contemporary artists.

Dates: April 28 – July 10, 2015
Address: Národních hrdinů Square, třída Svobody, Olomouc
Organizer of the exhibition: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague

More information HERE and HERE