The exhibition will present four panel housing estates in Olomouc

Olomouc - A quartet of residential areas in Olomouc will become the main theme of an outdoor exhibition that visitors to the center of Olomouc will be able to view starting at the end of April. The exhibition "The Story of Panel Housing in the Olomouc Region" will focus not only on their history and present but also on the structure of their inhabitants and the architecture of these neighborhoods. It will last until mid-July, the organizers informed ČTK.
    The exhibition will highlight the history and present of panel neighborhoods such as Norská, F1 on Nová Ulice, the housing estate at Svatý Kopeček, Lazce, and also one of the Přerov housing estates, Šířava. It will be freely accessible at the border of Národních hrdinů Square and Svobody Boulevard. This is the fourth exhibition in a traveling series dedicated to selected panel housing estates in various regions. "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," said the main author of the project, Lucie Zadražilová from the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague.
    According to the exhibition organizers, the Norská 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 Ulice and a smaller housing estate at Svatý Kopeček were developed. The former represents a characteristic composition of point and slab buildings, highlighted by the dominant residential water tower. The latter, made of bricks and featuring gabled roofs, distances itself from panel prefabrication. "The twilight of housing estates, but at the same time innovation in urban planning solutions and types of construction systems is illustrated by the Lazce set 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," added Zadražilová.
    The exhibition will also focus on questions of urbanism, apartment layouts, artistic decoration of housing estates, and building technology. It will address the age, educational, and professional structure of the inhabitants of these estates. "Through examples, we show what is happening to selected panel housing estates today, whether regeneration interventions have contributed to improving the living environment or, conversely, disrupted the genius loci of these entities," added the main author of the project.
    The exhibition is part of a five-year research and exhibition project involving nearly twenty architectural historians, urban planners, conservationists, demographers, and other experts from museum and academic institutions. The project includes 13 exhibitions in various regional cities, culminating in a comprehensive exhibition in Prague in 2017.