What does the past tell us about the future of Czech housing estates?

On Tuesday, September 12, 2017, at 7:00 PM, a brief lecture by American architectural historian Kimberly Elman Zarecor will take place at the VI PER gallery in Prague, Vítkova 2. Along with a subsequent discussion, she will focus on how Czech housing estates are transforming today and what potential they hold for comfortable urban living with regard to the environment. The discussion will also address the extent to which this development offers an alternative to the neoliberal approach to new construction, which is financially inaccessible to most local inhabitants. The lecture and the following discussion will be in English.

Kimberly Elman Zarecor is a professor of architecture at the College of Design at Iowa State University. In her book Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011; in Czech as Utváření socialistické modernity. Bydlení v Československu v letech 1945–1960, Academia, Prague 2015), she focuses on the intersections of architects' work, residential building design, and state apparatus in the early period of Communist Party governance in Czechoslovakia. Her current project deals with the post-war development of Ostrava, a Czech industrial city with coal and steel industries dating back to the early nineteenth century.

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