The Story of the Panel House: A Guided Walk with Martin Strakoš

The Antiquarian Bookshop and Club Fiducia, together with art historian Martin Strakoš, is organizing another guided walk, this time to the exhibition The Story of Panel Housing in the Moravian-Silesian Region.

The event will take place on Sunday, December 13th, at 2:00 PM, meeting in Husov Sady in the center of Ostrava near the aforementioned exhibition.

The guided tour will focus on both the exhibition itself and the realizations within Ostrava. In the second half of the tour, we will head to the nearby Jindřiška housing estate, where we will learn more about housing estates and their construction in Ostrava.

Until January 3, 2016, an outdoor exhibition The Story of Panel Housing in the Moravian-Silesian Region is taking place in Ostrava, which presents the history and present of selected panel housing estates in Ostrava (Zábřeh, District V of Poruba, Jindřiška), in Karviná (Ráj), and in Havířov (Podlesí). This exhibition, freely accessible to the general public in Husov Sady, is the sixth exhibition in a traveling cycle dedicated to selected panel housing estates in individual regions of the Czech Republic. The organizer of the exhibition is the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. “We would like to show that not all housing estates are the same, that they don't necessarily have to be monotonous clusters of boxes designed by an anonymous team in a design institute,” explains the lead author of the project, Lucie Skřivánková (Zadražilová). “Panel housing estates have their own past, present, and in many cases, developmental potential, and they represent a 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. As art historian Martin Strakoš states, who processed the history of housing estates in the Moravian-Silesian region as part of the mentioned project, the housing estates in Ostrava were to a certain extent a continuation, or rather were meant to surpass, the local tradition of housing in colonies associated with the development of heavy industry and coal mining. The guided tour will focus on both the exhibition itself and the realizations within Ostrava. In the second half of the tour, we will head to the nearby Jindřiška housing estate, where we will learn more about housing estates and their construction in Ostrava.

The event is supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture and the Czech Architecture Foundation.