The title of the exhibition quotes longtime president of the Union of Architects Pavel Janák and expresses thirty years of effort for housing reform. Against the bourgeois pseudo-historic interiors, whose production persisted well into the 1930s, the Union strove for functional, simpler, healthier, and more affordable housing that would also take social issues into account. The exhibition thus touches on the still relevant topic of difficult-to-access housing for starting young people and families, an issue that exhibitions and competitions of the Union tried to address a century ago in connection with the international movement for housing reform, utility objects, and lifestyle in general.
The exhibition for the first time presents a thirty-year period of the existence of the Czechoslovak (Czech) branch of the Union, a nationwide association platform for the modernization of design, housing, and lifestyle. The Union brought together creative personalities, schools, museums, manufacturers such as Sochor and UP závody, corporations (Artěl), cooperatives (Beautiful Room of Cooperative Work). Two generations of representatives of Art Deco and functionalism alternated within it, who under the leadership of the dynamic and enterprising architect Pavel Janák adhered to the legacy of the founder of the Union, Jan Kotěra.
Let us name František Kysela, V. H. Brunner, and Josef Gočár from the founding generation, and the highlights of the functionalist generation such as Ladislav Sutnar, Ladislav Žák, Oldřich Starý, František Zelenka, Jindřich Halabala, Antonín Kybal, Jan E. Koula, Karel Koželka, technician Ing. Miloslav Prokop and others. The Union also provided an important platform for self-realization for emancipated designers, who established their own textile companies such as Marie Teinitzerová or the duo Pošepná–Vondráčková, worked as designers for glass enterprises (Ludvika Smrčková), or contributed with their teaching activities to the modernization of crafts in the field of toys (Minka Podhajská), lace (Emilie Paličková and Marie Serbousková), or ceramics (Helena Johnová). The Union also allowed female architects, who contributed to advocating for the emancipation of women in housing, to exhibit and publish their work, such as Hana Kučerová-Závěsák, Augusta Müllerová, Emanuela Kittrichová, and others.
The breadth of the Union's activities is fascinating: it organized competitions, representative exhibitions at home and abroad, awarded scholarships to talented students for internships in manufacturing companies, and established branches in Bohemia and Slovakia. They placed great emphasis on publishing activities, publishing magazines and books that familiarized people with the modernizing European movement. The peak of their activities was construction: the first Czechoslovak settlements of modernist family villas Nový dům in Brno (1928) and Baba in Prague (1932), and especially their own House of Applied Arts in Prague on Národní Street (1936), a pride of functionalist architecture in the city center.
The installation of the exhibition responds to the theme. The exhibition design is raw, utilizing random color combinations of recycled exhibition panels. Members of the Union were not snobs; they sincerely aspired to a healthy relationship between people and objects and their social accessibility.
