In the Olomouc Museum of Art, an exhibition on collective housing will open

Václav Hilský, collaboration Evžen Linhart, Collective House in Litvínov, 1946-1957

Olomouc - Collective housing as an architectural phenomenon of the 20th century has become the main theme of a new exhibition at the Museum of Art in Olomouc. It will open on Thursday. The core of the exhibition consists of so-called hotel-type houses created from the 1960s to the 1980s, which have never been comprehensively presented before. This section will be complemented by the memories of eyewitnesses. The exhibition chronologically follows the historical stages of the development of collective housing, from various perspectives including political and architectural angles, museum representatives informed journalists today.

The exhibition is titled Living Together - Czech Collective Houses. The idea to organize the exhibition originated in 2014. "At that time, specialist in collective housing Hubert Guzik from the Faculty of Architecture at the Czech Technical University gave a lecture at the Museum of Art about collective and hotel houses. He tried to show people that it is not a communist construct, nor an idea brought to us from the Soviet Union. On the contrary, sociologists, businessmen, feminists, and architects have been dealing with this matter since the late 19th century,” said exhibition curator Klára Jeništová.

The phenomenon of collective houses is presented by the exhibition's authors through photographs, architectural designs, and building plans using an unusual technology of printed plywood boards. At the exhibition, visitors will learn, for example, that the first houses of this type began to emerge in Prague as early as the First Republic. They were initiated by Czech feminists from T. G. Masaryk's circle. "The very prehistory, however, dates back to the United States in the late 19th century, where the struggle for women's emancipation was peaking. The professionalization of household care and its transfer to the public sphere were intended to relieve women enough so that they could pursue a profession without neglecting the family,” Jeništová added.

Olomouc residents will be particularly interested in the history of the local hotel house, which still stands on Velkomoravská Street. "Architects Tomáš Černoušek, Karel Dolák, and structural engineer Jiří Zrotal worked on this experimental project in their free time without any fee, but with the vision of its meaningfulness. This house became a model for dozens of others that arose throughout the country in the following decades. It was intended for single individuals and childless couples, for whom it represented a kind of transitional stage on the way to independent family housing," Jeništová stated.

The exhibition is intended for both the general and professional public. It will include guided tours, and visitors will be able to build one wall of the Hotel House directly at the exhibition. "We have prepared a wooden framework of a housing wall, which both children and adults will be able to weave with strips made from PET bottles. We will prepare the plastic bottles for them, but they will have to make the strips themselves using a special cutter,” the exhibition curator added. The exhibition will be open until mid-February next year.