The exhibition focuses on the history, form, and reasons for the emergence of panel houses

Prague - Plans, models, period photographs, exhibits of home accessories, and typical environments of living rooms and other rooms evoke the era of the construction of panel housing estates at the exhibition. From Thursday, it will be accessible to the public at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and deals with the history of panel buildings from the 1940s until the decline of their construction with the end of socialism in Czechoslovakia.

The authors of the exhibition also used prefabricated parts in the installation, which form the bases of display cases with exhibits. They emphasize the unique and suffocating sameness, monotony, and stereotype that former residents of panel buildings particularly associate with this type of housing.

The exhibition Residence: Panel Housing Estate - Plans, Implementation, Housing 1945-1989 will last until May 20. According to the authors, it aims to introduce the history of selected housing estates in the Czech Republic and the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts that accompanied their emergence. It is based on a five-year research project that focused on 73 Czech housing estates, mainly from an art-historical perspective, addressing their architecture and urbanism, demographic characteristics of residents, and the possibilities for heritage protection.

Project leader Lucie Skřivánková previously told ČTK that the research showed that not all housing estates are the same; they do not necessarily have to be monotonous clusters of buildings. They have their past, present, and future, and often there is a specific authorial intention behind them. As part of the research, a new periodization of housing estates was created, which is also reflected in the exhibition, with each time period having its own section of the display.

The origins of housing estates are placed back in the 1940s. So-called proto-housing estates were still built using brick technology, but utilized prefabricated elements and principles of functionalist urbanism. Socialist realism in the 1950s brought the first panel buildings with historicizing facades. The pioneering phase (turn of the 1950s and 1960s) was marked by experiments with technologies that led to the first nationally widespread construction systems. In the so-called beautiful phase of the 1960s, the architecturally and urbanistically most successful complexes were created, featuring a wide range of civic amenities and residential qualities of public space, Skřivánková noted.

During the normalization period in the 1970s, architecture was driven by demands for quantity and financial savings. The final phase of postmodernist housing estates (the 1980s) arose from the criticism of the inhumane environment of massive residential complexes from the preceding stage.

A series of lectures is being prepared for the exhibition, which will present specific examples of panel housing estates in more detail, along with workshops for the public and guided tours of the exhibition. More details can be found on the museum's website and project.