Exterior Exhibition: The Story of the Prefabricated Building in the Plzeň Region

From September 21, 2016, to January 1, 2017, an outdoor exhibition titled "The Story of Panel Housing in the Plzeň Region" will be presented in Plzeň, which will highlight the history and present of selected panel houses and housing estates in Plzeň (PL 60; Slovany, Doubravka, Bory, Lochotín) and in Klatovy (U Pošty, Nad Rybníčky). This exhibition, freely accessible to the general public at the DEPO2015 gallery, is the tenth exhibit from a traveling cycle dedicated to selected panel housing estates in individual regions of the Czech Republic.

“We would like to show that not all housing estates are the same, that they do not necessarily have to be monotonous clusters of boxes designed by an anonymous team in a design institute,” explains the main author of the project, Lucie Skřivánková (Zadražilová) from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. “Panel housing estates have their past, present, and in many cases, their developmental potential, and for their inhabitants, they represent home. Therefore, it would be a mistake to close our eyes to the individuality of many of them and to be influenced by one-sided judgments,” she adds.

The outdoor exhibition introduces visitors to one experimental house, four panel housing estates directly in the regional city, and two modestly sized complexes in Klatovy. The experimental house PL 60 by architect Karel Janů on Tomanova Street in Plzeň is an interesting testament to the development of prefabricated construction. However, this unique example also represents a dead end, as it did not correspond to the lifestyle and habits of the then inhabitants in terms of usage and operation.

The Slovany housing estate was designed in the 1950s, and its implementation stretched into the early next decade. It consists of five diverse parts where traditional brick houses and the first panel houses were utilized. Here, you can find all the then-standard typologies, and in the Slovany I district, there is even a collection built in the spirit of socialist realism following the model of Soviet historicizing architecture. The Doubravka estate is characterized by the contrast between low family houses and much bulkier panel houses – most of them were built during the 1960s and early 1970s in gaps between the old buildings. Some of these "touching" areas were cleared. At the Bory estate, architects Miloslav Hrubec and Václav Skalník tested a new construction system PS 69 while designing fourteen-story tower blocks, which was then used in the construction of Plzeň housing estates until 1990. The Bory housing estate from the 1960s is among the highest-quality residential complexes of this type in our country in terms of architecture and urbanism, primarily because the architects had the opportunity to realize it according to their vision. In contrast, Lochotín, the youngest of the monitored housing estates, was built in the 1970s, when the political pressure for the number of newly built apartments was strongest. The architects had their hands tied, and quantity thus outweighed quality. Two small panel housing estates in Klatovy – the U Pošty estate from the 1970s and the Nad Rybníčky estate from the 1980s – were built on the site of cleared historical suburbs.
Many capable architects who creatively developed the ideas of interwar avant-garde architects and urban planners were involved in the realization of these housing estates. The exhibition also addresses questions of urbanism, apartment layouts, artistic decorations of the estates, and construction technologies. It does not overlook the question of what the age, educational, and professional structure of the local inhabitants is and how it has changed since the time of construction. “Through examples, we show what is happening with selected panel housing estates today, whether regenerative interventions have contributed to improving the residential environment or, on the contrary, disrupted the genius loci of these complexes,” adds Lucie Skřivánková.

The grant project "Panel Housing Estates in the Czech Republic as Part of the Urban Living Environment: Evaluation and Presentation of Their Residential Potential" is a five-year research and exhibition project involving nearly two dozen architectural historians, urban planners, conservationists, demographers, and other experts from museum and academic institutions. The project is institutionally supported by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, with art historian Professor Rostislav Švácha serving as the academic guarantor. The Czech Ministry of Culture supports the project under its grant program for research and development of national cultural identity (NAKI).

In addition to a comprehensive Czech-English monograph on the issue of housing estates and specific professional texts and publications, the main output of the project is a series of thirteen exhibitions in individual regional cities, culminating in a comprehensive exhibition in Prague in 2017. The exhibition cycle is aimed at both experts and the general public. The exhibition design by the architectural studio A1 Architects (Tereza Schneiderová, Lenka Křemenová, David Maštálka) takes the form of a stylized panel town. Six free-standing elements made of lightweight concrete were custom produced for the project by LIAS Vintířov. The graphic design is by Štěpán Malovec.

Panel housing estates represent an important urban, architectural, and historical phenomenon. Although they were the most typical and widespread form of mass housing construction from the 1950s to the 1980s and today nearly three million residents of the Czech Republic live in these estates, research on their significance and socio-cultural role is still in its infancy. After years of one-sided criticism and rejection, we are now witnesses to a growing interest in the topic of panel housing estates, not only among experts but also among contemporary artists.

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