Exterior exhibition: The Story of Prefabricated Housing in the South Moravian Region

Panel Houses in Brno

From January 13 to March 28, 2016, Brno will host an outdoor exhibition The Story of Panel Houses in South Moravia, which will bring closer the history and present of selected panel housing estates in Brno (Juliánov, Lesná, Bohunice, and Starý Lískovec, Vinohrady) and a small housing estate in Mikulov. This exhibition, freely accessible to the general public at the Vaňkovka Gallery, is the seventh exhibition 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 Applied Arts in Prague. “Panel housing estates have their past, present, and in many cases development potential, and they represent a home for their residents. Therefore, it would be a mistake to close our eyes to the individuality of many of them and be influenced by one-sided judgments,” she adds.

According to the last census, 21% (i.e., more than 230 thousand) of the South Moravian region's population lives in panel houses. The outdoor exhibition introduces visitors to four panel housing estates directly in the regional capital and one small, brick housing estate in Mikulov, built in the first half of the 1950s according to the principles of socialist realism. In the 1960s, two experimental panel housing estates were created: Juliánov, the first residential complex in Brno built from large-panel prefabricated construction, with a simple urban composition. And of course Lesná, based on the concept of a garden city. Lesná is rightly considered one of the most successful housing estates in Czechoslovakia due to its exceptional urbanism. In the 1970s, during the so-called normalization period, a panel housing estate was built in the area of Bohunice and Starý Lískovec, designed as a standalone city quarter for nearly 30 thousand residents. Its design was influenced by monitoring economic indicators, construction monopolies, and pressure to fulfill plans. The latest residential unit of the exhibition, Brno's Vinohrady, attempts to explore new paths in the construction of housing estates. The estate was developed during the 1980s and is characterized by an effort to return to an organized urban structure as well as colored facades.

Very capable architects often participated in the realization of these estates, creatively developing the ideas of interwar avant-garde architects and urban planners. The exhibition also addresses issues of urbanism, apartment layouts, artistic decoration of housing estates, and construction technologies. It does not overlook the question of the age, educational, and professional structure of the local residents and how it has changed since the time of construction. “Through examples, we show what is happening today with selected panel housing estates, whether regeneration interventions have contributed to the improvement of the living environment or, on the contrary, disturbed the genius loci of these units,” adds Lucie Skřivánková.

The grant project Panel Housing Estates in the Czech Republic as a Part of Urban Living Environment: Evaluation and Presentation of Their Residential Potential is a five-year research and exhibition project involving almost twenty architecture historians, urban planners, conservationists, demographers, and other specialists from museum and academic institutions. The expert guarantor is art historian Professor Rostislav Švácha, and the project is institutionally backed by the Museum of Applied Arts in Prague. The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic supports the project within the grant program for research and development of national cultural identity (NAKI).

In addition to a comprehensive Czech-English monograph on the issues of housing estates and individual expert 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 intended for those interested among both professionals 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 the company LIAS Vintířov. The graphic design is by Štěpán Malovec.

Panel housing estates represent an important urbanistic, 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 into their significance and sociocultural role is still in its infancy. After years of one-sided criticism and rejection, however, we are now witnessing a growing interest in the topic of panel housing estates not only among experts but also among contemporary artists.

Term: January 13 – March 28, 2016
Address: Ve Vaňkovce street 2, at the Vaňkovka Gallery (in front of Café Práh), Brno

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