Rostislav Švácha: History of Czech Panel Housing Estates

Panel housing estates have long been considered a typical product of the socialist regime. In reality, they were built all over the world after the Second World War, regardless of the political system, and foreign historians of modern architecture pay them extraordinary attention today. In the Czech Republic, the most recent mapping was done by the project Paneláci. The lecture will introduce the listeners in Kolín to the results of this project. It will focus primarily on the categorization of the development of housing estates into individual stages from 1945 to November 1989, highlight the differences in their quality, and briefly discuss their most significant examples, such as the Prague housing estates Solidarita, Invalidovna, or Ďáblice, Poruba in Ostrava, Lesná in Brno, or Jižní Svahy in Zlín. It will also reflect on the issue of heritage protection of the highest quality housing estates.

Photo: Architects Polák, Šalda, Novotný and others, housing estate Invalidovna in Prague, 1959-1965. Photo by Zdeněk Voženílek