RESIDENCE: PREFAB ESTATE. PLANS. REALISATION. HOUSING. 1945 – 1989

The exhibition Residence: Prefab Estate presents the history of selected residential complexes in the Czech Republic and the social, political, cultural and economic circumstances that accompanied their construction. It follows the development of housing estates in the Czech lands from their start in the late 1940s up until the first years of the 1990s, when such construction came to an end. A brief summary is also presented of the later attempts at ‘humanising’ prefabricated buildings as well as current reflections by architects and historians on these estates today. Individual periods of housing-estate construction are presented through plans, models and historic photographs lent by public institutions and private collections from across the Czech Republic. Illustrating the historic context are various items from the areas of the arts, interior decoration, or industrial design. The visitor is thus provided with a basic overview of the types of construction, important structural systems, development of technical possibilities in the building industry.
The exhibition is the culmination of the research and exhibition project Prefabricated Housing Estates in the Czech Republic as Part of the Urban Environment (more briefly, The Paneláks), which took place from 2013 to 2017. The research team investigated the architecture and the urban design of over seventy Czech housing estates, as well as the demographic composition of their residents. In addition, the research took into account the development of the industrialisation of mass housing construction, changes in the political and economic conditions of socialist Czechoslovakia, and the changing role of architects and urban planners. Reinforcing the art-historical aspect of the study is the use of material from other humanistic disciplines, from the history of architecture and planning up through anthropology, heritage protection, or even historical demography.