Slavomíra Ferenčuhová: Stavoprojekt and Prefabricated Wooden Housing in Socialist Czechoslovakia

The role of Stavoprojekt – both its individual offices and the organisation’s leadership – in developing and promoting prefabrication and standardisation in residential architecture in socialist Czechoslovakia is well known thanks to previous research (e.g., Zarecor 2010; 2011; 2012). Unquestionably, the most important result of these tendencies is concrete panel housing, especially the numerous large housing estates (LHEs) built between 1960s and 1980s across Czech and Slovak cities. However, the post-war trend of prefabrication and standardisation in housing construction has left some more, and various, marks in the landscapes of Czech cities. Unlike for the history and present-day condition of concrete panel housing, much less is known about the work of the employees of Stavoprojekt that applied principles of prefabrication and standardisation in designing wooden typified housing and in preparing urbanist concepts for neighbourhoods of so called ‘Finnish houses’. In my presentation, I focused on the history of wooden prefabricated houses construction in North Moravia, where they were built to house mineworkers working in the local pits. I presented the findings from my research in local archives. However, I also explained the story of the North Moravian houses in the context of the pre- and post-war history of wooden housing prefabrication, both in former Czechoslovakia and abroad.

Web of the conference.

Conference programme.