Designing for the Socialist Family: The Evolution of Housing Types in Early Postwar Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The history of postwar architecture in Eastern and Central Europe remains largely unknown to all but a few specialists. After 1989 there was an explosion of research on the interwar architectural avant-garde resulting in a large body of high-quality scholarship from the region and abroad.¹ In contrast, the postwar period has been neglected and in some cases forcefully rejected.² Expressing a commonly held point of view, émigré architect and translator Eric Dluhosch describes the buildings of the period as “one of the most depressing collections of banality in the history of Czech architecture, one that still mars the architectural landscape of this small country and will be difficult—if not impossible—to erase from its map for decades, if not centuries.”³ Within the discipline of architectural history, dislike for the architectural aesthetics of the period, an aversion to communist politics, and a lack of knowledge about the country’s social and cultural context made postwar architecture an unlikely and difficult topic to address until recently. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach and new methodological models, the discussion of postwar architecture has started to be reoriented away from formal expression and toward an understanding of this work as an integral and revealing component of the history of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe.⁴ This does not eliminate aesthetics from the discussion, but renders this aspect of the architecture less important than many of its other features.