In accordance with the state-proclaimed requirement for the industrialization of construction, in 1951, the Institute for Research and Standardization in Prague, led by the architect Erich Kohn, began work on an overview of standard types that defined the parameters for building structures and features. The primary construction requirements were quantity, speed and efficiency, in order to make up the shortfall in the housing stock, which had been decimated in the Second World War. With regard to the situation in Brno, Jaroslav Mlýnský noted that ‘almost every other residential building had been destroyed or damaged, which added up to 11,800 apartments in ruins and 35,000 apartments in need of repair’. At the beginning of the 1950s, numerous institutes were established that focused on the development and preparation of documentation for the construction of standardized buildings and prefabricated building components and research in the field of architecture and urban planning (e.g., the Research Institute for Construction, the Institute for Architecture and Territorial Planning etc.). After 1955, when, following developments in the Soviet Union, the Czechoslovak political leadership rejected ‘ornamental decoration in architecture’ and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia adopted a resolution on measures to industrialize and further develop the construction industry, the importance of such institutes increased.
After Stavoprojekt was split into specialized design institutes in 1954, the Institute for the Industrialization of Construction in Gottwaldov (formerly Zlín) was tasked with the development of prefabricated buildings, and it was here that the first prefabricated panel construction system was born, designated by the letter G. Brno’s first prefabricated panel building was built from full-wall panels to the G-type design of Bohumír Kula, with local modifications to account for the sloping terrain. This type of construction system had transverse load-bearing inner walls, onto which floors were laid in parallel with the outer longitudinal wall. The perimeter panels were non-load-bearing and formed the brace of the building. The system had a span of 3.6 metres, while the main construction components were the 24 cm-thick outer panels, the inner supporting panels (20 cm), the partition panels (10 cm) and the stair panels. By 1958, twenty-five thousand apartments had been built with this system, after which it was replaced by the G57 construction system, which was used throughout the country.
This four-storey building with three sections and thirty-four apartments is situated in the attractive residential district of Černá Pole, which is mostly made up of buildings from the nineteenth century and the interwar period. This Brno prototype was meant to compensate for the shortcomings of the existing G-type prefabricated buildings, which were only for east-west orientation and therefore not suitable for the design of housing estates. However, the hopes placed in this technological innovation came to nought. Of the original forty planned apartments, only thirty-four were built, and only a fragment the fourth floor materialized in the form of two residential units in the left third of the block, which was meant to address the issue of its relationship to the buildings nearby. The gradient of the terrain also required the entrances to the outer sections to be placed on the side of the building, and the norms for the number and category of apartments were not observed. The poor choice of land eventually led to the failure of the whole project – rather than a building that would become a prototype for mass housing construction, it turned out to be ‘ordinary atypical design’.
Due to the very limited variety of prefabricated panel components (only four types were available in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s), it was virtually impossible to achieve any variability in the configuration. The role of the architect was purely a formality in the design phase, which is confirmed by the stark appearance of this building on Fišová street, whose classicizing entrance doorways on an otherwise bare facade hark back to socialist realism. The hasty implementation of these ‘proto-experiments’ and their insipid architectural solutions perfectly reflect the prioritizing of technical and economic solutions over individual concepts and aesthetic aspects that was typical for that time.
MŽ