A few Notes on the Current Situation of Post-War Industrial Aarchitecture in the Czech Republi
The increasingly frequent attempts to point out the importance of industrial buildings and the possibility of their use in a new perspective have, through expert discussions, publications, exhibitions and through various initiatives of a number of groups and associations as well as reports in mainstream media, contributed to a significantly increased awareness of the value of industrial heritage in recent years. However, while our attention has often been drawn to the architecture of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, we still perceive post-war industrial buildings as something anonymous and vague which – to top it all – saw the light of the day at the wrong time. The source of our uncertainty is mainly caused by the close historical proximity, as well as the complicated social and ideological situation or even our own prejudice and insufficient differentiation. But if we take a closer look at this specific architecture and the context of its origins, we discover a number of aspects challenging our opinion.The aim of the paper is to outline the current situation of this previously unmapped layer of our architectural heritage, offering a selection of the most interesting buildings created between 1945 and 1980 which are either already lost to us, in imminent danger of vanishing or which have been given an opportunity to be used in a new context. The text is one of the results of the research performed within the dissertation titled Industrial Architecture in the Czech Republic: 1945 – 1960 (Architektura průmyslových staveb v České republice, 1945 – 1960), currently carried out at the Faculty of Architecture, CTU, Prague, and the project by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic implemented under the “NAKI” (National and Cultural Identity) applied research programme called the Industrial Topography – new use of industrial heritage in the Czech Republic as a part of national and cultural identity (DF11P01OVV016), investigated from 2011 to 2014 by the Research Centre for Industrial Heritage, Faculty of Architecture, CTU, Prague.
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