Forum

The Ambition for Centralized Control

An Organizational History of the Czechoslovak State Design Institute Stavoprojekt Between 1948 and 1953

Scheme displaying the organizational structure of Stavoprojekt in November 1948 Source: VOŽENÍLEK, Jiří. 1948. Zásada a organisace urbanistické práce ve Stavoprojektu. Architekt: měsíčník pro architekturu a urbanismus, 46(10), p. 163

The article explores the formative years (1948–1953) of Stavoprojekt, the largest state design institution in state-socialist Czechoslovakia. As part of an ongoing research project, it traces organizational changes using the previously inaccessible archive of the Stavoprojekt Directorate, now held in the National Archives of the Czech Republic. The research is based mainly on the analysis of this fund, which contains fragmentary documents of Stavoprojekt’s operations. The state of the fund itself reflects the early development of the Stavoprojekt organization: inconsistent, ambiguous and haotic. This article aims to clarify the milestones of this development by relating this material to the contemporary literature, periodicals, and legal changes in the fields of architecture and construction.

 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/archandurb.2025.59.1-2.8

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License