The opening (vernissage) will take place on 3 December 2025 at 18:00 in the Galerie Jaroslava Fragnera in Prague, and the exhibition will run from 4 December 2025 until 1 March 2026.
Stavoprojekt was founded in September 1948 as part of the Czechoslovak construction enterprises, a massive organization that gathered collectivized building firms. As a new state design institution, Stavoprojekt played a fundamental role in incorporating architecture into the processes of planned economy and construction under the newly imposed socialist regime.
The exhibition is organized into three thematic sections. The first part deals with the founding of Stavoprojekt and its institutional development during the first five-year period, including its everyday operations and major organizational changes. The second focuses on housing estates as a materialization of contemporary social priorities and the subject of technocratic typification and standardization. The third outlines the extremely wide typological range of Stavoprojekt’s work, which touched on virtually all areas of nationalized construction.
According to the exhibition’s main curator, architectural historian Petr Vorlík, the exhibition “still represents only the proverbial tip of the iceberg of what was happening in the early 1950s — a period that on one hand brought the ruthless establishment of a repressive totalitarian regime, but at the same time also a ‘project’ of postwar rehabilitation and modernization of society and economy.”
The exhibition presents a unique collection of previously unpublished archival materials — including planning documentation from the period, standardization catalogs, official documents and circulars — mostly from the holdings of the National Archive (the previously unprocessed fund “ČSSZ – Stavoprojekt”). Through these materials, visitors can glimpse how architecture was planned, standardized and implemented in the early socialist period.
The project also includes a critical catalogue and a series of accompanying events.
The exhibition was created as the main output of the research project Stavoprojekt 1948–1953. Collectivization of design activities and their imprint on the memory of Czech landscape and cities, carried out between 2023 and 2027 at the Department of Theory and History of Architecture.
