To describe a house that under one roof offers apartments, a wide range of services and places for meetings or neighborly cooperation, the term ?kolektivní? (collective) became typical in Czech. During the 20th century, this type of housing was discussednot only by architects, but also by sociologists, businessmen or feminists. Despite the fact that participants of these debates held different world views, the tension between individuality and collectivity was a key topic for all of them. This book presents the most important Czech examples of collective housing, discusses what individual agents of ?koldům? expected from this type of residency, and illustrates what social processes were to be affected by collective houses.
In the Czech architecture after the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, we can observe a departure from the almost traditional thinking of architecture and architectural design as methods for visualisation of social utopias. Up till then, throughout the 20th century, not even the relative austerity of Czech architecture managed to rule out its utopian social charge. A fascinating manifestation of architecture as social utopia is seen by Czech art historiography in the vision of collective housing. This project aims to examine in depth the questions of collective housing in Czech Lands in 1900-1989, both on the plane of theory and utopian plans and on that of completed buildings. This research is to advance our understanding of the history of modern and contemporary Czech architecture, history of housing in the 20th century in the Czech Lands, and history of architecture as an instrument of social utopia.