The best housing estate in Czechoslovakia

conference paper

English

The Brno housing estate Lesna is undoubtedly an important achievement of Czechoslovak urbanism and architecture of the 1960s. It was built on the southern slopes north of Brno in 1962–1970 according to a project by a team of architects Frantisek Zounek, Viktor Rudis, Miroslav Dufek and Ladislav Volak. Although it was a standard housing construction made of prefabricated components, the architects did not want to hide its technical expression. They also fully copied it into the very urban arrangement of long blocks, which contributed to the fulfillment of the vision of the garden city. Close cooperation between the supplier, investor and designer was ensured already in the phase of elaboration of the project task. The architecture of residential buildings is based on the diligent efforts of the whole team to promote the use of a lightweight facade of a prefabricated house using parapet panels and strip glazing in the B 60 construction system. The unusually high-quality solution of the public space in the Lesna housing estate was mainly due to the time of its creation. Political liberalization in the 1960s allowed architects to come up with a generous plan for a free stop and thus perfectly fulfill the vision of a garden city. The population density of the Lesna housing estate, less than two hundred inhabitants per hectare, was multiplied by up to four hundred inhabitants per hectare in other housing estates of the "president Gustav Husak" era due to tightening economic indicators. Public greenery respecting the natural elements of the rugged relief required a different professional approach due to the extent of the exterior design. It was common practice that landscaping were carried out on residential complexes with a delay of several months and years after the first inhabitants moved in. The architects managed to reverse this common practice, so the first inhabitants moved to finished houses with access sidewalks, planted greenery and functioning residential amenities. This could not have been imagined by its inhabitants in the later realizations of housing estates. That is why the Brno housing estate Lesna is rightly called the best.

Brno; architecture; urbanism; housing estate; Lesná; construction system; residential buildings

GUZDEK, A.

2. 12. 2021

IOP Publishing

Bristol, UK

1757-899X

IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering

1203

1

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

1

9

9

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/1203/3/032010

http://hdl.handle.net/11012/204016