Finnish houses on the road: mobilities of architectural models across the Iron Curtain
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the aftermath of WWII, Czechoslovakia, as well as other European countries, faced severe housing shortage that extended well to the 1950s. In this situation, model prefabricated single family houses were imported from Finland to Poland, Soviet Union, or Czechoslovakia. Scandinavian architecture was followed and admired by Czechoslovak architects already in the 1940s; however, import of whole houses represents a specific, materialized example of the mobility of architectural models across borders in the Cold War period. My paper aims to uncover the story of “Finnish houses” (as they are locally called) imported in the 1950s to house families of workers in small towns in Moravia, and the relationship inhabitants developed with these structures along the past 60 years. It uses this example to debate the variety of stories about how housing shortage was solved in socialist countries, pointing out the transnational links that were established in this process. Thus the need to think ‘relationaly’ about the history of the socialist housing is stressed. |
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