Greyness and colour desires: the chromatic politics of the panelák in late-socialist and post-socialist Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The article investigates the function of colour and greyness in relation to housing estates and panel buildings [paneláks] in Czechoslovakia. While the significance of chromatic symbolism to architectural discourse and practice has persisted between the 1970s and today, three different moments of relating colour to the panelák are identified. In late socialism, the discourse of grey registered the critique of the panelák voiced by architects and the nomenklatura. Simultaneously, future socialist alternatives were imagined in colour. Late-socialist desire for colour is interpreted in the context of a wider struggle to reform architectural industrialisation, revive the ideological function of architecture and rehabilitate the living environment of housing estates. In the 1990s the desire for colour surged, but it was geared to leaving socialism behind. The trope of greyness converged with a blanket dismissal of socialism. The article documents that in post-socialism architects gave up on the question, and the reality of housing estates and the process of applying colour to panelák façades moved into the hands of home owners. Their vernacular use of colour had a double rationale: to differentiate one panelák from another and to dissimulate its form and tectonics. In the wake of the recent housing crisis architects took issue with these vernacular patterns. They denounced them as garish chaos and assumed the role of experts who would put this chaos in order. This is interpreted as the beginning of a new moment, in which the panelák is rediscovered as an object of cultural heritage while its social and political determinations are disregarded.