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(Not) A Friend of the city? Department stores from the 1960s to the 1980s in the small towns of South Bohemia.
NOVOSÁDOVÁ, Kateřina
My thesis deals with the phenomenon of department stores built between the 1960s and the 1980s in small towns in South Bohemia. They are buildings fashioned in the socialist style which often had strong impact on the appearance of the town. The main goal of my work is not only to document urban changes of the historic centres of the chosen towns and to reconstruct the circumstances of the constructions of those department stores, but also to describe their art historical aspect. I have chosen department stores in Písek, Blatná, Protivín, Vodňany, Strakonice, Vimperk and Prachatice which were not built by the company Prior. The main investor was the company Pramen or Jednota. The main primary sources of the research are from files in the respective town halls, from state district archives and newspapers of that period. Those sources have often not been published yet. The secondary literature is used for a comparison. The sources help to clarify and assess how the chosen buildings changed the appearances of the towns. The thesis describes some features of the individual buildings related to their functions and depicts their facades, so called "billboards in the town", which provided the main communication with the people. And then I try to find variations and combinations of materials used in the construction of the buildings. The thesis also deals with the artistic decoration complementing the architecture of the buildings and how much of it has remained. The text provides not only comparison of the buildings in small towns in the given areas, but there is also a comparison with major department stores of the company Prior in regional capitals in former Czechoslovakia. At the end it touches on the question of the future of the examined buildings and their possible preservation as national monuments.
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