Flying Panels
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Flying Panels: How Concrete Panels Changed the World
Flying Panels is a major exhibition about how prefabricated concrete panels changed the world.
Housing billions of people, apartment blocks made of concrete panels are the most common buildings in the world. Alongside air travel, the space programme and nuclear power, the concrete panel was once considered an innovation that heralded a new, rational future for society and the world. In the second half of the 20th Century, the heroic image of a flying panel soaring across the sky appeared in paintings, photographs, drawings, films, posters, cartoons, children’s toys and opera sets.
Flying Panels is the result of over a decade of research by Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola. The exhibition looks at how concrete panels emerged, spread, were embraced by different nations, and have been adapted for every imaginable climate and context. It also shows us how the panel was used as a symbol of the future across the political and artistic spectrum, and ultimately how panels were satirised, derided and even blamed for the problems of the late 20th Century city.
The exhibition compiles films, posters, propaganda, cartoons, toys, opera sets and other forms of popular culture alongside the catalogue and global mapping of concrete panel systems used across the world. By presenting the longstanding work of Erik Stenberg (Associate Professor at the KTH School of Architecture) on the Million Programme era, the exhibition also outlines the D4 Group, an association of Swedish pioneers who advocated for prefabricated concrete construction methods and developed the technology in Sweden and abroad.
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Photo: Kristofer Johansson. 2019.
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Publication
A publication accompanies the exhibition with essays by Michael Abrahamson, Jimena Castillo, Adrian Forty, Boris Groys, Maria Lind, Jennifer Mack, Philipp Meuser, Natalya Solopova, Erik Stenberg, and Christine Varga-Harris.
