Abstract
Most of the museum exhibitions in the Czech Republic occur in the spatial, visual and symbolic framework of the older buildings. Among them, the buildings which were (re)built for museum and memorial purposes during the period of state socialism represent a specific category.
After 1989, they lost their ideological role, were "recoded" or stayed without purpose. The paper will analyze three different examples of such houses - National Memorial on the Vítkov Hill in Prague, World War II Memorial in Hrabyně and Klement Gottwald "Birthplace" in Dědice - and points to the difficulties with their current expert reflecting and presenting to the public.
The specific architectural form, visual and symbolic connotations of these objects cannot be only an obstacle of their present-day musealisation - each of them could also became an exhibit sui generis. The paper pleads for more reflexive "reading" of this sort of architecture which offers many interesting impulses for the museum presentation of our modern and contemporary history.