Attractive pictures and news about Western high-tech architecture penetrated beyond the Iron Curtain at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of a politically controlled Czech socialist economy, however, architects had to transform these inspirations into unique forms and conceptual lines that reflected both coming to terms with the past and present, but also the search for the possible and feasible. The first line followed the domestic obsession with pure engineering and thus employed the incisive visuality of avant-garde techno-optimism, with roots especially in Krejcar's Pavilion for Paris exhibition 1937, the Hubáček's Tower on Ještěd and the large-scale structures (for sports buildings) in the 1960s. The second line coped with new ethical challenges, mainly with efforts to humanize the idea of mass prefabrication, patronized by the socialist state and abused by it during the construction of housing estates, or with efforts for energy-efficient architecture after the experience of the oil crisis. The third line based its approach on a structural and spatial experiment, mainly within the construction of technologically comprehensive buildings (e.g. telephone exchanges) or the concept of architecture as an "enlarged" design. Despite a wide variety of results and forms, all such attempts reflected the dreams of the young generation of architects about bold, technicist, socially and environmentally responsible architecture and before the fall of a rather disorganized socialist regime offered a vision of a better future.