Author : Łukasz Stanek
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 38,54 MB
Release : 2020-01-14
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 0691168709
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Chapter 1 Introduction Worldmaking of Architecture -- Chapter 2 A Global Development Path Accra, 1957-66 -- Chapter 3 Worlding Eastern Europe Lagos, 1966-79 -- Chapter 4 The World Socialist System Baghdad, 1958-90 -- Chapter 5 Socialism within Globalization Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City, 1979-90 -- Epilogue and Outlook -- A Note on Sources -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Image Credits.
Author : Simon Elmer
Publisher :
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 38,18 MB
Release : 2021-06-22
Category :
ISBN : 9781008909540
Over the summer of 2019, as part of a research fellowship, the UK practice Architects for Social Housing (ASH) took up a month's residency in Vancouver. Drawing on the past five years of practice working with residents of housing estates threatened with demolition, ASH presented their thoughts about the necessity and possibility of a socialist architecture under capitalism. To do so, they looked at the social, environmental, economic and political spheres of architecture, and how they can be reclaimed from the hegemony of neoliberalism in legislation, policy and practice. In a series of four lectures, ASH mapped out the development process from 1) strategy, legislation and policy, to 2) urban design, master-planning and brief development, to 3) project design and the planning process, to 4) procurement and construction, to 5) management and maintenance, and identified the moments of political agency at which the agents for a socialist architecture can intervene in and disrupt the capitalist structure and functioning of this process. In addition, ASH also identified moments that are outside this development process proper, but which can be brought to bear upon it, including the tasks of education, dissemination and agitation for change. In doing so, they have developed a framework for both individual and collective agency that extends far beyond the skills of an architect, and is not limited to either industry professionals or the layman's protest. ASH contends that all of us are potential agents for a socialist architecture; but to be called 'socialist' that agency must go beyond voting and protest - both of which give legitimacy to the illusory 'freedom' of capitalist democracies - to oppositional political practice. For this printed edition of the lectures, ASH has included two additional texts: an introduction, which was originally published in January 2020, following the UK general election; and a postscript, which looks at the ruinous impact of lockdown restrictions on UK housing and how we can respond. In publishing the expanded forms of these lectures, ASH aims to make their contents available not only to people who are threatened by the crisis of housing affordability in the UK, but also to policy-writers looking for alternatives to the selling off of public land and housing to private investors, as well as to architects looking for an alternative to the orthodoxies of contemporary architectural practice.
Author : Christina Schwenkel
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 31,13 MB
Release : 2020-09-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1478012609
Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.
Author : Ana Miljacki
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 30,58 MB
Release : 2017-02-03
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1315460114
The Optimum Imperative examines architecture’s multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia’s entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops’ occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzík and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal. Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects’ optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.
Author : Srdjan Jovanović Weiss
Publisher :
Page : 68 pages
File Size : 32,36 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Architectural photography
ISBN : 9783941644922
Socialist Architecture ? The Reappearing Act' is a cooperation between the architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and the photographer Armin Linke. Since 2009, Jovanovic Weiss and Linke are documenting the current state of selected places of socialistic architecture in the former Yugoslavia. After the disappearing of Yugoslavia, the inherited architecture often remained empty, in a kind of limbo between reutilisation and modern archaeological ruin. This documentation considered this indecisiveness in the five emerging democracies and investigates the relative impact on the spatial perception and the fate of the former ideological architecture of Yugoslavia.
Author : Alexander C. Diener
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 38,70 MB
Release : 2016-04-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1317585887
The development of post-socialist cities has become a major field of study among critical theorists from across the social sciences and humanities. Originally constructed under the dictates of central planners and designed to serve the demands of command economies, post-socialist urban centers currently develop at the nexus of varied and often competing economic, cultural, and political forces. Among these, nationalist aspirations, previously simmering beneath the official rhetoric of communist fraternity and veneer of architectural conformity, have emerged as dominant factors shaping the urban landscape. This book explores this burgeoning field of research through detailed cases studies relating to the cultural politics of architecture, urban planning, and identity in the post-socialist cities of Eurasia. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers.
Author : Kimberly Elman Zarecor
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 16,5 MB
Release : 2011-04-10
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 082297780X
Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country's transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.
Author : Mary Pepchinski
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 40,17 MB
Release : 2016-08-05
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1317119029
Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe 1945-1989 presents an alternative narrative of women in architecture. This edited collection focuses on the woman architect in a position of equality with their male counterparts.
Author : Christina E. Crawford
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 422 pages
File Size : 29,90 MB
Release : 2022-02-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1501759213
Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states—and capitalist welfare states—for decades to follow. Thanks to generous funding from Emory University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Author : Armin Linke
Publisher : Jrp Ringier Kunstverlag Ag
Page : 131 pages
File Size : 27,97 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Photography
ISBN : 9783037642450
Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act is a collaborative project between photographer Armin Linke and architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss.Linke and Weiss have worked together since 2009 to visit and document selected examples of ex-Yugoslav Socialist architecture in order to document the state that they are in today. The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia vanished during the early 1990s and the former Socialist states were 'Balkanized' into a number of emerging democracies.Each of these new states inherited monuments, buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure, which were constructed specifically for the former Socialist context and needs. After Yugoslavia vanished, most of the inherited architecture was left vacant and in a state of limbo between being repurposed and reused for new content, or simply being declared 'Socialist archeology', and continuing its life as ruins.By creating documentation, this project captures the indecision of five particular emerging democracies today: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia, and the distinct effects their irresolution creates spatially and visually on former Yugoslav architecture.Published with Codax Publishers, Zurich.English and German text.
