The Man-Made Environment in Post-Stalinist Europe 1953-1968

This project looked at the various responses, both political and aesthetic, to the end of socialist realism and the return of pre-war modernism as a desirable ideal. It considered both the built environment and objects of daily use (furniture, radios, TV sets, etc.) in several countries of the region, including Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Romania, also comparing developments there with corresponding ones in the west. Among particular aspects considered were the effects of Kruschev's speech in December 1954 to workers in construction, machine-building and design industries, in which he argued against monumentalism and criticised both "classical architecture" and socialist realism. The team see the real issue in interpreting Eastern European architecture as its lack of a critical edge, since official discourses took the place of any form of criticism and architects sought to implement the "official line". Megastructures became increasingly popular from the 1960s onwards and in Romania, for instance, came to dominate the city in the late 1980s. Such structures proved an efficient way to control the environment in countries plagued by prefabrication and social housing, and the group see the exhibition of inflated concrete grids as perhaps the most important feature of Eastern European architecture in the 1960s and 1970s. They also point out the rarity of glass and steel architecture in the east, where the preferred material was concrete, a material seen as "revolutionary" as it was the product of heavy industry and was grey, i.e. the workers' colour. Tactile elements were more important here than the visual elements favoured in the west, and a solidity more in line with the dominant ideology than the ephemeral qualities of glass.