Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings

by Owen Hatherley

Overview

When communism took power in Eastern Europe it remade cities in its own image, transforming everyday life and creating sweeping boulevards and vast, epic housing estates in an emphatic declaration of a noncapitalist idea. The regimes that built them are now dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to postrevolutionary Kiev, the buildings remain, often populated by people whose lives were scattered by the collapse of communism.

Landscapes of Communism is a journey of historical discovery, plunging us into the lost world of socialist architecture. Owen Hatherley, a brilliant, witty, young urban critic shows how power was wielded in these societies by tracing the sharp, sudden zigzags of official communist architectural style: the superstitious despotic rococo of high Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces, and secret policemen's castles; East Germany's obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went further than any avant-garde ever dared. Throughout his journeys across the former Soviet empire, Hatherley asks what, if anything, can be reclaimed from the ruins of Communism—what residue can inform our contemporary ideas of urban life?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620971888
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Pages:	624
Sales rank:	1,149,906
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Owen Hatherley is the author of the acclaimed Militant Modernism, a defense of the modernist movement, and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. He writes regularly on the political aesthetics of architecture, urbanism and popular culture for a variety of publications, including Building Design, Frieze, The Guardian, and New Statesman. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Socialism Isn't 1

1 Magistrate 37

2 Microrayon 91

3 Social Condenser 148

4 High Buildings 201

5 Metro 250

6 Reconstruction 310

7 Improvisation 365

8 Memorial 417

Conclusion: Socialism Is 510

Acknowledgements 533

A Note on Names 535

Notes and References 537

Index of Places 565

General Index 584

Editorial Reviews

An erudite and surprising study of what Soviet-era buildings said about the beliefs and hopes of the citizens. . . A wonderfully accessible, compelling guide to these Eastern European cities.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Owen Hatherley's eye is so acute, his architectural expertise so lightly deployed, his sympathies so wide and generous, that reading it is like a tour of a whole world of unsuspected curiosities and richnesses conducted by a guide whose wit is as refreshing as his knowledge is profound…I loved it, and I'll go back to it again and again."
—Philip Pullman

"In the craven world of architectural criticism Hatherley is that rarest of things: a brave, incisive, elegant and erudite writer, whose books dissect the contemporary built environment to reveal the political fantasies and social realities it embodies."
—Will Self

"Hatherley has a wonderful eye for buildings and space, a good grasp of the history that spawned them, and a deft way of describing them...I'd better take his book, big though it is, in my backpack next time I go to Warsaw, Lviv, Bucharest or elsewhere in the old Soviet empire. I might even throw out Sytin and take it to Moscow."
—London Review of Books

"[Hatherley's] grasp of twentieth century social and cultural history is impressive, and he has created a witty, intimate and insightful book."
—Sunday Times (London)

"Owen Hatherley goes in search of socialism via an epic and insightful study of Eastern bloc architecture."
—The Guardian

“Hatherley takes us on an extraordinary tour of architecture in what could loosely be called the ex-Iron Curtain countries."
—The Independent

From the Publisher

2015-12-06
An erudite and surprising study of what Soviet-era buildings said about the beliefs and hopes of the citizens. British author and journalist Hatherley (A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, 2010, etc.) debunks much of what the West categorizes as "Soviet architecture"—i.e., monumental, monolithic, totalitarian, and repetitive, such as massive rows of housing blocks. In this fresh look at many former communist cities in the Soviet camp, including Warsaw, Vilnius, Kiev, Belgrade, and Berlin, as well as Moscow and Leningrad, Hatherley plots a "zigzag" journey through the Communist architectural mindset. The author explores the period of 1917 until about 1930, when modernism was dominant in social democratic capitals like Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, and when the experiment in high-density, inner-urban "superblocks" became the Soviet model. Hatherley also chronicles the early 1930s to the 1950s, when modernism was discarded as "inhuman, technocratic, tedious, repetitious, constricting," replaced by appeals "to tradition, history, ornament, hierarchy, beauty—the city as a composition, not as repetition." Above all, Hatherley seizes the sense of utopian vision the communists sought. The Soviet model drew on the grand urban planning of Baron Haussmann, favoring compositions that were "strongly centralized," and top-down. The author, whose love affair with a Polish woman propelled him to visit these sights and buildings himself, organizes his fascinating travels thematically, around the kinds of structures the communists built reflecting their uses: the magistrale, the series of grand boulevards needed for the military parade route; the "microrayon," or system of housing units that the author considers a valiant attempt at providing housing for everyone; high buildings, TV towers, and so on; the marvelous metros (about which Hatherley writes eloquently); memorials such as the Lenin Mausoleum; and the improvised sites prompted by the people themselves. A wonderfully accessible, compelling guide to these Eastern European cities.

Kirkus Reviews