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?
2015-11-05 2015-11-05File Name: B017N2BRO0
Review
