Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe book cover

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1st Edition

Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Fundamental Europe

Copyright Year 2013

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Book Description

The built environment of former socialist countries is oftentimes deemed uniform and drab, an apt reflection of a repressive regime. Building the State peeks behind the grey façade to reveal a colourful struggle over competing meanings of the nation, Europe, modernity and the past in a divided continent.

Examining how social change is closely intertwined with transformations of the built environment, this volume focuses on the human relationship between architecture and state politics in postwar Key Europe using examples from Hungary and Germany. Built around 4 case studies, the book traces how architecture was politically mobilized in the service of social modify, first in socialist modernization programs and then in the postsocialist transition.

Edifice the Country does not only offer a comprehensive survey of the various political uses of architecture in postwar Central Europe simply is the first book to explore how transformations of the congenital environment tin offering a lens into broader processes of state formation and social alter.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction  ii. Building Socialism on National Traditions: Socialist Realism and Postwar Urban Reconstruction  3. Prefabricating Modernity: Mass Housing and its Discontents  4. Questioning Modernity: Western or Vernacular?  5. The Traditional "European City" in The Global Age: Rebuilding Post-wall Berlin  half dozen. Conclusion

Writer(s)

Biography

Virág Molnár is Banana Professor of Sociology at the New Schoolhouse for Social Enquiry in New York. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and her work focuses on the politics of the built surround and urban culture.

Reviews

"Building the State importantly demonstrates how architecture and urbanism construct political objectives by other means. In charting the changing roles and evolving self-identity of the architectural profession in two key parts of Central Europe between 1945 and 2000, Virág Molnár adroitly reveals the complex dialogue among modernism, socialism and nationalism."

Lawrence J. Vale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

"This book offers a fresh perspective on the interaction betwixt architecture and politics in East Deutschland and Republic of hungary during state socialism and its aftermath. The author'south approach, combining case studies and historical ethnography, is a delight for any reader, including architectural historians."

Pál Ritoók, Hungarian Architecture Museum

"In her volume, Virág Molnár provides us with a sophisticated inquiry into architectural soapbox in East Germany and Hungary during and after the menses of state socialism. Molnár'southward report takes on an important gap in literature on compages under country socialism."

Brigitte Le Normand, Academy of British Columbia, Canada. Planning Perspectives, April 2014

"Molnar shows that whether material construction operates as a "cultural representation", a "cultural medium", or a set of strategies for change is non something that can be answered a priori. Past focusing on the same general professional person arena over a long period of fourth dimension and beyond space, she shows how the "same" arena is transformed as it changes its relation to local and global power structures and histories–– how the material carving of the world emerges simultaneously as an almost "total social fact" and equally a powerful style to shape future activeness. What emerges, and then, is a nimble written report of culture that truly takes its objects seriously—avoiding like shooting fish in a barrel prefabricated answers, while showing how textile culture is brought into action."

Iddo Tavory, European Journal of Folklore, University of California, USA

"Virág Molnár'due south Building the Land: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Post-War Key Europe explores the changing meanings of the built environment and its roles in the formulation of the socialist country in two former socialist countries, the German Autonomous Republic and Hungary."

Vladimir Kulić, Contemporary European History