Aug 28, 2015 10:32 PM
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015...ial-truths
EXCERPT: [...] As Owen Hatherley explains in "Landscapes of Communism", we all have our stereotypes of communism, beaten into us from decades of cold war propaganda and inextricably linked to its architecture. Think of communism and we obediently conjure up images of vast, monochrome housing estates, stern and unyielding.
The classic Levi’s advert from 1984, about a young renegade smuggling in a pair of jeans, contains all the clichés: granite-faced border guards, looming posters of Lenin, Prokofiev soundtrack and, inevitably, a menacing block of flats. “Nothing,” Hatherley writes, “is seen to discredit the entire project of building a non-capitalist collective society more than those featureless monoliths stretching for miles in every direction” -- even if the particular featureless monolith filmed for the Levi’s advert was, in reality, built in Britain.
[...] Hatherley’s point is that there is no easy connection between ideology and architectural expression. Communists can live in suburban semis. And featureless concrete monoliths have been built under regimes both left- and right-wing, collectivist and free-market. Hatherley’s book is at its best when he debunks stereotypes and opens our eyes to the diversity and eclecticism of what communism was and the contradictory architecture built in its cause. This was an ideology, after all, that stretched across the world and almost a century. How could it not be as rich, terrible, astonishing, surprising, grim or beautiful as the people who built and lived in it?
[...] Communist architecture, as I discovered in Yugoslavia, could be glamorous. It could be kitsch. It could vary wildly over time. Hatherley describes its broad narrative “zigzag”, from modernism after 1917, through eclectic expression, all turrets and marble, under Stalin, back to modernism under Khrushchev and, in the 1980s, a return to often oppressive historicism under dictators such as Ceausescu. It could liberate you, Hatherley suggests, debunking one stereotype. Under the Marxists who ran Vienna from 1918 until 1934, an enormous, architecturally adventurous housing programme, part-funded by a “luxury tax”, gave tenants homes with rents frozen at between 2 and 4 per cent of the average worker’s income. Communist architecture, often dismissed as derivative, could also lead the world. The underground train systems built in communist countries, such as the Moscow Metro, were, Hatherley writes, “vastly superior to [those] of the west”, combining opulence with technological brilliance....
EXCERPT: [...] As Owen Hatherley explains in "Landscapes of Communism", we all have our stereotypes of communism, beaten into us from decades of cold war propaganda and inextricably linked to its architecture. Think of communism and we obediently conjure up images of vast, monochrome housing estates, stern and unyielding.
The classic Levi’s advert from 1984, about a young renegade smuggling in a pair of jeans, contains all the clichés: granite-faced border guards, looming posters of Lenin, Prokofiev soundtrack and, inevitably, a menacing block of flats. “Nothing,” Hatherley writes, “is seen to discredit the entire project of building a non-capitalist collective society more than those featureless monoliths stretching for miles in every direction” -- even if the particular featureless monolith filmed for the Levi’s advert was, in reality, built in Britain.
[...] Hatherley’s point is that there is no easy connection between ideology and architectural expression. Communists can live in suburban semis. And featureless concrete monoliths have been built under regimes both left- and right-wing, collectivist and free-market. Hatherley’s book is at its best when he debunks stereotypes and opens our eyes to the diversity and eclecticism of what communism was and the contradictory architecture built in its cause. This was an ideology, after all, that stretched across the world and almost a century. How could it not be as rich, terrible, astonishing, surprising, grim or beautiful as the people who built and lived in it?
[...] Communist architecture, as I discovered in Yugoslavia, could be glamorous. It could be kitsch. It could vary wildly over time. Hatherley describes its broad narrative “zigzag”, from modernism after 1917, through eclectic expression, all turrets and marble, under Stalin, back to modernism under Khrushchev and, in the 1980s, a return to often oppressive historicism under dictators such as Ceausescu. It could liberate you, Hatherley suggests, debunking one stereotype. Under the Marxists who ran Vienna from 1918 until 1934, an enormous, architecturally adventurous housing programme, part-funded by a “luxury tax”, gave tenants homes with rents frozen at between 2 and 4 per cent of the average worker’s income. Communist architecture, often dismissed as derivative, could also lead the world. The underground train systems built in communist countries, such as the Moscow Metro, were, Hatherley writes, “vastly superior to [those] of the west”, combining opulence with technological brilliance....