„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 and 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?”
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