Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 (review)

"Few building types are as vilified as the socialist housing block." Thus opens Kimberly Elman Zarecor's study of the forces that produced the ubiquitous panel-type housing in post-war Czechoslovakia. Zarecor's subject is not panel housing itself, however, but the political and professional realms that ultimately fostered its construction. The author uses a wide range of sources, especially contemporary architectural magazines and journals, archival materials, pamphlets, books, and, to some extent, the buildings themselves to unravel a history that has largely been disregarded among historians.

In the introduction, Zarecor clearly lays out her argument and boundaries. She challenges the formulations of respected scholars such as Kenneth Frampton and Eric Dluhosch who praise 1920s and 1930s Czechoslovak modernism yet ignore the modern aspects of post-war architecture. In her view, type housing, mass panel-housing, and even socialist realism were not simply foisted on the hapless architects, engineers, and builders by the Communist regime and the Soviet Union, but had well developed roots in the ideas about industrialization and mass production that existed in Czechoslovakia before the war. She also demonstrates that the Communist Party was not a monolithic structure but one that evolved over time. Many architects either joined the Party before the 1948 Communist coup or espoused socialist ideals and were initially hopeful about the development of a socialist built environment. In this introduction, however, she neglects to explain the overall structure of her work, which is not a simple progression. The book is organized into five chapters. The first two present the interwar high-modern period and the initial two years after the 1948 Communist takeover and show clear continuities between pre- and post-war ideas. The next two chapters cover the adoption of socialist realism and are particularly enlightening given the more subtle connection of this "style" to interwar modernism. The last chapter focuses on the development and roots of the mass production and industrialization of housing from the modern interwar period to the 1960s, highlighting continuities and the particular Czechoslovak way through it. A short epilogue about the nature of the creative process and the proper subject of architectural history complete the book.

In the first chapter, "Phoenix Rising: Housing and the Early Debates on Socialist Modernity," Zarecor maps the continuities in formal and technological terms between interwar modernism and the post-war shift towards socialism and communism. She illustrates that in the immediate post-war period many architects were already avowed socialists and were arguing for the construction of housing based on research, analysis, and planning. Karel Teige (1900-51), art critic and historian, met many of the important internationally known architects of the day—Le Corbusier, Hannes Meyer, Siegfried Giedion, among others, from CIAM (Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, 1928-59) and the German-based Bauhaus (1919-33), as well as members of the Soviet avant-garde. He opposed capitalist values and supported sociological scientific functionalism—"architecture as science" rather than "creation based on subjectivity" (19). Although Teige was discredited under the Communist regime, his ideas were carried forward through young architects such as the Architectural Working Group that he had mentored and whose members later held prominent positions in post-1948 Czechoslovakia.

Zarecor uses two significant projects to illustrate the legacy of modernism in the post-war era: the Collective House in Litvínov, designed in 1947 but not completed until 1959; and the Two-Year-Plan program that developed designs for model residential districts using standard unit types based on interwar and Scandinavian ideas. As she suggests, a new model of architectural practice also emerged at that time which emphasized scientific inquiry and expert knowledge over individual creativity and practice.

Chapter 2, "Typification and Standardization: Stavoprojekt and the Transformation of Architectural Practice," underscores the book's title Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity. In the early post-Communist period architects were told that their final product would be "a manufacturing plan of a building" rather than a completed project...