Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 by Kimberly Elman Zarecor (review)

The modern movement in twentieth-century architecture has an uneasy relationship with state socialism. The standard historical narrative sees in the emergence of Communist regimes in Europe the death of the interwar avant-garde. This happened first in Russia, where the eager participation of modernists like Ernst May and Le Corbusier in Soviet building projects of the 1920s and early 1930s famously gave way in 1932 to disillusionment following the decision to award Boris Iofan’s neoclassical tower the first prize in the Palace of Soviets competition. The notion that state socialism had by 1932 turned its back on the modern movement has made its way into a historiography that draws a sharp line between modernism and socialist realism, between the lost hopes of the avant-garde and an architectural practice dominated and determined by Communist Party functionaries.¹ In the history of Communist Eastern Europe, the ties between interwar modernism and postwar architecture are further complicated by the emergence of Cold War dichotomies that located modernism squarely in the camp of the “West,” in opposition to Nazi and Soviet design practices collectively dubbed “totalitarian.”

The separation between the architectural histories of East and West is curious given the international commonalities of postwar design, particularly in the area of vernacular architecture. In the decades after 1945, socialist and capitalist living spaces would increasingly come to resemble one another, often in appearance but also in the use of common building methods and similar design solutions. The near universal embrace in the postwar period of new industrial materials and the sudden ubiquity of experiments in prefabrication and standardization suggest a common history in the everyday architecture of East and West. That the assembly-line-inspired building methods used by Levitt & Sons in their Levittown projects were so similar to postwar experiments by Czechoslovak architects in what they called “flow construction” (259–60) gives strong reason to rethink the usual historical divisions between modernism and state socialism and to retell the history of twentieth-century vernacular architecture from a variety of geographical and political locations. Kimberly Elman Zarecor’s book is a welcome contribution to the study of the widespread use in the postwar period of prefabricated and standardized construction.

Zarecor provides a refreshingly nuanced interpretation of the relationship between modern design, industrialized housing, and state socialism in her book Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960. In this history of housing—the building type most often evoked in hackneyed descriptions of the failures of socialist design—Zarecor reveals that Czechoslovak architects working during the period of state socialism were deeply influenced by the ideas and lessons of interwar modernism. In five rich and wonderfully illustrated chapters, Zarecor describes the transformation of the Czechoslovak building industry after World War II. She follows the country’s architectural profession from the end of the Nazi occupation and the start of the Košice Program in 1945 through a transitional period up to the Communist takeover in 1948 to the nationalization of the building industry in the late 1940s to the Soviet Union’s more forceful attempts to impose socialist realism on Eastern Europe from 1950 to 1955. In her final chapter Zarecor considers the simultaneous development of industrialized construction and prefabrication techniques, which came to dominate the building industry in Czechoslovakia and, more broadly, in the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the end of the Communist period.

Zarecor’s sources include architectural journals and architects’ personal papers as well as state and administrative archival documents, making Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity as much a discussion of developments in housing as a history of the Czechoslovak architectural profession and its institutions. While her work contributes a great deal to broader discussions on the relationship between architects and Communist parties in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after 1945, Zarecor is careful to emphasize the particularities...