![]() | Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 Subjects: Architecture Domestic -- Czechoslovakia -- History -- 20th century; Architecture Domestic -- Political aspects -- Czechoslovakia -- History -- 20th century; Architecture and state -- Czechoslovakia -- History -- 20th century; Dwellings -- Czechoslovakia; Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. Kimberly Elman Zarecor is assistant professor of architecture at Iowa State University. |
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