Category: Scientific Study

The socialist period in Poland and other states in Central and Eastern Europe was associated with the country’s planned industrialisation and urbanisation. The effect of such a policy was the progressive development of urban areas, especially large cities, and an increase in the concentration of population in their area. This growth was fostered by the […]

Solving the Housing Crisis in Interwar Košice
Examples of Social Housing for the Unemployed and Impoverished

Even prior to the First World War, the challenging or indeed catastrophic housing situation in Košice was a regular topic of discussion in the city’s press. The war years, followed by the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic, threw the city into an entirely new reality, yet still […]

The Synagogue in Trenčín and Its Authors
A Transformation of Architectural Traditions through Modernity

The synagogue in Trenčín is one of the most important examples of synagogue or sacral architecture of the early 20th century in Slovakia, but also of the architecture of this period in the wider Central European region. As a result, it is mentioned in many texts, though its published information differs in many ways. In […]

The Healthcare Policy of the First Czechoslovak Republic
The Case of Uzhhorod

After Subcarpathian Ruthenia became part of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1919, the government faced numerous challenges in the development of the healthcare system in the region and its capital. The paper aims to examine the impact of the Republic’s legislative framework and the peculiarities of Uzhhorod’s needs on priorities in the construction and, in […]

Preservation Issues of Architecture from the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Late Modernist architectural works are confronted with an ambivalent situation between heritage acknowledgement and physical destruction. The text aims to explain the growing interest in their protection as a natural evolution of monument preservation, yet simultaneously questions the effectiveness of current procedures regarding the specifics of the given architecture. The Mäusebunker case study illustrates an […]

Polish Modernism’s Essentialist Claim
The Hansens and Open Form Architecture

This paper traces the continuities between the post-war Polish husband-and-wife architect duo of Oskar and Zofia Hansen, and their predecessors from the interwar avant-garde, the husband-and-wife artist duo of painter Władysław Strzemiński and sculptor Katarzyna Kobro. It argues that the Hansens’ Open Form (1958) approach extended the essentialism of Strzemiński and Kobro’s theory of Unism […]

Exclusive Histories, Unseen Narratives

The canon is generally understood as a body of the most important personalities and key works in a particular field, and for various reasons it evokes an impression of objectivity and impartiality. But is it really objective, or does it exclude someone or something? The study provides a critical reflection on the principles of the […]

Tirana: Its History and a Post-Socialist Perspective on Urban Growth and Transformation between 1991–2016

This paper examines Tirana’s urbanization process from a socio-morphological perspective. It presents a quick understanding on how Tirana came to be a town, and then how it became the capital of Albania in 1920. This material reflects on different urban interventions that the city has undergone in different social settings and political influences, displaying these […]

Let it Sprawl: Post-Socialist Policies Enabling Suburbanization

Suburbanization processes in the hinterland of Bratislava represent one of the most significant socio-spatial transformations in the post-socialist history of Slovakia. The trend of settlement decentralisation within the dynamically growing metropolitan region contrasts in many ways with the settlement development of the period of state socialism, during which centrally controlled and planned settlement transformation and […]

From Housing Estate to City?
Karviná and the Plans for a New Centre in the Karviná-Hranice Housing Estate Post-1989

The city of Karviná is an example of the process in which the meaning of a settlement changes over time, from economic and social ascent to a decreasing attraction. City development is continuously influenced by individual interventions, both planned and accidental, which can estimate and predict future developments only to a limited extent. We can […]

Foregrounding of Individual Lots in Zagreb – From Sensible Critique Towards Rampant Speculation

In the 1980s, in parallel to the decline of large-scale planning, a local critique of modernist urbanism came to dominate the planning discourse in Zagreb, one that sought to implement strategies of urban regeneration on the omnipresent strata of persisting agricultural lots, and would soon be inscribed as the guiding ethos in the last socialist […]

The Role of Open Spaces in Restructuring the Cerak Vinogradi Housing Estate in Belgrade

The paper’s subject examines the role of open spaces in restructuring the Cerak Vinogradi housing estate, planned and built in Belgrade in period 1977-1985. The paper provides a historical comparative analysis with an overview of spatial processes on the one hand and social processes on the other through identification of the role of open spaces […]

Tracing the Housing Frontline: The Post-Socialist Legacy of Housing Policies in Bucharest during the 1970s–1980s

During the 1970s and 1980s, the construction of large housing complexes in Romania, particularly in the capital city of Bucharest, reached its peak as a result of urban systematization policies. The impact of built densification in those decades can be measured on the socio-economic scale of consequences after the 1990s, less in terms of architectural […]

The Anatomy of Privatization: The Genealogy and Practice of Postsocialist Transformation of Housing in Bratislava

The general story of ECE cities in the era of transformation is well known. What began in the course of the 1980s as an endeavour to make cities more liveable, humane and ecological, ended up in a massive privatization at some point in the 1990s. Mostly this development has been explained by social geographers, sociologists […]

The Parks of Culture and Leisure in Prague and Bratislava: The Story of a Transition

The article will focus on a critical re-evaluation of approaches to the city in the period of late normalization; especially on the new ethos that took place in the professional community as a result of postmodern ideas coming from Western Europe, but also thanks to the extremely negative experience of the highly modernist industrialization of […]

The Return to the City towards the End of the Normalisation Period

Does Postmodern Mean Capitalist? On Postmodernism and the Planned Economy in Poland and the German Democratic Republic

Does postmodern mean capitalist? This article aims at providing an answer to this question by comparing postmodernism in two socialist contexts: the People’s Republic of Poland, where in the 1980s the planned economy was progressively eroding and postmodern architecture was mostly sponsored by non-state clients (private individuals, small housing cooperatives and the Catholic Church), and […]

Rusovce Manor House and Its Neo-Gothic Rebuilding. New Findings from Artistic and Archival Materials

The theme of the study is the manor house in Rusovce, near Bratislava, built in the neo-Gothic style, designed by a prominent Austrian architect working in noble circles in the monarchy, Franz Beer (1804 – 1861). Between 1841 and 1846, a radical reconstruction of the manor in the neo-Gothic style was carried out, commissioned by […]

Historical Evolution and Contemporary Examples of Hungarian Social Housing

There is a lack of a housing system based on common social responsibility in Hungary. There were attempts to create wider social housing system after democratic transition, but the lack of coherent social support a comprehensive system has not able to be established. The small number of new social housing projects were completed in an […]

From Agricultural Village to Socialist Industrial Town

Town of Strážske has gained recent attention because of heavy contamination with PCBs produced in Chemko Strážske, which was established in August 1952. Since then, small village in region of Upper Zemplín in eastern Slovakia had experienced a rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. Promising economic development quickly led to migration of builders and future factory workers […]

Analyzing contemporary image of the Olympic city Sarajevo: Modalities, Meanings and Negotiations

This work examines the visual identity of the city of Sarajevo, the host city of the XIV Winter Olympic Games 1984. It aims to question the role of the Olympic signs and symbols today, which do not solely exist as just visual interpretations but are set in the context of meaning – systems in a […]

Architecting Nature: The Pastoral Genre in Art Museum Design

How often do we get conscious of the fact that the function of art in general, and in relation to architectural space in particular, was dramatically changing throughout the course of history? And how is the consciousness of this historical transformative process relevant for the cultural and architectural discourse on museums and their architecture today? […]

“For Us, It Was a New and Difficult Task”: Czechoslovak Embassy Buildings in the 1918–1939 Period and the Construction of State Representation