Books in Brief: Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History

Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History, by Anders Aman (MIT, 285 pp., $35)

THE Iron Curtain, Professor Aman reminds us, was an architectural metaphor, and Stalin the Ozymandias of its design. Today, with the victory monuments stripped of their tanks, and statues of the Great Leader everywhere disassembled, what mostly remain are the grand civic projects of socialism’s failed international style. Aman does an admirable job of tracing the style’s evolution through postwar Eastern Europe’s reconstruction—the new cities and steelworks, the dwellings and “houses of culture.” Classicism and Modernism (the Latin and Esperanto of architecture, in Aman’s memorable phrase) were more and then less esteemed by the theorists of socialist realism, who rebuilt their countries rapidly and always with an eye to the changing winds in Moscow. This is a thorough if dry work, of greatest interest to specialists, but the general reader will nevertheless be absorbed by the many illustrations of monuments no longer extant and buildings under new management. My favorite: A Bulgarian hotel whose sign once read, “Proletarians in all countries, unite!” The sign is now simpler: “Sheraton Sofia.”

MC

About the Author

M. D. Carnegie

Featured Tags

Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History, by Anders Aman (MIT, 285 pp., $35)

THE Iron Curtain, Professor Aman reminds us, was an architectural metaphor, and Stalin the Ozymandias of its design. Today, with the victory monuments stripped of their tanks, and statues of the Great Leader everywhere disassembled, what mostly remain are the grand civic projects of socialism’s failed international style. Aman does an admirable job of tracing the style’s evolution through postwar Eastern Europe’s reconstruction—the new cities and steelworks, the dwellings and “houses of culture.” Classicism and Modernism (the Latin and Esperanto of architecture, in Aman’s memorable phrase) were more and then less esteemed by the theorists of socialist realism, who rebuilt their countries rapidly and always with an eye to the changing winds in Moscow. This is a thorough if dry work, of greatest interest to specialists, but the general reader will nevertheless be absorbed by the many illustrations of monuments no longer extant and buildings under new management. My favorite: A Bulgarian hotel whose sign once read, “Proletarians in all countries, unite!” The sign is now simpler: “Sheraton Sofia.”