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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Hatherley, Owen, author.

Title Landscapes of Communism : a history through buildings / Owen Hatherley.

Publication Info. [London] : Allen Lane, 2015.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (612 pages) : illustrations
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 537-564) and index.
Summary 'In the craven world of architectural criticism Hatherley is that rarest of things: a brave, incisive, elegant and erudite writer, whose books dissect the contemporary built environment to reveal the political fantasies and social realities it embodies' Will Self During the course of the twentieth century, communism took power in Eastern Europe and remade the city in its own image. Ransacking the urban planning of the grand imperial past, it set out to transform everyday life, its sweeping boulevards, epic high-rise and vast housing estates an emphatic declaration of a non-capitalist idea. Now, the regimes that built them are dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to post-Revolution Kiev, the buildings, their most obvious legacy, remain, populated by people whose lives were scattered and jeopardized by the collapse of communism and the introduction of capitalism. Landscapes of Communism is an intimate history of twentieth-century communist Europe told through its buildings; it is, too, a book about power, and what power does in cities. In exploring what that power was, Hatherley shows how much we can understand from surfaces - especially states as obsessed with surface as the Soviets were. Walking through these landscapes today, Hatherley discovers how, in contrast to the common dismissal of 'monolithic' Soviet architecture, these cities reflect with disconcerting transparency the development of an idea over the decades, with its sharp, sudden zigzags of official style: from modernism to classicism and back; to the superstitious despotic rococo of high Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces and secret policemen's castles; East Germany's obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went further than any avant garde ever dared. But most of all, Landscapes of Communism is a revelatory journey of discovery, plunging us into the maelstrom of socialist architecture. As we submerge into the metros, walk the massive, multi-lane magistrale and pause at milk bars in the microrayons, who knows what we might find?
Contents 1. Magistrale -- 2. Microrayon -- 3. Social Condenser -- 4. High Building -- 5. Metro -- 6. Reconstruction -- 7. Improvisation -- 8. Memorial.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Architecture -- Europe, Eastern -- History.
Architecture.
Eastern Europe.
History.
Architecture -- Political aspects -- Europe, Eastern -- History -- 20th century.
Architecture -- Political aspects.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject Communism and architecture -- Europe, Eastern -- History.
Communism and architecture.
City planning -- Europe, Eastern -- History -- 20th century.
City planning.
Land use, Urban -- Europe, Eastern -- History -- 20th century.
Land use, Urban.
Architecture and society -- Europe, Eastern.
Architecture and society.
Chronological Term 1900-1999
Genre/Form Electronic books.
History.
Other Form: Print version: Hatherley, Owen. Landscapes of Communism 9781846147685 (DLC) 2014482570 (OCoLC)913788584
ISBN 9780141975900 (electronic book)
0141975903 (electronic book)
9781620971895 (electronic book)
1620971895 (electronic book)
9781846147685
1846147689