On the estate: Somewhat defeats cliches about "urban decay" |
In both our guidebooks the huge
residential district of Prague 4 is described as a
"wilderness of panelaks". In terms of sheer numbers, they're right. Nonetheless the coincidence of metaphor is telling. Why, when talking about a completely artificial domestic environment, is 'wilderness' thought appropriate? Echoes of the concrete jungle? Well, we're a long way from Brooklyn. 'Wilderness' suggests verdant spectacle, energy and wonder, not the anonymity and obvious architectural conformity of the socialist housing estate. We wouldn't even describe most European forests as wildernesses. It's a bit like me calling my underwear a loin cloth, which frankly it isn't. It's from Primark.
Panelak, strictly speaking,
refers to any pre-fab housing slotted together from panels of
concrete. It is a phenomenon that had its genesis in the interwar
republic, but the archetypal
panelak dates from after the end of World War II. An image richly
associated with the former socialist bloc is that of the grey fourteen storey
monolith, assaulted by sleety winds in the midst of some post-feudal abyss. The
enduringly popular Russian TV film Irony of Fate
has some of the most magnificent, snowy footage of these beasts.
Indeed, so indistinguishable are the Russian blocks that the film's
central romantic conceit is premised on a man's ability to walk
into a woman's flat and believe it's his own. However, the phenomenon
of pre-fab housing doesn't entirely coincide with this more colossal image. It's also worth recalling, when scanning images of
condemned or failing housing blocks in eastern Europe, that the West's dalliance with futurism led to similarly grand social
experiments at perhaps greater social cost.
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Poster for The Irony of Fate (1976), Ryazanov |
Click here to see the full movie with English subs:
To what extent is
it possible, even desirable, today to disentangle eastern Europe's pre-fab housing from its web of grizzly connotations? For Eric Dluhosch, professor of architecture at MiT, the urban environment of the Czech Republic is "the exact antithesis"
of the "utopia of collective dwelling" and "one of the
most depressing collections of banality" ever built in the Czech
lands. A familiar criticism, and not one without some justification.
If their supposed redeeming grace was their very utilitarianism -
that is, the elevation of the ability to 'get the job done' relative
to any aesthetic considerations - many fail on even that score.
Shoddy design combines with shoddy building work. Everything is at
once half-mended and half-broken, stranded in a state of partly functioning limbo, the victim of an infernal cycle of ad hoc repairs. But the imagined doom of urban Czechs masks a more
variegated story, which actually contains some limited successes.
A Socialist Butlin's
Our 'hood |
A Socialist Butlin's
Blocks retreat behind greenery |
All Mod Cons
Panelaks
make up the larger part of the Czech housing stock, and therefore
embody the idea of home for a great many. Their dismissal as
aesthetic banalities and environmental and social bludgeons is rooted
in two tendencies, themselves incorporated in a certain type of sympathetic western arrogance: the first emphasises the general
cultural and social impoverishment of 'the East' along with its
'stunted' economic development; the second is aesthetically
disdainful of any architecture besides that representing pre-modern
imperial spectacle. Thus while mammoth housing estates are ugly
blights, no one questions the right to existence of the endless
country manors that dot the Czech and Slovak landscapes, if only for
their sheer opulence. These tendencies feed the condescension of a
west European audience eager to discover the eccentricities of the
former socialist bloc. The same tendencies have spawned irreverent museums to Communism across the land. This phenomenon, in turn, compounds the feeling of marginalization that comes from having a
globally fawned over historical city centre tucked in the embrace of
a vast patchwork of prosaic residential and business districts. Many
Czechs now accept without complaint that Prague's city centre is a
no-go area.
It is in fact unfair to say that the only areas
of interest for visitors to Prague are the Hradčany
(Castle District), Malá Strana (Little
Quarter) and Staré Město (Old
Town). Functionalism and Cubism, as inter-war architectural forms
peculiar to Central Europe, are amply exemplified, and have been duly
celebrated, outside of the tourist hub (although the most significant
example of the latter is deemed to be U
Černé Matky Boží
in Staré Město,
a number of private houses in Prague 6 are also good examples, while
the best example of Czech formalism is the Veletržní
Palac across the
river in Holešovice). However, the "spirit of modernity" evidenced in
functionalism and cubism is usually celebrated as part of an
irretrievably lost world, which only briefly came up for air before the
fall of the great European shadow. This heralded a "half-century
of darkness," according to architect and journalist Stephan
Templ: "The end of the modern era."
If a
central concern of central European intellectuals has been the region's premature withdrawal from the progress of modern, liberal Europe (the 'Great March' as Milan Kundera calls it), another focus has
been a more amorphous dread of the "iron cage" of total
bureaucratic administration. Both are grounded in an anxiety about
the modern, even if they contradict one another in the direction of their fears.
The former mourns the absence of 'sophisticated', modern consciousness (a la
the West); the latter despairs
at the encroachment of a very modern, rationalised mode of
administration. Recall Kafka's The Castle:
an ignorant, staid Bohemian village is cowed by a Hapsburgian
monolithic state, at once mystical and bureaucratically
domineering. Meanwhile, the fear of a
transformation of artistic production into a mere
technical practice pervades attitudes to panelak
suburbia. For the central European intellectual, modernity threatened to extinguish the creativity and independence of the artist (a trope uniting such diverse thinkers and writers as Kafka, Max Weber, Heidegger, and Adorno). Immediately after the war, the utopia of socialist
housing wasn't feared for its grotesque inefficiencies and failings,
but precisely for its (potentially) extraordinary success.
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Karel Teige, Collage no.26, 1936: surrealism meets functionalism |
Karel Tiege: Surrealism Meets Functionalism on the Estate
Karel Tiege, the star of Czech functionalism, can be seen as a bridge between pre- and postwar ideas about the social function of architecture. For Tiege the monumentalism of Le Corbusier merely reproduced old bourgeois values in different forms. Tiege started out advocating a synthesis of everyday pleasures and architectural utilitarianism - a functionalism of desires. The scale would be modest, human and, therefore, the project itself attentive to real needs. Yet he was simultaneously an articulate proponent of modernist innovation, particularly of the "metaphysics of space" of formalism. He was at home with both conctructivism and le Corbusier, thus attaining a rare status: a politically radical, left wing modernist whose ideological and aesthetic commitments were at once materialist and experimental; utilitarian and sublime. Such were the contradictory tendencies at play in the central European intellectual world of the time. What perhaps marks Tiege out from his peers is the way he reversed the cultural tendency towards social pessimism. It is hard to imagine, say, Weber or Adorno basing a utopia of collective housing on the notion of "poetism" - a slightly hippyish expression of the desire to connect "love and evil" to everyday living spaces. Tiege's optimism was expressed in the hope for a dialectical fusion, or at least transplant, of the antagonistic relationship between art and technology so dreaded by the pessimistic central European intellect:
Constructivism
wanted to overcome the dualism between art and technology and
simplified its task by reducing art to a new technical craft...
Architecture remains a sphere that belongs both to material and
spiritual culture.1
Surely,
then, it was architecture that possessed the unique facility to
overcome this separation, and to celebrate technical production as a
free cultural practice, no longer governed by the blighting laws
imposed on it by the logics of capitalist accumulation and surplus
realisation? Architecture, in a new social order, would be the
expression of a "synthesis" of "technological,
sociological and psychological factors of life."2
Such attempts to dodge technical rationality through abstraction,
through recourse to a marvelous vision implemented by enlightened artists, are profoundly
vulnerable to distortion. Tiege did not live to see the imposition of
the pre-fab phenomenon on the Czech lands, but the irony of a
centralized, bureaucratic state embarking on massive building
projects; a brutalized, authoritarian version of his own humanist
vision, might not have escaped him. Socialist utilitarianism in fact
expresses a vapid metaphysical formalism - identical blocks designed
to be infinitely reproducible anywhere, any time. Tiege's grand
synthesis of a materialism of desires and an experimental
metaphysics of design would be supplanted, once the Communists gained power, by the bare utility of needs and an infinitely
reproducible, one-size-fits-all design (Tiege, despite being a vocal supporter of the Communist Party, was silenced following the establishment of a Stalinist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia). While the West went on to
produce doomed monuments to the future in the sky, it was the
socialist Bloc that ventured down the road of pure, plastic consumption. The
result was a depressingly monotonous landscape. But one hardly devoid
of its own, peculiar resonances.
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Suburbs of Fear by Karel Koplimet |
Invisible Threats
Suburbs of Fear (exhibited in Tallinn in 2012) by Estonian artist Karel Koplimet captures perfectly the hidden malice of a typical housing estate. First, the viewer is met with a scale model of a typical estate, which sits on a platform in the centre of a darkened room. It is lit by model street lamps. An uninhabited park sits at the rear of two housing blocks. Videoed cars fly by in silhouette, intermittently lighting up the whole set. A series of tiny cameras records images from the estate, which are then projected in black and white onto a screen in an adjacent room. Somehow the partial reality of the model estate is transformed on screen into a sinister nocturnal world. As the projector cuts between images from different cameras, the play of shadows created by the street lights causes irregular, angular blind-spots to emerge: places where nameless, unidentifiable enemies lurk. Our eyes are drawn to flashes of light, the occasional flicker of a passing car, the distorted shadows of tree branches. Though no people are strictly visible, there are hidden presences everywhere. We imbue the shadows with life. Even the so-called "rational environment"of the contemporary housing estate accrues nightmarish libidinal fixations on the part of its inhabitants.
Suburbs of Fear (exhibited in Tallinn in 2012) by Estonian artist Karel Koplimet captures perfectly the hidden malice of a typical housing estate. First, the viewer is met with a scale model of a typical estate, which sits on a platform in the centre of a darkened room. It is lit by model street lamps. An uninhabited park sits at the rear of two housing blocks. Videoed cars fly by in silhouette, intermittently lighting up the whole set. A series of tiny cameras records images from the estate, which are then projected in black and white onto a screen in an adjacent room. Somehow the partial reality of the model estate is transformed on screen into a sinister nocturnal world. As the projector cuts between images from different cameras, the play of shadows created by the street lights causes irregular, angular blind-spots to emerge: places where nameless, unidentifiable enemies lurk. Our eyes are drawn to flashes of light, the occasional flicker of a passing car, the distorted shadows of tree branches. Though no people are strictly visible, there are hidden presences everywhere. We imbue the shadows with life. Even the so-called "rational environment"of the contemporary housing estate accrues nightmarish libidinal fixations on the part of its inhabitants.
1Tiege,
The Minimum Dwelling, 27
2ibid.,
28