Postmodernism or Socialist Realism? The Architecture of Housing Estates in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia

MAROS KRIVY

摘要

The encounter with postmodernism made late socialist architects attentive to the urban living environment, meaningful images, existential spaces, and architectural and urbanistic archetypes. In Czechoslovakia the postmodern program of stylistic plurality and eclecticism was taken up in a metaphysical sense. It legitimated a historico-phenom-enological turn to streets, blocks, and communicative facades that sought to renew a sense of place and urbanity in the sidliste. Jan Bahna argued in 1985 that "we are afraid of ... folklore and romanticism, of bolder artistic expression in general. ... Overcoming this fear of history and national identity... is the only way toward architecture as a materialized conception of home." Bahna's advocacy of traditions and domesticity implied a critique of universal and utopian attitudes in architecture. The turn to history and meaning was emphatically anti-utopian, and its proponents were proud of it. As Jiri Sevcik put it: "Today's architecture ... is a revival of all revivals.... Inhabiting the whole space of history in a concrete place is in our opinion more authentic and moral. The historicity of postmodernism returns to the past without a priori ideological constructs and the safe compromises of a road secured in advance." He equated "democratic" and "nonutopian attitude[s]" and claimed that contemporary architecture questioned the exalted ambitions of modernism to redeem society. He asserted, "Today's revival of revivals follows 'lower' objectives, and it wants man to be able to live amid contradictions." Postmodernists wanted to trade politics, Utopian thinking, and ideology for concrete places ostensibly free from these influences. The historicity of the Czech and Slovak postmodernists was in many respects similar to Jiri Kroha's philosophy of thirty years earlier. At the height of the socialist realist breakthrough, Kroha urged architects to draw upon "vibrant works of traditional architecture" and "national and popular attitudes without effacing thei vivacity and inexhaustible diversity." Later, Sevcik and Bahna, situated on the institutional margins and deliberately not engaged with questions of Marxist aesthetics, shared with the Communist hard-liner Kroha a commitment to imbue architecture with historical meaning. A similar program was simultaneously advanced by neo-socialist realists in the core institutional segments of the discipline. Postmodernist and neo-socialist realist historicity diverged, however, in their conception of how history and freedom were related. For the postmodernists history was an unedited repertoire of archetypes and a reservoir of transcendental memory. Postmodern designs advanced negative freedom, freedom from the sidliste model, while advancing the principles of boundedness, interaction, and expressiveness without a specific social content. Postmodernism traded concrete history for concrete places. Neo-socialist realism held to a dialectical conception of historicity, in which the turn to history and ideology-including the return to socialist realism-sought to resolve the painful limits of the bureaucratic-functionalist model of the sidliste. At the same time, it held to positive freedoms, maintaining that the universal right to housing, as it was embodied in the sidliste of the 1960s, should be expanded to include the right to a high-quality living environment. This conception manifested most clearly in relation to architectural industrialization and typification. The socialist realism of the 1950s put the industrialization of architecture second to ideological questions. The functionalism of the 1960s put ideological questions second to the industrialization of architecture. Neo-socialist realism, arguing for a reformed, more flexible form of typification, attempted to resolve this contradiction by recovering the role of ideology and meaning in architecture while retaining its industrialized component. It was a way of giving architects a say in how the construction industry operated. By contrast, the postmodernist turn to historical meaning in Czechoslovakia was eventually a way of liberating architecture from its subjection to the centrally operated construction industry. This discussion of late socialist architects has identified some parallels and tensions between postmodernism and neo-socialist realism. If Dulla built formal bridges between the two, the case of Bauer's canopy exposed the limits of design divorced from the questions of typification and industrialization. Holzel pioneered a distinctive sidliste environment built around a pedestrian promenade but eventually renounced efforts to reform typification. The architects in Bratislava applied color to articulate but also to disguise the facades of panelak buildings. And Sevcik, advocating courtyards and semipublic spaces, construed boundedness as the archetypal quality of existential space but failed to observe how this quality had been concretely determined throughout history. Is the nineteenth-century perimeter block defined by a bourgeois or a working-class boundedness? Is the boundedness of the socialist realist block the same as the boundedness of the late socialist block? Paradoxically, it was Oberstein-who was neither neo-socialist realist nor postmodernist-who created the most interesting example of a late socialist housing estate at Jihozapadni Mesto. Oberstein was perhaps the most successful in juggling ideology and industrialization. His superblock recovered historical meaning and semipublic space for the sidliste but also avoided resorting to the pre-industrial nostalgia of the perimeter block. The superblock was made possible by Oberstein's active intervention in the system of typification and the introduction of two corner segment types. Oberstein's interest in place and its historical meaning manifested in the reform of typification rather than in a wish to eradicate industrialization of architecture as such. Oberstein's intervention was limited, but it sustained an architectural momentum in which the concern for place and the aspiration to be socially relevant were not mutually exclusive. In other words, the quality of the living environment and the quantitative question of how this quality should be socially and spatially distributed-the question that was at the crux of late socialist typification-were not divorced from each other, as they were in other postmodernist projects. As critic Otakar Novy presciently pointed out in 1984, postmodernism correctly criticized the ossification of postwar functionalism and identified the crisis of industrialized architecture, but it was ultimately uninterested in the betterment of society. In late socialist Czechoslovakia postmodernism recovered sociability but also commerce, boundedness but also privatism, articulation but also dissimulation. It espoused historical meaning but renounced architecture's social role. The question for future research remains whether the late socialist historico-phenomenological revival of the sidliste also contributed to its postsocialist demise.

机译：后现代主义的遭遇使已故的社会主义建筑师对城市生活环境，有意义的图像，存在空间以及建筑和城市主义原型产生了关注。在捷克斯洛伐克，从形而上学的角度出发，采用了后现代的风格多元化和折衷主义方案。它使历史，现象学，生态学转向街道，街区和交往的外墙合法化，从而试图重新塑造锡德斯特里的地方感和都市感。扬·巴赫纳（Jan Bahna）于1985年提出：“我们担心……民俗和浪漫主义，总体而言会表现出更大胆的艺术表达……克服对历史和民族认同的恐惧……是将建筑作为物化概念的唯一途径家。”巴赫纳（Bahna）对传统和家庭生活的提倡暗示了对建筑普遍和乌托邦态度的批评。历史和意义的转向着重于反乌托邦，它的支持者为此感到自豪。正如吉里·塞维克（Jiri Sevcik）所说：“今天的建筑……是所有复兴的复兴……。在一个具体的地方居住整个历史空间在我们看来是更加真实和道德的。后现代主义的历史性回到了过去，而没有先验的思想构想和道路安全的预先妥协。”他将“民主”和“非空想的态度”等同起来，并声称当代建筑质疑现代主义崇高的救赎野心。他断言：“今天复兴的复兴遵循'更低'的目标，它希望人能够在矛盾中生存。”后现代主义者想用政治，乌托邦思想和意识形态来换取具体地方，这些地方表面上不受这些影响。捷克和斯洛伐克后现代主义者的历史性在许多方面类似于三十年前吉里·克鲁哈（Jiri Kroha）的哲学。在社会主义现实主义突破的高峰期，克罗哈敦促建筑师借鉴“传统建筑的活力”和“民族和大众的态度，而又不损害其活力和取之不尽的多样性”。后来，塞维克（Sevcik）和巴赫纳（Bahna）站在机构边缘，故意不参与马克思主义美学的问题，与共产主义强硬派克罗哈（Kroha）共同致力于使建筑具有历史意义。新社会主义现实主义者在该学科的核心制度领域同时提出了类似的计划。但是，后现代主义和新社会主义现实主义的历史性在关于历史与自由之间的关系上存在分歧。对于后现代主义者而言，历史是原型的未编辑曲目，也是超前记忆的库。后现代设计提出了消极的自由，摆脱了锡德主义模式，而在没有特定社会内容的情况下提出了有界，互动和表达的原则。后现代主义将具体的历史换成了具体的地方。新社会主义现实主义坚持历史性的辩证概念，其中转向历史和意识形态，包括回归社会主义现实主义，旨在解决西德利斯特的官僚功能主义模型的痛苦局限。同时，它坚持积极自由，坚持应将1960年代sidliste中体现的普遍住房权扩大到包括享有高质量生活环境的权利。这一概念在建筑工业化和典型化方面表现得最为明显。 1950年代的社会主义现实主义将建筑的工业化置于意识形态问题的第二位。 1960年代的功能主义将意识形态问题置于建筑的工业化之后。新社会主义现实主义主张改革，更灵活的典型化形式，试图通过恢复意识形态和意义在建筑中的作用，同时保留其工业化成分来解决这一矛盾。这是一种让建筑师对建筑行业如何运作有发言权的方式。相比之下，捷克斯洛伐克的后现代主义者转向历史意义，最终是将建筑从其主体解放到集中经营的建筑业的一种方式。对已故社会主义建筑师的讨论确定了后现代主义与新社会主义现实主义之间的某些相似之处和张力。如果杜拉在两者之间建立起正式的桥梁，那么鲍尔的天篷案例暴露了设计的局限性，而设计的局限性与典型性和工业化问题背道而驰。霍尔泽（Holzel）开创了围绕步行长廊的独特的sidliste环境，但最终放弃了改革典型的努力。布拉迪斯拉发的建筑师运用颜色进行表达，但也掩饰了Panelak建筑物的外墙。还有Sevcik，崇尚庭院和半公共空间认为有界性是生存空间的原型质量，但未能观察到这种质量在整个历史中是如何具体确定的。是19世纪的边界块是由资产阶级或工人阶级界定的？社会主义现实主义障碍的界限与晚期社会主义障碍的界限一样吗？矛盾的是，既不是新社会主义现实主义者也不是后现代主义者的奥伯施泰因（Oberstein）创造了吉霍扎帕德尼·梅斯托（Jihozapadni Mesto）已故社会主义住房最有趣的例子。奥伯施泰因（Oberstein）可能是在思想和工业化方面最成功的。他的超级街区恢复了锡德莱斯特人的历史意义和半公共空间，但也避免了对周边街区的工业化怀旧之情。 Oberstein在典型系统中的积极干预和两种边角段类型的引入使超级街区成为可能。奥伯斯坦对地方的兴趣及其历史意义体现在典型化的改革中，而不是希望消除建筑本身的工业化。奥伯施泰因（Oberstein）的干预是有限的，但它保持了建筑上的势头，在这种动能中，对场所的关注和与社会相关的愿望并非相互排斥。换句话说，生活环境的质量以及如何在社会和空间上分配这种质量的定量问题-这个问题是社会主义后期典型化的症结所在-并没有像其他后现代主义者那样彼此分离。项目。正如批评家Otakar Novy在1984年预先指出的那样，后现代主义正确地批评了战后功能主义的僵化并确定了工业化建筑的危机，但最终对社会的改善不感兴趣。在后期的社会主义捷克斯洛伐克，后现代主义恢复了社交能力，也恢复了商业能力，有限度也恢复了私有主义，清晰地表达了同时又是一种sim贬。它具有历史意义，但放弃了建筑的社会角色。锡迪尔主义者的晚期社会主义历史现象学复兴是否也促进了其后社会主义的灭亡，这仍是未来研究的问题。

Postmodernism or Socialist Realism? The Architecture of Housing Estates in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia

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