JAN WOLLNER: UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

A2 / Future Architectures Platform at @UMPRUM invites to the lecture by architectural historian Jan Wollner, framed within Universities for Climate strike. Lecture will be held in English an followed by a discussion moderated by the students.

 

Utopian architecture in East-Central Europe

Utopian imagination, accelerated by technological progress in the 1960s, resulted in radical architectural projects. Besides proposing new architectural forms, authors of these projects also anticipated structural changes of society. They challenged population growth, leisure-work ratio, geopolitical order, and even planet Earth as a "human condition". In a visually-based lecture on utopian architecture in East-Central Europe, I will screen many images. They are only a narrow selection of a vast scope of utopian projects though, chosen according to their relevance to building socialist statehood and society. I will cover the period from the late 1950s till the fall of Communism and by mentioning examples from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, GDR and the Soviet Union, I will try to point at various versions and phases of socialist society represented by architectural designs.