Publication details
International inspirations and influences in Czechoslovak post-war architecture and urbanism (1946-1965)
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper aims to analyse international connections and the inspirations from abroad that Czechoslovak architects and urbanists searched and adopted in their own work and in various projects of post-war urban development between 1948 (after the Coupe de Prague) and 1968. It responds to academic work that has emerged in the past five years and that deals with contacts and exchanges between socialist/Soviet architecture and planning and the practice outside the ‘Eastern bloc’ (e.g. Cook et al. 2014; Ward et al. 2013; Ward 2012; Stanek 2012), and it also develops my previous work (Ferenčuhová 2011; Ferenčuhová, manuscript). Based on analysis of expert magazines on architecture published at the time (Architektura CSSR), as well as of specific projects, it shows that architects working in socialist Czechoslovakia referred to and used ideas and models developed abroad. They searched models to follow or get inspiration both in other socialist countries and Soviet Union, and in the ‘Western’ world. The paper considers especially three questions, that is – where/in which countries and contexts information/models were searched; what kind of information was used (theoretical ideas including those on social role of architecture; technological know-how; aesthetic models); and how this information was incorporated into projects prepared in Czechoslovakia. The argument of the paper is that during these two decades of intense urban (re)construction the strategies of searching, using and presenting models from abroad varied importantly. While in 1950s ‘Western’ models and pre-war modernist theories were officially refused, urbanist models from Soviet Union were adopted and exchanges with Soviet colleagues were established, the decade of the 1960s was characterised by renewing connections ‘with the West’ and adopting models observed there, and by denying the approaches to architecture and urbanism of the previous decade. The paper brings examples of this. |