striated space versus refuge sites

out-of-body experiences
an interpretation  of  the modern architecture in the fifties and sixties
(the research was made possible by the author’s affiliation to
the New Europe College and the Research Support Scheme, Prague)

1. The Disappearing Body of Modern Architecture?
2. Who Framed the European City?
3. “Arise, And Take Up Thy Bed, And Walk”:
4. CorpoReality: Organic vs technological or Architecture as Prothesis
5. Looking Through: Artificial Environments and The Ultimate Sense
6. Erotic vs heroic: Plastic/Soft Architecture
7. A Love/Hate Liaison: Glass and Concrete Playing Sight Against Touch
8. Coda
 

The Disappearing Body of Modern Architecture?
Architecture in the fifties and sixties increasingly lost its corporeality. It was not just the desfiguration of its face. It was not just an 9corch9e, skinless mechanism, displaying (rarely in a glass window) every single organ outside; it emphasised its respective shape (brutalism), flexing rough concrete muscles (Paul Rudolph’s Yale Faculty of Architecture, late-Corbusier’s La Tourette, Chandigarh and Notre Dame de Haute Ronchamp).
 It was much more than all these: architecture after the war revolted against its integrity, completion, definitiveness, permanence, and inside coherence. It stood against internal measure (Michelis, 1982: 200-8) and ended up by being anti-antropomorphous - at one end the Hi-Tech wizardries, at the other end Kurokawa’s “cyborg architecture”. Architecture as an unique body exploded. Its internal, sustaining structures became interconnected and proliferated, leading to the megastructure concept, while its cells became autonomous, replaceable, moveable, only to evolve eventually towards Reiner Banham’s “bubbles” , to capsules (in Metabolism) and to disposable (Cook called it “throw-away”) architecture later on.

Who Framed the European City?
Megastructures and East-European Look-Alikes
Megastructure had a great size; “was build of modular units; were capable of great, or even ‘unlimited’ extension; was a structural network into which smaller structural units (for example rooms, houses, or small buildings, of other sorts) can be built - or even ‘plugged-in’ or ‘clipped on’ after having been prefabricated elsewhere; a structural framework expected to have a useful life much longer than that of the smaller units which it might support”
Reiner Banham (1976:2)

The part played by the corporal metaphors in the post-war architecture was not throughout researched. First of all, it may be looked at from the perspective of an analogy between functional and organic: among the ideologies of functionalism identified by  Benjamin Handler (1970:5), organicism was by far the most radically encompassing. Sullivan’s slogan is thus enhanced, since Handler looks at the perfect identity between form and function (Handler, 1970:9). Form was understood as the outcome, the external expression of an internal process of functioning. According to the theory of systems, form would be “the functioning of the whole” (ibidem).

Obviously, post-war Modernism played with its body (or with what was left after dismembering it) in a rather peculiar way. Architecture as a single, internally and (thus, the Modernists would say) externally coherent body had to disappear. Brutalism was an ?corch?e: skinless architecture without its protecting envelope to keep together in an unique body the entire building, and to mask its interior from outside looks. The house did not need to be draped by a unique facade anymore. Instead, each part of any given building should be exclamated, displaced from its system/structure and loudly displayed towards the exterior, to be widely visible. For the Smithsons, “form follows function” became “every single function should be expressed in a separated exterior shape/volume”. By letting the parts free, Brutalism pointed towards the internal mechanism of the (architectural) body, towards its vital systems sustaining it, which then became essential: circulations/transportation, water pipes and electricity wires in the city, structural elements and correspondents of the above in the building .

There was only one step left to the megastructure concept, which could be looked at as the architectural structuralism. The step was made by Archigram and Yona Friedman, by Japanese Metabolists, Urbanisme Spatial in France and by Citt? Territorio in Italy. The body disappeared, only to be replaced by a twofold alternative: on the one hand the mega/meta organisms that could spread over a whole city and even a (national/world-wide) territory; all it mattered was the “biological”, internal functioning of the whole, how the “atoms” move and are distributed within it is secondary. While the first Modernists, like Le Corbusier, were fascinated by cars and hangars, architects of the so called “second Machine Age” (Martin Pawley) looked at space forms and chemical plants instead, “all canned in exposed lattice frames, NASA style” (Colquhoun, 1986:17), since those provided the kind of “dismembering” needed to prove their point.

Without bodies to contain them, the internal mechanism could proliferate malignantly, from house to city to the whole environment. All of those were in fact systems of control and manipulation upon the urban structure, that have gradually evolved and took over the architectural discourse, and from which Western environment was saved (except for the interesting Cumbernauld example), since they remained largely as urban utopias rather than realities. In the East “and in Cuba” (Banham, 1976:10), though, megastructure - as a macro-concept regarding a whole country as the site for heroically extending the central control over it - became increasingly popular since the sixties, only to devour their host - the city - in the late eighties in Romania.

For megastructure was not the “neutral grid” (Colquhoun, 1986: 121) envisaged by Yona Friedman for the University of Berlin, or by Le Corbusier for his hospital project in Venice - neither in its original understanding, nor in its East-European counterparts. First of all, because the frame was dominant, permanent, fixed and structuring. Secondly because, given the above mentioned inner qualities, it was supposed to be expressed in a monumental way, which eliminates definitively its neutrality. The frame is not the background against which the city projects its functioning, but the functioning mechanism turned the very essence of the city/environment.

In the late 1960’s Romania, as well as in the West earlier, the community spirit was replaced by “civic centres” - monuments dedicated to it, best described, as its West European counterparts, as “grotesque civic monuments with compulsory piazzas (...) an elephantine tendency” (Curtis,1982:349) inspired obviously by “the last” Le Corbusier. It is here where the frame/structure exists the internality of the architecture to exhibit its “heroic” part in sustaining the whole. The grids were metaphors of control displayed on the facades of major administrative buildings built since late 1960’s in every county capital city.  Although the structural/decorative frames did not become autonomous, as in megastructures, this exhibition of inflated concrete grids is perhaps the most important feature of  the East european official architecture in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

In the same “heroic” style, but closer to a brutalist disembodiment, several major edifices were built in the sixties and early seventies in Romania. The Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest (1962-1972, Octav Doicescu chief-architect; P.Iubu, C. Hacker. S. Lungu, P. Swoboda, I. Podocea architects) was an early example of a monumental, brutalist approach towards a dramatic change in designing edifices after Stalinism. Grids and rough, plugged-in volumes were nevertheless masked with superficial brick finishing, altering their “sincere expression” praised by Gheorghe Curinschi Vorona (1981:344). A slightly similar approach was conveyed in designing the Academy “Stefan Gheorghiu” (Stefan Rulea chief-architect): its auditoriums are huge masses detached from the concrete grid of the facade and individually exposed as “primadonas” of the exterior composition.

Communist Eastern Europe, plagued by prefabrication and social housing after 1954 (i.e. exclusively common dwelling units, with very little ownership allowed since 1970’s), was the perfect playground for megastructures - an efficient way to control the environment and its inhabitants. During the sixties, vast areas of environment and historical city centres were destroyed  everywhere in Europe in the name of development (Curtis, 1982: 349). Tradition disappeared for Modernism to take over and impose “a simple and architectonic order on the layout of human society and its equipment” (Banham,1976:199).

“Arise, And Take Up Thy Bed, And Walk”:
Capsules And the (re)Movable Home
"Art.1. The capsule is cyborg architecture. Man, machine and space build a new organic body which transcends confrontation (...). Art. 2. A capsule is a dwelling of Homo movens."
Kisho Kurokawa (1977: 75-6)

On the other hand, one discusses about the prime unit: a dwelling capsule  - detachable, transferable, thus mobile. The body metaphor retreated inside the cell. Yet the cell is secondary, since it depended on the megastructure. Within a “permanent and dominating frame containing subordinate and transient accommodations” , the capsule is just another function of the city “housed” in “a large frame” . While the capsule celebrated by Metabolism had its own roots in the Japanese tradition: kago, the individual transportation unit, and the shoin pavilions called jiga (Charles Jencks in its Foreword to Kurokawa, 1977:11), in the west it was a clear mark of disembodying architecture.

Yet Kurokawa refined the concept, since the capsule is not exclusively biologic any longer: he talks about “cyborg architecture” - architectural body with prothesis. Architects should not look at the body for inspiration, but rather to its technological alter-ego. And, with technology and capsule, “A Home is not a House” anymore, as claimed by Reiner Banham in 1965. Any of its internal functions could be supplied technologically, and thus their material expression became irrelevant: solid,  permanent walls, windows, furniture items with their bourgeois, monumental appearance criticised by Baudrillard (1968).

Despite its compulsory modernism, East European architecture and interior design have never questioned the alleged “conservative” nature of house furniture, capable of subverting the “revolutionary” message conveyed by the social common dwelling. More even, furniture in Romania after the war produced retarded yet traditionally “bourgeois” furniture items, such as the enormously popular glass cases, where the household valuables could be displayed. More even, Modern architecture was transformed and even reppressed by vernacular ways of appropriating the internal home space: the “clean” room for guests took over the living room as a place with the best furniture, the most valuable possessions in the household, where children were not allowed to play; kitchen, despite its small sizes in Modern apartments, was still the “fire centre” of the home, and arguably the most important place in any Romanian apartment and so on and so forth.

Yet, as a consequence of their mobility, homes of post-war visionaries lack oikos, the site with qualities best described by the concept of Raum. (Heidegger, 1995:185). “Home of the Homo movens” (Kurokawa, 1977:76), the capsule is in fact the most elaborated consequence of  previous concepts elaborated by the Constructivst “desurbanists”, who have searched to allegedly give the Soviet citizen an unlimited freedom to move across the Soviet Union without having to depend on a given, fixed “dwelling place”. Placeless architecture was the alternative to “bourgeois”city envisaged by desurbanists, who were repressed since 1930 by Stalin and Jdanov in saying that, since the Bolshevik revolution had won in the cities, it followed that those cities were revolutionary from that point onward. With capsule architecture plugged into megastructures, one deals with a generic human being as opposed to individuals. Man became a social, anonymous being docked in a space without attributes, which he did not own, yet which he had to call home.

The question rises here whether standardisation and prefabrication of home in East-European architecture is the ultimate encapsulation of dwelling, expressed on the facades as well. Architecture in the 1960’s emphasised the structural frame, which then celebrated the repetitiveness of its internal units . The actual limits of any given home (i.e. flat within the block, even individual rooms) were not only left apparent, but they were emphasised towards the exterior. Facades as drapes that could veil  and mask such details had already disappeared. One can look at a “brutalist” attitude: the box frame “expressed the actual physical limit to each dwelling; each unit reads” (Banham, 1966:91).  The poor craftmanship and mere economy induced this separatedness of each panel, rather than any conceptual attitude.

While in the West the common dwelling was rather the exception, in the East it was the norm: an artificial environment, capable of being manipulated, which could repress self-representations of the individual ego, flattering in exchange the social indistinctiveness. With the skinless, paneled facades, home as a shelter/refuge/ hiding space was gone from the post-war Modern architecture.

CorpoReality: Organic vs technological or Architecture as Prothesis
“Naturalism does not fit well with modern trends, nor with the structures of today”.
E.Heinle&M.B?cher (1971:284)

By the same token, “organic” meant something different in the post-war Modernism. While Gaudi’s bone columns and visceral  G?el chapel still refer to the body metaphor, for Metabolists the organic was just the host for healing technologies. Modern organic architecture looked at how organism worked; at systems, not at their shapes. It was fascinated by velocity, self-sustained processes, internal functioning - metabolism in a word. Bionic architecture itself was not about miming the compete plant or animal body , but rather about why is it working so well. “Organicism” in the latter discourse was not a celebration of the Body as a whole, but of the way it worked as a Mechanism - the ultimate metaphor of Modern architecture.

Banham’s environmental bubble as well as Quarnby’s “organic” forms, the fantastic shapes .of W.E. Wedin’s polyurethan houses have both descended from and informed back sci-fi/cosmic architecture, such as Barbarella’s Sojo city (imagined by Mario Garbuglia in 1968) and its fur coated space-ship where Jane Fonda purred bare naked - all are somewhat indebted to the organic metaphor, yet expressed in non-organic materials. Although Kurokawa did discuss “living” concepts, they were scarcely addressing the body alone: movement (Kurokawa, 1977:87), dynamic modulation (ibidem), growth and change (idem: 89-91), or even a possible “aesthetics of death” (Jencks in idem:10) referred to mechanism, to cyborgs more than to beings.

Looking Through: Artificial Environments and The Ultimate Sense
To be able to see through substance became more and more magic as techniques of production were able to give larger and larger uninterrupted forms.”
Peter Cook (1970:63)

Combining existing materials, inventing new, artificial building materials and building colours, eroding conventional ways of employing old and new materials in architecture were perhaps the most radical strategy to displace the being from its nest of  conventions regarding its urban/public as well as interior/private space after 1950. The most intimate archetypes, such as the trilitic arche-structure, had to be disrupted and dis/re/placed.
 Unlike before the war, when architecture, albeit Modern, had still a sense of appropriatedness in dealing with (building) matter, after 1950 one can see architects looking into it to find “new” ways of twisting, folding, packing, inflating, exposing and even making invisible the very same matter, or its “cyborg” mutants.

A look into the substance of architecture and how dealing with it changed the very nature of the architectural discourse in Western as well as Eastern Europe might illuminate fractures as well as continuities within this process, and their relevance to our understanding of the architecture of the fifities and sixities.

Erotic vs heroic: Plastic/Soft Architecture
“Architecture can be seen more related to the ambiguity of life.”
Peter Cook (1970:67)

The most important quality of plastic, apart from its modernity, came from its versatility: by designing plastic furniture, one could invent items with multiple functions and, most important, with non-conventional colours. Even entire cities, plastic utopias as the Spatial Housing Project (W. Doring) , or the suspended Rendo Housing Project (Casoni&Casoni), or the 1966 utopian pneumatic town by Gernot Nalbach. A living capsule made entirely of the same material thus became reality, while inflatable furniture, with its erotic, soft and sometimes transparent shapes, was fashionable in the sixties (and has a comeback in the mid-nineties).

There were clear references to attributes of the body, yet “embodied” by the most artificial, anti-organic material. Soft architecture is perhaps the best example.  Bionics and metaphors of life are clearly incorporated in this definitely Modern material, which is more clearly related to the sixties, with its  out-of-body experiences - mind expanding, drugs (H.Rucker: Mind Expander, 1968) - than with “classical” antropomorphism as such. “Sculptectures”: all these dialogues, distorsions, frustrations have to do with corporeality, witnessing an impossible struggle of Modernity to completely exile its traces within the architectural discourse. Finally, one can argue that the most striking similarity between body and later Modern architecture was their sheer temporarity. Architecture was no longer eternal, but replaceable, disposable, and ready to die. Plastic does not die, however.

It has a pre-war history especially in Germany - that wanted to be independent from importing raw materials - and in the UK - with its 1941 Building Plastics Research Corporation in Glasgow. Eventually, it emerged as the alternative, up-to-date building material in the early fifities , due to the dwelling crisis and to plastic’s easy prefabrication. The first real structure did not come out until 1955, when, at the Paris Exhibition, Ionel Schein (with R.A. Coulon and Y. Magnart) exhibited a plastic house.

The plastic capsules appeared later on, by the same team: Motel cabin (1956) and exhibition units for a mobile library (1958). Plastic was so popular and hype in the sixties, that it was adopted instantly by the pop culture, thus being present at Disneyland, as a crossed plastic home sitting on a pilaster (1957), shaping “the ideal home” designed by the Smithsons (1956), and envisaging future habitations (Monsanto House of the Future by Hamilton and Goody).

Plastics then offered unexpected ways to avoid traditional design strategies and conventional forms. There were details: curved window frames, probably alluding to (space)ships, or no window frames at all. Then it corroded the very nature of any architectural structure to day. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Peter Cook thought that a revolution in architecture happened during the fifities and sixties, as new materials and structural techniques allowed architects to blow the trilitic system up. By detaching the structure from the architectural skin after 1945, each component had its own eventual destiny. Without columns and beams, the skin became the structure by itself, due to Otto Frei and Buckminster Fuller: plastic structures , pneumatics - with their erotic, “very exciting looking shapes” (Cook,1970:62) - reinforced cables, as well as geodezic domes.

Finally architecture could become really “new”. And, more important, Modern architecture found a way to be thrilling without employing strategies of visual heroism. Soft architecture, although inherently big, was regarded as a “gradual erosion of monumentality” (idem:67). One must remember here that the lack of monumentality was by far the strongest argument to resisting Modernism before the war: it was seen as an unreliable aesthetics, since it was not capable to offer the heroic structures the elates of nation/states needed to convey their messages within city textures.

Modernism thus had to accept pollination with other idioms to accede to more important edifices than extravagant houses in the woods for the rich and the snob intellectual/art elite before the war. Rationalism, Art Deco and Classical features negotiated together to offer a cocktail called either stripped Classicism (as seen at the Paris Exhibition in 1937), or Classical Modernism (of the New York World Fair in 1939) . This is why Cook’s remark is highly important in a discussion on whether Modern architecture was ever able or indeed really willing to produce monumental structures at all.

A Love/Hate Liaison: Glass and Concrete Playing Sight Against Touch
 Glass (...) was, quite clearly, the ideal “skin” (...) the purpose was to produce maximum invisibility for the wall and maximum visibility for the structural skeleton of the building”
Peter Blake (1977:72)

 Perhaps the most striking development in Modern architecture after the war is the steady disappearance of the other senses in experiencing the built matter but the visual. In fact, seeing became more and more the only possible way to experience architecture. Yet the more the visual took over, the more substanceless the facades became. Glass was used either as a mirror, or as a transparent “skin” whose primordial function was not to protect, but to unveil, even expose the structural skeleton.

How did it come to this? First of all, there was the separation between structure and facades, which was a product of the first Modern generation: Gropius’ Faguswerk, Le Corbusier’s continuous glass windows, and especially Mies van der Rohe’s triangular glass Friedrichstrasse tower competition entry displaced the wall from its structural purpose, and the latter was attributed to pillars retreated behind the glass facade. Then, in the fifties and sixties, even the pillar disappeared, as in Fuller’s USA Pavilion and his “roof” for Manhattan, only to make room to a completely glass/transparent facade, regardless how intimate the interior might have been - a home, as in Philip Johnson’s New Canaan residence, or a sky-scrapper, as in Lever House of Mies/Johnson.

As the facade was peeled off the structure, the former became just a way of negotiating the dichotomy between interior and exterior, and the latter was increasingly regarded as the essential part of the architectural organism, it was only logical that the former should “disappear” in order to display/emphasise the latter. While brutalism left the building skinless, arguing that there was no need to camouflage at all the structure - quite the opposite - other idioms found more metaphysical ways to deal with sensual experiences of architecture as a physical body.

In the Western Europe and the US, roughness and opacity (flattering the tactile and being key qualities of an aesthetics based upon concrete) were increasingly and deliberately suppressed from the discourse, by focusing on smoothness and transparency (which in turn emphasised the sight, and were centered around glass and metal). More and more, the choice of materials, surfaces as well as colours in Modern architecture was intended to complement a unique sense, and thus to alienate the being from its built environment.

It was not a straightforward process, nor was it ubiquitously present in all national/regional architectures after the war. One can see it in France, from the late Le Corbusier (with his raw concrete masses which have started a trend in the fifties and sixties in western Europe and the US, only to find it anew in the East in the late sixties and the seventies as “lyrical functionalism”) to Jean Nouvel “disappearing” glass tower in Def?nse and the recent Fondation Cartier, where there is no more resistance opposed to visually penetrating the architecture in its entirety.

One can obviously find it in the US, yet in a rather contorted manner, since Rudolph’s mid-sixties, a la maniere de Le Corbusier, muscle flexing at Yale was rather a reaction against the glass curtain of “Orthodox” (Venturi), corporate Modernism, and where Post-modern opaque consistence brought back matter onto building facades.However, one cannot find the same process in the East, where Khruschev’s laudatio for cement and concrete was absolute. One can make edifices out of concrete: rough, powerful, heavy, thus monumental. Concrete was “revolutionary”, as it was an outcome of the heavy industry, and it was grey, which is, as pointed out by Schusev, is worker’s colour .

Glass is cool, both transparent and reflective, fragile and easy, thus “feminine”. It is present, corporeal as well absent and virtual. Thus concrete is “masculine”: rough, “as found” (Glendenning&Muthesius, 1994:92), massive, immobile, the very embodiment of (heavy) industry, progress, and materiality.

There was a discrete yet fundamental change in the nature of finishing. It became a quality of the surface itself, indeed of the structural system, rather than something applied eventually. Finishing could be a quality, something to enhance the surface’s attributes, yet it could also stand for “accidental marks of shuttering” (ibidem), “out-of-form”ness (Stillman & Eastwick-Field), in order to obtain a “directness of expression” (ibidem). Obviously, a “revolutionary” discourse had to look for certain metaphors and be attentive to the metaphysics of matter.

Thus, following Khruschev’s emphasis on concrete, one can read the glass/concrete marriage as key dichotomy in understanding Communist architecture. Sight was a key sense in experiencing Western architecture. Unlike in the West, due to a ubiquitous presence of concrete, tactile was still present and relevant. Much like plastics, yet more impressive and heroic, concrete could be manipulated and could subvert the trilitic system as well. The so called “visual concrete” (Heinle&B?cher, 1971) stands not only for the immediate finishing the structure, but also for expressive, unconventional forms like shell structures with complicated geometry, as well as for a whole range of “hard landscape[s] in concrete” (ibidem). Up to the 1970’s in both West and East, concrete made it to playgrounds, interiors, schools, fountains and urban furniture items.

Hardly can one find towers with glass “curtain walls” in the east. First of all, because high rising buildings, as major characters of Stalinist architecture from the Palace of the Soviets to the post-war seven  towers in Moscow and Warshaw, were among the most important targets of Khruschv’s speech. Secondly, because one cannot imagine unframed glass, i.e. uncontrolled building elements. Thirdly, because architecture (i.e. the structure), although artificial, had to be present, visible, material, whereas glass offered but elusiveness, was slippery and metaphysical, could entail uncontrollable reflections under various light conditions: “a giant Hall of Mirrors, or Skyline of Mirrors (...) [which] implies, of course, total abdication” (Blake, 1977:73). The concrete structure had to be emphasized, not camouflaged. It was exhibited, not allowed to be unveiled by the glass walls.

Why then reflect the reality, and not be real? The reflected city is not the real city anymore, but an image, an interpretation of  it, its the other city from beyond the mirror. Mies van der Rohe could assert back in 1919 that “the important thing in a glass tower is the play of reflections” (quoted by Blake:ibidem; italics mine, A.I.); and perhaps in the west one needed now more than ever) a second cornea, a screen prothesis to act as protective/interpretative intermediary between reality and being. Perhaps glass could be built in the most ethereal ways, as were the glass skyscrapers in the desert outside Teheran (Iran), where only the chaos was reflected and multiplied, or as is SOM’s Bank in Rhyad (Saudy Arabia), with his glass walls (towards the inner, empty, triangular court) looking into themselves.

Yet this was not the case in the East, where glass was heavily guarded  and/or framed by opaque panels of concrete, rarely stone, retracted behind heavy brise-soleils  or colonnades. Enframing the glass panels is the norm in Romanian architecture during the envisaged period, recalling works like the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro by Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, or, closer to home, Duiliu Marcu’s CAM building on Victoria Avenue in Bucharest.

The outcome were T.Ricci’s glass-within-stone/concrete grids Radio House and especially Romanian Television building. The latter’s facades are quite relevant in that context, as its boxes resemble TV sets, yet the emphasis is not on the glass screens, but on the green structure which sends the glass towards the depths of  the facade surface. Glass flanked in between two opaque panels was also popular in the Clasicizing edifices before the war, such as D.Marcu’s War School and especially Victoria Palace in Bucharest were sources for post-Stalinist edifices as the Palace Hall in Bucharest, as well as for many city halls and “unions’ culture houses” in the sixties and seventies.

Coda
The scope of this text is not only to verify whether the East-European architecture after Stalin died, while lacking a definitely critical, self reflective edge, nevertheless echoed and employed major concepts of Western architectural discourse. It is, in fact, a comparative study with rather optimistic conclusions.
While obviously  trailing - at least temporally - the Western discourse,  it seems quite stunning that Communist architecture, regardless - or, rather, despite - the ideological pressure, the overwhelming state control, the poor craftsmanship as well as the obsessive industrialisation of building techniques, materials and finishing, was in fact able to roughly go along the same trends as its less controlled, more democratic counterpart outside the Iron Curtain.

Which brings us to the question: how really important are ideologies and power manipulations when one observes the aesthetic discourse? Obviously, they were not able to completely turn the clock backward, as Stalinist elite believed, nor were they able to completely control the practice or to stop inner processes emerging within the discourse. For most of the concepts enumerated before, one has merely reflections, distorted copies or look-alikes. It was not, given the absent critical edge, a complete assimilation. Yet, they existed.
There were several directions where East european architecture leads, with little - if any - equivalent in the West. When Bolshevik ideology met Modernism after Khruschev’s speech, it was love at first sight (or second sight for that matter, after the Avant-garde). Certain aspects of Modernity found in the East their most spectacular fulfilment: mass prefabrication of social housing, who were able to entirely reshape the existing urban structures; inventing new environments, as well as extending the megastructure concept to its malignant variant” - the so called “systematisation of the national territory”.

Perhaps the bottom line of this paper would have to be the following phrase: Modernity is a totalitarian concept in the end, and the only place where its basic, most important goal, that of entirely reshaping the reality according to its political/aesthetic plan, was abundantly achieved in the USSR and (some) of its satellite countries between 1954 and 1989.

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