The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968

Ana Miljacki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315460116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

The Optimum Imperative examines architecture's multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia.

Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia's entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops' occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzík and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal.

Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects' optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.

Part I
Projection

1939–1948 THE SOCIALIST PROSPECTIVE

The Czechs are a small Central European people who inhabit an enclosed, once almost unreachable territory (Bohemia), as well as neighboring Moravia, open and passable. There are times when Europe takes little or no interest in the Czechs, and others when dramatic tensions suddenly make them much talked about; then they are quickly forgotten again. Silence returns, along with a certain feeling of shame. About ten million Czechs speak a very difficult Slavic language; they owe a great deal spiritually to the rest of Europe, but return very little, because of their linguistic isolation.

—Jan Patočka, What Are the Czechs? (1975)

Functionalism could and has to be overcome, because its own powers and its own progressive development will take it further, toward its more mature form and even its own antithesis. However, the progress made by functionalism won’t be negated by the subsequent rich development of the socialist architecture. That great and famous step toward the new socialist architecture that was accomplished by functionalism, compels the avant-garde architects to continue to advance toward the goal, which is to produce a plan for a free Communist life, a framework for the free development of individuals and a collectivity.

—Karel Teige, Development of Socialist Architecture (1936)

When Andre Breton visited Prague in 1935, as many important figures of the European avant-garde did in the interwar period, the First Czechoslovak Republic, barely halfway through its second decade, was ascendant. Prague was not only a satellite of Moscow, Berlin, and Paris, but also an intellectual hub in its own right: it was on the cultural map of Europe, and its gates were open wide. Czechoslovak aesthetic discourse of this period made original contributions to modernism and prefigured a specific set of lineages for the postwar construction of Socialism.

When he visited, under the pressure of the historical events ominously unfolding across Europe, and finding himself in palpable geographic proximity to Moscow, Breton famously proposed that surrealism had real affinities with Marxist thinking. He also recognized in Prague a perfect ground for surrealist work. Breton found Prague of the First Czechoslovak Republic to have been intrinsically magical, a mystical idea that subsequently appealed to a number of Czech historians of the city.¹ Only a few years before Breton’s visit, international modernism’s key figure, Le Corbusier, was similarly inspired by the grand space and austere gestures of the city’s Veletržní Palác, one of the finest examples of Czech constructivism. Remarkable for its glazed roof and the light that floods the multistory atrium of its exhibition hall, the Veletržní Palác was designed by Oldřich Tyl and Josef Fuchs in 1924–1925 and built a few years later. Although it was one of Europe’s largest functionalist buildings to date, the Palác did not make it into Henry-Russell Hitchock and Philip Johnson’s canonical The International Style. The coauthors did make mention of Czechoslovak examples of the trend, but the historical events that followed the book’s publication in 1932 made it objectively harder to learn about the “golden era” and even harder to study postwar production in the region. Although unable to verify it themselves, historian Kenneth Frampton (1980), as well as Manfredo Tafuri and his coauthor Francesco Dal Co (1986), reserved room in their respective (eventually canonical) narratives of modernism for the possibility of an important history of Czechoslovak contribution to modern architecture.² Before World War II, Prague was a laboratory of modern avant-garde thinking. Both Czech and European artists in otherwise opposing aesthetic camps contributed to the discourse on modernism that took place in the city. Czechoslovakia’s most eloquent theorists of modernism, Karel Teige, famously embodied and held in suspension a number of key theoretical contradictions. While he championed the type of rationality exemplified by the Veletržní Palác, which was by all normative accounts of surrealism diametrically opposed to all strands of it, Teige was also one of Czech surrealism’s key spokesmen.

“The golden era”—often invoked by historians of Czechoslovak aesthetic production—and the vibrant links between Prague and other cultural hubs of the interwar period were, as the cultural historian Derek Sayer has suggested, forgotten and written over by Cold War narratives of modernism’s heritage and meaning on both sides of the divide (Sayer 1998). In the West, narratives consolidated around Paris, Berlin, and Moscow; in the East, even the politically appropriate type of modernist production—most Czech modernist discourse was cultivated under the red flag of Socialism—was first suppressed and later reshuffled to support a particular narrative of Socialist nation building.

Only a few years after Breton pronounced Prague the magical capital of surrealism, the Czechoslovak population and its leaders were shocked when their presumed place in the geopolitical order of Europe was upended. Czechoslovakia had embraced and successfully cultivated a Western-style parliamentary democracy —a format of governing that was rapidly failing in the region. In most cases, rudimentary attempts at parliamentary democracy in the new post-World War I nation-states of the region were giving way to authoritative regimes. And yet, as much as the progressive First Czechoslovak Republic may have embraced the idea of Europe (and Europe seemed to embrace the country’s contribution in return), its intellectual and economic allies were quick to give up its various territories to appease Germany’s expanding appetite.

With real foresight and realism about his own nation’s capacity to withstand the mounting pressures from its borders, President Edvard Beneš had taken a series of measures to secure Czechoslovakia’s political fate in the years leading up to the Munich accords, including a little entente with Romania and Yugoslavia, a treaty with France, and a mutual-assistance pact with the Soviet state. But he had not anticipated the ease with which his Anglo-French allies would swap one set of Czechoslovakia’s borders for another. The agreement reached in Munich between the representatives of the British and French governments and the Reich (and which Winston Churchill eventually saw as a dishonorable loss for Europe) approved the German annexation of Sudeten parts of Czechoslovakia a year before Germany absorbed under its command the remaining territory of Czechoslovakia. President Beneš’s government refused the first version of the Munich “deal,” but it gave in due to pressure from both Hitler and Czechoslovakia’s Western allies and under the threat of imminent war. Beneš resigned five days after the Munich accords were settled. The Czechoslovak territory continued to be dismantled, Slovakia separated (turning into a semiautonomous supporter of the Reich), and, finally, six months after the accords, the new “puppet-president,” Emil Hvachá, placed the Czechs under “the protection of the Reich.”

The First Czechoslovak Republic dissolved into the protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia. Launching Czechoslovakia into World War II (before the war had de facto started on September 1, 1939, with the German bombing of Poland), the Munich accords could only register, both for the general population and the Beneš government, as the West’s epic abandonment of the country. Historian Bradley Abrams has convincingly related the disappointment around the Munich accords to the political adjustments and general sentiment in the immediate aftermath of the war, and even the 1948 Communist takeover of power.

World War II thus crept up on Czechoslovakia without much bloodshed, which was not, of course, the case elsewhere in the Eastern European region. Having started with harrowing bombings of Warsaw and Belgrade, the devastation of war in Poland and Yugoslavia, respectively, far exceeded anything that their Western allies had experienced, although both countries (with the exception of the independent state of Croatia) were in open or guerilla conflict with Axis forces throughout the war. As one of the protectorate’s most industrially advanced regions, Czech lands (Moravia and Bohemia) were spared annihilation by Reich forces. In fact, industrial production there rose during the war, although the Czech population grew increasingly impoverished during the same period.

Due to both the persecution of Czechoslovakia’s Jewish population and Nazi anti-Communism, much of the openly leftist intellectual class was sent underground during the war, including both seasoned and younger contributors to architectural discourse.³ Prior to the 1939 dissolution of the First Czechoslovak Republic, there had been many disagreements among architects about the merits of functionalism, as critiques of modernism had begun before the war started, and these, just as the earlier discussions in favor of functionalism, were framed within a decidedly leftist rhetoric. According to a number of chroniclers of World War II, all architectural production was halted during the war, though important architectural discussions continued, albeit at a lower volume, at the university and in private apartments and cafés. Architect and landscape theorist Ladislav Žák described the war’s effects on the discipline and the profession as a type of “compulsory giving up of all exterior activities in order to induce the people to the contemplative life.” The Esprit Nouveau that permeated the intellectual and aesthetic discussions witnessed by both Le Corbusier and Breton gave way to wartime anxiety and newfound political zeal. Czech architectural discourse shifted during the war analogously to the more general rise of a new generation and its particular predispositions toward Socialism, described as “radicalization” by Abrams (2004).⁴ The wartime shifts in architectural discourse and its demographics, as well as in politics in general, made the postwar nationalization of the construction industry nearly inevitable. It is chiefly the architects of this younger generation, influenced by some of their mentors’ most radical ideas, that actively planned and eventually executed nationalization in the spheres of architecture and building.

Architectural discussions, especially those sponsored by the Union of Socialist Architects and the Architectural Working Group, anticipated extensive material and institutional reconstruction of the country. When the Allied forces and the Red Army withdrew from Czechoslovak territory in 1945, the country indeed had to be reconstituted. Although the joint republic of Czechoslovakia (including Czech and Slovak lands in their prewar configuration and territorial definition) was resumed under the leadership of former President Beneš, an exact repetition of its pre-1938 nation-state was neither possible nor desirable, which made the process of reconstitution open to influence from larger geopolitical forces.

The Yalta Conference in Crimea that took place on March 24, 1945, between President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Joseph Stalin hovers mythically over Eastern European postwar developments.⁵ The importance of “Yalta” as a periodizing marker of Cold War events has been absorbed into the general colloquial understanding of Eastern European people as an ironic twist of history: a moment when three politicians single-handedly defined the years of toil to come without any representation of the peoples whose fates they had sealed in their deal. In addition to discussing the establishment of the Security Council, dismembering of Germany, and determining the financial retribution due to Moscow, the text of the agreement reached at Yalta described with precision the particular political future of Yugoslavia and territorial definition of Poland (Yalta Conference Agreement 1945). Czechoslovakia did not figure in the record of the conversation at all, meaning that the country’s particular path of postwar recovery was not overdetermined in Crimea.

Though the Yalta meeting may have sent political signals to the Czechoslovak government and people, the rebuilding of Czechoslovakia and its road to Socialism (initially, at least) were much more in the hands of local politicians and populations than the Western term usually reserved for the 1948 Communist takeover—“the coup”—implies. Three key events that structured the logic and the sentiment of a particular Socialist prospective are the Košice conference that took place in April 1945, the national election in 1946, and the 1948 coup. Relatively unencumbered by the eventual, gravitational pull of the Soviet Union, the three-year period between the Košice conference and the February 1948 coup—a period later termed the National Revolution—was full of real possibilities.

The meeting in Košice installed the National Front government, a coalition including members of Beneš’s government, who had been in exile until 1945, and members of several more and less leftist parties: National Socialists, People’s Party, Slovak Democrats, Social Democrats, and the Communist Party. The same program that established the coalition functioned as a plan of Czechoslovakia’s reconstitution, reconstruction, and Socialist reform. The Košice program covered a range of issues, from the way a new government would deal with German and Hungarian populations that cooperated with the Reich to the multiethnic constitution of the country and its schooling system and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Optimizing Optimism
• Part I: Projection 1939–1948: The Socialist Prospective
• Part II: Production 1948–1958: Drawing the Curtain
• Part III: Experimentation 1958–1968: Reform from Within
• Postscript Turning “Máj” Into “My”
• Bibliography
• Index