Interesting podcast. The overview regarding socialist architecture is broadly correct : its roots are in avant-gard aestehics typical of both Western and Eastern Europe ; surrealism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, suprematism, Bauhaus – in Romania, for instance, the artistic effervescence in architecture and in other arts at the time was at least equal if not greater than in Czechoslovakia and it is well known that many avant-gards at the begining of the 20th century have eastern-European roots). These avant-garde easthetics moved towards functionalism, right angles and pure lines, i.e. formalism, as a sort of new modernistic (not modern!) classicism, decomposed or abstracted into its essential elements, as well as to the use of the latest industrial materials and mass production techniques (as a side note, the fascist and the nazi regimes also embraced this “simple lines”, functionalist architecture as official architecture, and some of these avant-garde architects worked for both regimes). However, from an aesthetic point of view, this avant-garde functionalist architecture never evolved in the Communist Est, compared to the Democratic West, where it also spread rapidly. In the West, in the 1970s and the 1980s, the large scale use of steel and glass replaced concrete, for instance; urban planning guidelines were revised; in many countries the building of large scale areas filled with a “monoculture” of apartment flats was abandonned all-together and, of course, this functionalist architecture was never official or had a monopoly on building style! In the Communist East, the architects – even those who were deeply communist – soon found themselves deprived of artistic liberty. In fact, the whole dispute between formalism and socialist realism, which touched only lightly architecture, but which was devastating in all the other arts, from music to literature, is a tragic story of great significance, a war against culture and artistic freedom, to which many wishful thinking artists became prisoners, mere servents or even victims of the regime they sometimes helped construct because formalism, understood broadly as elevated, intellectual, abstract artistic expression was considered a treason of the “working class”, a manifestation of bourgeois thinking and decadent culture. In general, the variation in design was minimal for 50 years of communist architecture, the only significant innovation permitted later on in architecture was the construction by Stalin of the “baroque socialist” towers in Moscow, but also Warsaw, Bucharest etc, and by Ceausescu of the House of the People in Bucharest, the former being an example of Stalin’s vision of “national-communist” grandeur imposed on almost all the countries he conqured and the later an example of Ceausescu’s vision of “national-communist” grandeur proclaimed, in a complexed way, so as to defy the “monopoly” on architectural grandeur instituted by the USSR even officially, although not necessarily in writing.. It is true that from a social point of view, the socialist housing programs fulfilled the needs of industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth and that the qualiy was usually comparable to that of the 1950-1960-1970 working class Westerners; they were better than the brick and mortar building of before, which had no central heating etc; however, the “Eastern socialist working class” never transitioned to bourgeois style single family houses, as in the US, or appartment flats with country vacation houses as in Sweeden or Finland. It also worth mentioning that in many, although not all, socialist countries (or cities) the idea of urban planning and the socialist functional architecture were used deliberatly to destroy whole acres of bourgeois, “decadent”, urban architecture, sometimes of great artistic and historical value, to erase the “capitalist past”, as it were. Finally, it must also be emphasised that the socialist appartment flats also had the auxiliary role of facilitating social control, by maintaining one secret police informer per flat, which could spy its neighbours very efficiently, or by encouraging spying and reporting between neighbours. For all these reasons, the rather sympathetic treatment in the podcast is not warranted. In an alternative history, the same or better could have been obtain “the capitalist way”, so to speak, without the destructions, tragedies and the very persistant bad legacies of communism throught these societies, their politics and their culture.

I am sure that the authour did its best to study the socialist housing policies in Czechoslovakia as impartially as possible, but I must confess that the podcast left my biased mind with the same amused and amazed feeling as this 1961 Birtish news report about Bucharest, in which the socialist architecture and regime are being praised pari pasu as “progressive” by the repoter, while a famous neobrancovan or neoromanian style vila in the city (a late historicist style developed in the begining of the 20th century by Romanian architects, at about the same time as Gaudi develops his “imaginative Art Nouveau-gothic style) is called an “Orthodox house of faith”(?!?!) and is considered an example of oriental architecture or of backwardness….

http://www.britishpathe.com/video/bucharest