Łukasz Stanek

lukasz.stanek@manchester.ac.uk
Articles by Łukasz Stanek

Excerpt from Łukasz Stanek’s “Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War,” Part II

The controversies around socialist labor point to what might be the main dilemma of this book: the relationship between the studied architectures and the project of socialism. This relationship was addressed by  means of the concept of socialist worldmaking, or visions of global cooperation practiced by actors from socialist countries against the delineations of  the world inherited from the colonial period and in competition with other projects of global cooperation after World War II. Socialist worldmaking  included, but was not limited to, the claim to the worldwide applicability of  the socialist path of development; the worlding of Eastern Europe, or the sharing with the developing countries of the Eastern European experience of overcoming underdevelopment, colonialism, and peripheriality; and collaboration within the world socialist system. So understood, socialist worldmaking informed the changing geographies, volumes, speed, distribution, and programs of architectural resources that were moved between Eastern Europe and the Global South.

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Excerpt from Łukasz Stanek’s “Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War,” Part I

Eastern European architectural labor in West Africa and the Middle East was both postcolonial and socialist. It was postcolonial in the sense that independence fundamentally changed the conditions of architectural production in Ghana, Nigeria, Iraq, and the Gulf, the continuities with the preceding period notwithstanding. This meant the establishment of new  and reorganization of old institutions, but also the emergence of new clients, new programs, new discourses, and new ambitions that defined the  parameters and stakes of architectural production. For many, the arrival of Eastern Europeans promised to break the vicious circle of underdevelopment in which the damage inflicted by the colonizers on the colonized could be undone only with the resources and knowledge of the former colonial center.

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