The Bones of Socialist Buildings: The IMS System as an Archive of Worldmaking

• In Event: What Did the Socialist Sweater Look Like, and Why Does it Matter?: New Perspectives on Socialist Materialities

Abstract

The paper examines how the structural cores of buildings—their hidden "bones"—can serve as material archives of socialist technological exchange and solidarity. Through the case study of the IMS Žeželj system, a sophisticated prefabricated construction technology developed in Yugoslavia in 1957, it traces how building technologies circulated among socialist and non-aligned countries outside traditional colonial and Cold War power dynamics. While the studies of socialist materiality typically focus on visible aspects like architectural style or consumer goods, the paper argues that the invisible structural components of buildings carried equally significant political and social meanings. As the IMS system traveled from Yugoslavia to Hungary, Soviet Georgia, Cuba, Angola, and beyond, its concrete columns became both the objects and emblems of the networks of knowledge exchange, technical expertise, and international solidarity. The system's adaptability to local conditions and needs transformed these seemingly rigid prefabricated components into flexible tools of postcolonial development. Today, these concealed structural frameworks persist as material witnesses to an alternative vision of technological exchange—one based on mutual benefit rather than one-way influence. By examining these "concrete memories," the paper offers new insights into how building technologies served as malleable instruments of socialist world-making, where technological transfer meant not just replication but active transformation and co-production.

Author

• Vladimir Kulic, Iowa State U