Erasure and Resilience in Eastern European Architectures

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The architecture of Eastern Europe—the region largely populated by Slavic peoples spanning between the German-speaking lands and the continent’s customary borders on the Ural and the Caucasus—is facing today the most dramatic crisis since World War Two. On the one hand, the military aggression in Ukraine has physically jeopardised built environments and their inhabitants, from vernacular architecture to socialist estates. On the other, the exacerbation of ideological polarization in response to the war has fuelled historical revisionism across the region. It is reflected in attempts at whitewashing urban spaces through historicist restorations and devastating those resisting homogenization into nationalist narratives.
In response to this current crisis, the panel invites reflections on the global relevance of Eastern European architecture by prioritizing its transnational legacies. By testifying to cross-pollinating cultures and religions, including Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities, Eastern European architecture offers invaluable insights not only into the mechanisms of erasure carried out by imperialist and revisionist forces but also of extraordinary resilience in the face of such dramatic challenges, both through the reconstruction efforts in region and through its diaspora contributions. Building upon the methodologies developed by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Małgorzata Omilanowska, Timothy Snyder, and Łukasz Stanek, the panel will serve as a platform for the contested and silenced dimensions of Eastern European architectural production that nation-based narratives both fail to address and actively seek to obliterate.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Tijana Vujosevic, U of British Columbia (Canada)

Papers

• Metabolism of Architecture in Late-18th-Century Tsarskoye Selo - Aleksander Musiał, ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

• Settlement, after 1861 - Alla Vronskaya, U of Kassel (Germany)

• Unconscious Memories of the System: Standardised Architecture Following the USSR’s Collapse - Dimitrij Zadorin

Discussants

• Tijana Vujosevic, U of British Columbia (Canada)

• Ella Chmielewska, U of Edinburgh (UK)

Session Manager

• Liladhar R. Pendse, UC Berkeley