Concrete Modernity: A Material-Ecological History of Architecture in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe
Hailed in recent public discourse as “the most destructive material on earth,” concrete has garnered a conflicted heritage over the last few decades. It is not just the heightened awareness of environmental degradation, however, but also reactions against the politics and the aesthetics of state socialism that have transformed the material of twentieth-century utopias into the target of manifold criticisms. Indeed, few building materials can evoke historical and political significations as widespread as the association between concrete and the state socialist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. In popular culture, seemingly never-ending rows of identical looking Plattenbauten have come to stand for the de-individualizing character imputed to socialism. Yet the material practices and discursive frameworks around concrete predated state socialism and are still actively shaped by the latter’s memory.
By examining a longer chronology (ca. 1900-1990), this project approaches concrete architecture in Eastern Europe and the discourses coalescing around it as historically contingent and politically determined phenomena. Thanks first to its novelty at the beginning of the century, and, after the mid-1950s, to its ubiquity, concrete was often situated at the center of dichotomous debates on localism and centralization, idealization of the past and grandiose visions of the future. Both material processes and discursive framings long situated concrete in opposition to concepts of “nature.” From the early railway networks of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the sanitation campaigns of the interwar years, concrete had been established as the material of modernization long before the infrastructural capacity of the state finally matched the ambitions of modernization advocates. During state socialism, infrastructural modernization and urbanization made concrete a ubiquitous material in extensive building campaigns designed to increase economic output and raise the standard of living—processes which were often cast in rhetorical terms as the conquest of nature for the sake of humankind’s ever-growing material needs and aspirations.
By foregrounding the historicity of concrete, this project examines how Eastern European architects understood the meanings of modernity, development, nature, and culture at different junctures in the twentieth century. It analyzes the relational construction of these concepts across political divides and longer periods of social transformation, positing concrete as a material pathway to understanding aspirations regarding the kind of society political leaders and technical experts endeavored to build. This approach, combining an analysis of material practices and discursive framings, examines the entangled aesthetic, spatial, and political ambitions that concrete enabled.
This project has two components: a monograph proposing a political-ecological periodization of concrete based on archival research in the Romanian National Archives; and a series of collaborative events that will bring together scholars working on Eastern and Southeastern Europe to form the basis of a regional intellectual network promoting critical ecological approaches to architectural history.
[Caption: SANIC [National Archives of Romania], Comitetul pentru Problemele Consiliilor Populare, Directia Sistematizare, 149/1976, "Mobile gravel extractor yielding 200,000 m³ per year," f. 89. ]