Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe by Molnár Virág Eszter

Author:Molnár, Virág Eszter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317796428
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Chapter 4: Questioning Modernity

Western or Vernacular?

There is only one professional field where progress is not the law, where intellectual inertia reigns, where people look to the past for answers: architecture.

(Le Corbusier 1923 cited in Magyar Építő”ipar 1988/3: 97)

Modernist architecture called for an ahistorical architecture of functionalism to fashion a new sense of space with the help of new technologies and modern materials: steel, concrete, and glass. The modernist dictum of “form follows function” prescribed that the form and appearance of buildings ought to grow out of their applied materials and structural engineering, and called for the abandonment of superfluous ornamentation. It sought harmony between function, technology, and artistic expression. The search for a sparse, rational, and utilitarian architecture was also coupled with a social agenda: architects turned to standardization and mass-production to satisfy society's building needs while maintaining a commitment to aesthetic sophistication.

The modernist program cherished deeply universalizing aspirations for architecture worldwide, for the “universal laws” of economy and technology were supposed to apply everywhere. The modernist movement acquired the label “International Style” in 1932 to highlight what was believed to be the most prevalent feature of this architecture: its unboundedness by place and culture. Modernist architecture indeed spread to become the dominant professional paradigm under very different institutional, political, and economic conditions, in liberal democracies of postwar Western Europe and the United States just as well as in Latin America or state socialist Central and Eastern Europe. In everyday practice, however, International Style was still confronted with the need to accommodate national, regional, and local idiosyncrasies (Khan 1998). In some places the local taming of International Style proceeded rather smoothly; Finnish modernists or Japanese metabolists indeed came to be widely acclaimed for their skillful blending of international influences and locally rooted traditions (Quantrill 1995; Stewart 1987; Umbach and Hüppauf 2005). But in other places, such as Hungary, the process of local adaptation proved to be a much more controversial undertaking due to the tangled and highly politicized cultural and historical connotations architectural modernism came to be infused with during the twentieth century.

In postwar Central Europe the principles of modernist architecture were debated and applied predominantly in the arena of mass housing construction in response to the pressing everyday challenges of housing shortages, standardization, prefabrication, and technological change, as shown in the previous chapter (see also Hannemann 2005; Zarecor 2011). Nevertheless, there were also several influential controversies around modernist architecture that focused more explicitly on the symbolic and political rather than on the economic and technical aspects of the paradigm. These debates reveal how architecture was increasingly rediscovered during the 1970s and 1980s as an important repository of national and European traditions that emphasized the distinctiveness and cultural autonomy of Central European societies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.1 The so-called “Tulip Debate” in Hungary that forms the backbone of this chapter encapsulates this shift particularly vividly.2

The Tulip Debate (1975–6) was sparked off when a group of architects in southern Hungary embarked on building a prefabricated housing complex with a “human face” by using surface decorations to break the monotony of modernist aesthetics.

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