Complexity and Contradiction in Central European Radical Architecture: Experiments in Art and Architecture in the 1970s

Abstract

The article discusses the visionary or radical approach to architecture in East-Central Europe. Examining art and architecture in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania in the 1970s, the author seeks to answer a number of questions about the nature of the experiments non-architects were conducting in art and architecture in the Eastern Bloc. Did experimental architecture represent a homogeneous movement in the region in the 1970s? Did architectural projects of that period share any characteristics and objectives in common across the region? Were those projects distinct from similar work being created in Western Europe at the same time? The article highlights several projects that demonstrate the existence of formal links between the art and architecture in Eastern Europe and that in the West. The conceptual, substantial, and semantic convergences and divergences between Eastern and Western architectural projects are analysed and ultimately reveal the unique aspects of East European architecture. The article offers a critical reflection on architecture in the context of an authoritarian political system. The focus in examining architectural projects in Eastern and Central Europe is on the relationship between the formal language of architecture and its ideological, political, and social connotations.