Abstract
Designed in 1967 for a site near Prague, Czechoslovakia, and exhibited that year at the Montreal Expo, Etarea was to be a city of 135,000 inhabitants, where the conveniences of automated infrastructure would satisfy future socialist generations. Conceived by the architect Gorazd Celechovský as the ideal communist city, the case offers compelling insight into the influence of Marxist humanism and systems theory on post-war and specifically post-Stalinist state socialist architectural culture. Informed by these intellectual currents, as the article details, Etarea placed the question of meaning at centre stage. Meaning in architecture was considered in terms of both cybernetic communication and existential phenomenology, and its function was no less than to advance the communist transition. Etarea was informed by Civilization at the Crossroads (1966), an influential policy treatise that emphasized the significance of the intelligentsia and the so-called ‘scientific and technological revolution’ to future communism. The article explores the function of the ‘living environment’ as a conceptual banner and link between the publication and the project. While Civilization argued that urbanization must be decoupled from industrialization, Etarea was to be a model ‘post-industrial’ environment. Three aspects to Etarea are analysed in detail: the territorial question of the city-country divide, the balance between automation and socio-psychological meaning and tensions between political emancipation and cybernetic control.
Highlights
Introduction ‘We are not futurologists by profession, but the future is becoming more and more significant today’, mused Czech philosopher Radovan Richta in 1967 (Kotek and Richta 1967: 1)
There is a thriving architectural historiography on systems theory and environments in the post-war West (Scott 2016), and this study introduces a comparable history of the socialist side of the Cold War divide
Etarea is considered in relation to linear territorial development, aiming to dissolve the city-country distinction; as a cybernetic-humane environment that is infrastructurally automated and psychologically meaningful; and as the ideal communist city, fraught with tensions between political emancipation, algorithmic control and abstract humanism
Summary
Introduction ‘We are not futurologists by profession, but the future is becoming more and more significant today’, mused Czech philosopher Radovan Richta in 1967 (Kotek and Richta 1967: 1). As a design manifesto for the ‘living environment’, the polyvalent term that featured in the title of the project report, Etarea set out to cut the Gordian knot of socialist urbanization: addressing the ostensibly deleterious effects of industrialization on urban ecology and of standardization on the human psyche; while rethinking, but not abandoning, the role of industrialization and standardization in architecture and even intensifying economies of scale.22 Three aspects of the project are discussed below in detail.
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