Paris or Moscow?: Warsaw Architects and the Image of the Modern City in the 1950s

Abstract

This article sets out to explore the ways in which Polish architects and writers on architects imagined the future during the early Cold War period. During the Stalin years, Soviet cities were presented by communist ideologues as the future face of the progressive urbanism. By contrast, during the destalinising Thaw after 1956, Paris and other Western cities were understood as centres of architectural invention. Crowley’s essay is based on reports and photographs gathered by young architects to Paris and Moscow before and after the dramatic events of 1956. The article also explores how the knowledge that they gathered in both settings was used in the production of new buildings in the course of the 1950s. This article was commissioned as part of international research project called 'Imagining the West' which was sponsored by the Norwegian Academy of Science. Scholars from various fields and national contexts were asked to explore the image of 'the West' from the perspective of Eastern Europe during the C20th. Adopting a post-colonial perspective, the project was an attempt to reverse the conventional viewing position of much scholarship. The article was first published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History in 2008. It was then reproduced in a book edited by Gyorgy Peteri called Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), pp. 105-130. A review of Peteri's volume from The Russian Review (autumn 2011) described it as a study in ‘both trans-national and trans-systemic history rendered with insight and subtlety that make for an important contribution to scholarship’.