Let me start with Agata’s remark that my selection of cases explored in the book resembles the work of a curator because I think this idea also helps to address Daria and Steve’s introductory note about the methodological tools available for the study of socialist and postsocialist urbanity. I find this analogy indeed quite appealing. Being a sociologist, and thus operating under constant methodological anxiety over having to justify my case selection (i.e., sampling) strategy by strict disciplinary standards, the work of a curator has always appeared to me not only a lot classier but also more autonomous. A curator also tries to construct a larger narrative through carefully assembled fragments but is often allowed to have more of an individual voice. Yet, this does not mean that curators can make arbitrary decisions about what to include or exclude in an exhibition. They do need a strong conceptual agenda that clearly and effectively frames the individual pieces.

I am actually not stretching this metaphor to cleverly evade Agata’s more specific questions about how the book’s overarching narrative would change if I had opted for a different combination of case studies for the various historical phases. Indeed, I believe that the overall story would still hold up because although the specific building projects might differ, the central themes that organized architectural discourse and practice as well as the larger political logics that shaped them would remain nearly identical. For instance, if I had decided to focus on Hungary instead of East Germany in the 1950s, I would still find that architecture was primarily instrumentalized for political propaganda to inscribe a new political system in space through representative projects, and Hungarian architects were also searching for an architectural vocabulary that was “national in form and socialist in content” as demanded by Soviet-style socialist realism. Similarly, the “European city” motif and references to “Europe” as the ultimate benchmark featured prominently in the post-1989 reimagining of Budapest even if obviously, the scale of building activity never even approximated that of Berlin (as Budapest did not embark on a Stalinallee-like extravaganza in the 1950s either).

But the shape of the story is also in part a level of analysis issue. Comparative studies of several countries adopt more of a bird’s eye view where the main contours of the landscape dominate over fine-grained details.  Yet, as one zooms in on individual countries the nuances of the local context come into sharper focus.  In the book I tried to mix these two angles: using a broad comparative logic for selecting my cases and then zooming in on them, putting them under the microscope.  Now, this mix-and-match strategy may not be entirely convincing to everyone, but I think it was still worth experimenting with.

Existing comparative strategies feel somewhat stale and formulaic even though there is increasing need for sophisticated comparisons that capture transnational and global exchanges and are supported by a bolder and more diverse methodological imagination.  I think edited volumes that bring together experts on individual countries around a loosely defined set of themes do not always do the trick; they can be informative but often fall short of their theoretical ambitions. They also strongly reinforce a broader trend that still considers individual countries or cities as the legitimate and nearly exclusive units (and lenses) of analysis. There are sporadic attempts to move beyond this methodological status quo, for instance, by focusing on what the cultural geographer Jane M. Jacobs calls “instances of repetition” that often crop up in vastly different political, geographical and cultural contexts. They are repeated urban forms  that can include building types (e.g., residential high-rise, prefabricated public housing project, shopping mall, gated community) but also travelling urban policies or urban planning and development paradigms (e.g., new urbanism) and can offer entry points into comparative research. Jane M. Jacobs’ own project on the residential high-rise or Florian Urban’s recent book, Tower and Slab, which looks at the contested history of the modernist mass housing block in Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Brasilia, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Moscow, illustrate the potential of this analytical strategy.

Let me now quickly turn to Elidor’s very important points about modernism and the role of the “vernacular”. I agree with both Elidor and Juliana that modernism now risks becoming a catch-all phrase that obfuscates rather than clarifies our understanding of postwar developments. Nevertheless, I am afraid that it is also a term that we cannot do without. But the concept of modernism needs to be deepened both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, it is important to highlight the distinctions as well as the linkages between aesthetic modernisms, social modernization, and modernity as a historical project.  In addition, to me modernism has always been primarily an empirical question. I tried to show in the book how the meanings of modernism were multiple and changed over time even in the same country. Moreover, modernism also proved to be a relational concept, usually defined vis-à-vis real and imagined geopolitical units (“Europe”, “the West”, the USSR, etc.), historical legacies, and the “vernacular”. In the case of Hungary, and I would say in Germany as well, modernism was often explicitly or implicitly defined in opposition to the “vernacular” as the chapter on the Tulip debate shows. But Elidor is right in pointing out that in many other Second World countries the vernacular was not antithetical to modernism but became incorporated into it; though in my view the vernacular still remained an important reference point. Thus, one possible research scenario is to try to map the range and changing configurations of the meanings of modernism to discover patterns of similarities and differences while trying to better understand the political, social and cultural reasons for the apparent variation.

Virág Molnár, The New School for Social Research

The book’s argument is that architecture’s role in the process of state formation in East Germany and Hungary has changed over time: from “a tool of political representation” (in the 1950s, a decade marked by the crowning of socialist realism) to “a weapon of social reform” (during the all-consuming preoccupation with the housing question in the 1960s), as a medium for the “recovery” of national forms (in the 1970s), and, finally, in the 1990s, as a platform for integrating the former socialist states into a European community. Architecture as instrument, in other words, and not merely a manifestation of power. “As such, in both periods,” Molnár writes, “architecture became part and parcel of a grand civilizational project: of communism in the 1950s and of capitalism and re-Europeanization in the 1990s (169-70).

The author makes a good case for organizing the book as she does: four case studies that highlight specific professional debates and, in her view, functions of architecture, with two drawn from Hungary (1960s-1970s) and two from East Germany (the debates on socialist realism in the 1950s, and the projects on Berlin after 1989). The expansive chronological emphasis is another departure from conventional approaches, and much of what is lost in detail and historical nuance is gained in terms of sharp and suggestive analytical insights.

But I will focus on the Hungarian chapters here, simply because the East German debates are largely familiar to specialists (and East Germany is mainstream in the study of socialist states). I also do so because the Hungarian chapters constitute, in my view, the major contribution of this book. We do not merely obtain a competent overview of the emergence of industrialized building techniques in 1960s Hungary, but an intelligent analysis of the architectural profession’s ambivalent response to it. Industrialization was a powerful answer to the housing dilemma (shared across the Second World), but it was also a kind of bind for architects who dreamed of experimentation. And whereas, say, in unreformed Albania, experimental souls (like the architect Maks Velo) were thrown into prison for invoking modernism, in Hungary experimentation became possible.

Take, for instance, Elemér Zalotay’s radical ideas about a massive “strip house” of collective housing (which at one point found a sympathetic audience in none other than the Hungarian Communist Youth Organization). Though ultimately rejected, Zalotay’s bold visions were seriously debated among Hungarian architects. In this part of the book, the professional debates come alive, and we get a sense of the enormous stakes at play—stakes that can be easily overlooked in histories of architecture that gloss over the economic and political context. It is where the author’s insistence on the analysis of professions, not merely architectural models, delivers the most resonant example.

In addition to the state-sponsored industrialization effort, Molnár tells us, in Hungary, “self-help” housing construction—informal self-built dwellings—continued to pop up in villages, small towns, and the outskirts of larger cities. Aesthetically unassuming, these structures were scorned by architects, who saw them as tasteless displays of provincialism. But the dwellings spread so widely that some observers thought they were actually standard prototypes, like the monotonous factory-made housing units dotting the larger cities. Standardization, in other words, took place even when it was not sanctioned from above. Self-help housing was embarrassing to a state that was supposed to provide everything; it exposed the underbelly of the socialist construction industry: shady deals, scavenging for building materials, and “private” activities that formally had no place under socialism – not even the Hungarian “goulash” variety.

The discussion of informal construction under socialism is important for another reason. Molnár rightly resists the urge to see informal construction as a kind of “political resistance” against the socialist state. Instead, she sees material manifestations of social inequality and an architectural elite that was largely a product of the system itself – its idealism, arrogance, and elitism. Architects, the author concludes, “inadvertently ended up supporting the state’s simplified approach to housing construction” (101).

Similarly insightful is the discussion of the Tulip Debate (1975-6), a period when “a group of architects in southern Hungary embarked on building a prefabricated housing complex with a ‘human face’” by introducing surface decorations (tulips, stripes, TV-shaped frames). The ensuing heated arguments among Hungarian architects on this issue, in Molnár’s analysis, show that modernism was reshaped in Hungary according to the specific demands of the state and the architects. This kind of adapted modernism allowed Hungarian architects to reclaim cultural links to the West, as well as their pre-Soviet past. Still, “vernacular” flourishes on prefabricated concrete panels could be found far and wide, from the outskirts of Tirana to Central Asian capital cities (as many issues of Arkhitektura SSSR will attest). And while Molnár insists that her local examples have broader implications for what she refers to as “Central Europe,” one wonders how the interpretation presented in her pages would hold up to an expanded field encompassing countries that lacked an immediate claim to modernism (or to “the West”).

A related question emerges: At what point is modernism so transformed as to become something else? The Hungarian examples presented in this volume are so rich as to make the reader wonder whether it is necessary at all to continue to locate modernism (or, in this case, “postmodernism”) behind the Iron Curtain, and thus mirror the anxieties of the architects under study. It would be worth here picking back up Juliana Maxim’s question (posed in a previous review in this forum): “[H]as modernism become our new de-facto operational category, the largest matryoshka of architectural history, able to accommodate within its roomy contours everything that was built in the 20th century’s second half, regardless of geographical or political context?” Molnár’s highly suggestive work seems to suggest that analyzing the obsessive relationship between major Eastern bloc architects and modernism can still produce results. But the gesture towards the study of institutions, professional imperatives and conflicts, and informal practices under central planning is far more compelling.

Elidor Mëhilli

Hunter College of the City University of New York

Molnár investigates the changing relationship between politics and the built environment in two Central European states: Hungary and the former German Democratic Republic. She analyzes various ways that architecture and urban planning were mobilized politically in the service of both social modernization under communism and the later postsocialist transformations. Molnár’s focus is on architecture “as a profession and an arena of social knowledge production not simply as an aesthetic discourse or technical practice” (16). She combines strategic case studies with historical ethnography and encourages the reader to consider her chapters as “analytical narratives” on the multifarious interactions between architecture and state formation.

Rather than delivering a conventional comparative study, Molnár illustrates various points of intersection of architecture and politics with select cases from (East) Germany’s and Hungary’s postwar histories. The chapters are organized around the following topics: architecture as a tool of political representation (socialist realism and postwar urban reconstruction in the GDR); architecture as an instrument of social reform (mass housing in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s); architecture as a cultural medium to reclaim national identity (the multiple meanings of architectural modernism in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s); and architecture as an urban strategy of “re-Europeanization” (rebuilding post-Wall Berlin).

The selection of the chronologically ordered cases is admittedly arbitrary, but nonetheless compelling and has left me wondering what other urban projects and buildings the author could have considered. If we were to imagine a sequel to this book with a reverse order – i.e., one in which the first and last chapters focus on Hungarian cases and the two middle ones on GDR cases – which urban plans and strategies would Molnár choose to analyze? Would the narrative remain the same or would a different selection of cases irrevocably alter the bigger story Molnár is trying to tell? The author stresses that despite the Soviet Union’s undeniable control over the region, its satellite countries developed their own unique strategies of (re)imagining and (re)building the state and that architecture and architects were particularly important in these processes. If we consider only the intersections of architecture and politics, Molnár’s argument would probably hold ground regardless of the choice of cases. If, however, we want to understand architecture, politics, and state formation in post-war Central Europe, as the book’s subtitle suggests, the selection of cases becomes not only instrumental for the book’s structure, but also highly political.

In her decision to pick several cases without placing them within a rigid comparative framework Molnár resembles a curator and, indeed, Building the State could serve as a great basis for an architecture exhibition. Molnár’s book stands out also because of the sensitivity and insightfulness with which the author approaches her topic. The actors she describes are not merely famous names, but personalities. Each chapter has its main protagonist as well as several supporting characters. In the chapter on socialist realism in the postwar GDR, Molnár not only points at the pivotal roles Kurt Liebknecht and Walter Ulbricht played in shaping the built environment, but also helps us understand what motivated them. In the two middle chapters, Máté Major emerges as the leading architectural theorist of socialist Hungary and Elemér Zalotay as Hungarian architecture’s radical visionary. Finally, Hans Stimmann is identified as the mastermind of post-1989 changes in Berlin’s urban landscape, eagerly applauded by a circle of so-called “Berlin architects” (Hans Kollhoff and Jürgen Sawade, among others) and criticized by prominent international architects (Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas) and architectural critics, particularly from the former GDR (Wolfgang Kil, Bruno Frierl).

Though she stresses the importance of architects and urbanists, and places them among the main actors behind state building strategies and practices, Molnár is far from glorifying them as a group and reveals countless cases of elitism, corruption, or sheer opportunism among the professionals. She also demonstrates the falsity of the widespread belief that architects in socialist countries were separated from the professional debates in the West. Hungarian architects, for example, were integrated into international professional networks since the 1950s (109) and had both institutional and informal access to architectural discourses beyond the Soviet Bloc. It is precisely because of the international nature of architectural discourses in general that this particular type of professional is so fascinating to study within the context of the Cold War and post-1989 globalization. As Molnár argues, “professionals … are always compelled to look beyond national boundaries but are then confronted with having to apply their knowledge locally, caught up in the local power dynamics of their society.” (16) Through her focus on select architectural discourses at various points in Hungary’s and the GDR’s postwar histories and by scrutinizing the articles, interviews, and manifestos of leading Hungarian and (East) German architects, urbanists, and theorists of the time, Molnár demonstrates that architecture is “not merely a reflection but an instrument of social modernization and political power; it is broadly deployed to physically construct and periodically reproduce a new political system” (16).

Agata A. Lisiak is the author of Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe (Purdue UP, 2010). She is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the TRANSFORmIG project at Humboldt University in Berlin and currently a Junior EURIAS Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.