Marxism and Architectural Theory across the East-West Divide

Architectural theory as we know it today is thoroughly informed by neo-marxist theories of the Frankfurt School and others. The legacy of critical thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch has been formative for authors such as Manfredo Tafuri, K. Michael Hays or Fredric Jameson. Later versions of critical architectural theory, which include inspirations from gender studies and postcolonial theories, build upon this established tradition. It concerns a trajectory that is well known and by now well covered in multiple anthologies and handbooks.Marxism however also gave rise to other trajectories and traditions. At a time when architecture cultures in the West were incorporating these theoretical impulses, distinct forms of Marxist architectural theory were being articulated in the countries where Orthodox Marxism was the foundation of political theory - in the USSR and its satellite states in Eastern Europe, as well as in Maoist China. Intellectual exchanges among Western neo-marxists and the Orthodox Marxism of the East were rather limited – Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukacs were major figures bridging, to a certain extent, the divide in the 1950s, but such exchanges, apart from a few exceptions, withered away in the 1960s. Architectural discourse was also strongly affected by the divide, since Eastern Europe and China set out to differentiate their own theories and building practices as much as possible from the modernism in the West. These Eastern trajectories and traditions are today far less well known internationally. They have been understudied because of their relative isolation from international networks of communication in the First World, a factor more stringent for theoretical insights than for technological knowhow. What also played a role is that, after 1989, there was a reluctance in many of these countries to revisit the communist years and to address the communist knowledge production as more than just politically informed propaganda. Now, almost thirty years later, there is a new openness among scholars to ask relevant questions and to study architectural discourse as it unfolded on what used to be the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain. This theme issue asks about architectural theory and its Marxist imprint in the Second World and Third World in the decades of the 1950s through the 1980s, investigating the interconnections between these different countries and traditions and unraveling entanglements with versions of postcolonial or anti-imperialist theories. It offers a first exploration of these issues, aiming at a preliminary inventory of what was going on where and who were some of the key figures. It thus offers necessary ground work for what later could become a more precise mapping of the worldwide impact of Marxist thinking on architectural discourse.

Jaar van publicatie:2019