Brokers of Modernity

Kohlrausch, Martin

doi:10.2307/j.ctvcwnzhj

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The transnational flows of ideas and knowledge, inter-war legacies, war destructions, ideological and socio-political tensions, state and administrative limitations all led to the emergence of novel planning concepts, in particular the formulation of Doxiadis' Ekistics, whose focus on settlements and housing developed in dialogue with the growing field of international planning expertise in the post-war era (Mehos and Moon 2011;Pyla 2013;Lagae and De Raedt 2014). By focusing on rural settlements and the Greek countryside, this article goes beyond the prevailing focus on town planning and the rebuilding of urban centers, thereby offering another perspective from which to revisit European reconstruction and its various policy-making legacies and planning trajectories (Lampland 2011;Clapson and Larkham 2013;Pendlebury, Erdem, and Larkham 2014;Diefendorf 2015;Moravánszky and Hopfengärtner 2016;Wampuszyc 2018;Kohlrausch 2019). Moreover, it highlights a crucial episode in the post-war architectural and planning histories, which became intricately tied to the geopolitics of the Cold War, the international and national agendas for the socio-economic development of rural-based societies that spread across the non-western world from the 1950s onward (see, for example, Muzaffar 2012;Phokaides 2018;Karim 2019a).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

Phokaides

Samarinis

Triantis

et al. 2021

Architectural Histories

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This article investigates the complex ties between planning, socio-political conflicts, and emerging Cold War geopolitics during the post-war reconstruction period in Greece, by focusing on the years between 1944 and 1947. In these crucial transitional years, transnational flows of expertise, interwar legacies, and political, scientific, and ideological contestations gave rise to novel planning ideas and antagonistic visions for the country's reconstruction and its future development path. The article sheds light on how the architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis formulated Ekistics as a spatial vision, a mode of central planning, and a technical guide, examining how Ekistics affected the shaping of reconstruction policies, particularly in the countryside. This analysis further exposes the way the Greek countryside became the locus of competing visions of spatial development, as well as contradictory state responses: from long-term housing policies and self-help practices all the way to ideological repression and population resettlement strategies, British interventionism, and Civil War conflicts that paved the ground to Greece's subsequent US-led recovery programs under the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshal Plan (1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952). By focusing on the paradigmatic case of Greece, this article advances an understanding of European reconstruction as an uneven, contested, and transitional process and highlights the implications of architecture and planning discourses and practices amid ideological, territorial, and geopolitical contestations.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

Phokaides

Samarinis

Triantis

et al. 2021

Architectural Histories

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“…Although the two academic professions of architect and construction engineer became the formal expression of the long-standing 'sibling-rivalry' between architects and engineers in the twentieth century, 23 the fact that specialists were in very short supply helped avert professional tensions between engineers and architects in Lithuania. The first Congress of Lithuanian Engineers and Architects that convened in Kaunas in 1924 led to the founding of a joint Association of Lithuanian Engineers and Architects.…”

Section: National Modernism: the 1930s Generation And Aesthetic Debatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Migrant modernists: The making of national architects in Lithuania in the 1930s and their survival strategies in the 1950s

Drėmaitė

2020

J Mod Eur Hist

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The new national states that emerged on the European map in 1918 following the collapse of the great European empires in the wake of World War I became enthusiastic participants in the race to modernise, hoping to keep pace with global trends and become more European in the process. Renewal was the central goal of many European cities. This was particularly so in the newly restored cities or those newly designated as administrative capitals such as Kaunas, which became the provisional capital of the Republic of Lithuania from 1919 to 1939. These cities faced similar challenges: ridding themselves of imperial pasts, architectural legacies and symbols, changing their urban environment, creating new political centres and constructing new government facilities. The question of national architects became similarly important. Through the lives of the modern architects who were compelled to change their citizenship or suffered exile, forced migration or genocide, we can study the effect of social and political change, and in particular political ruptures. This paper follows how architects, collectively as well as individually, developed as a modern group of socially engaged intellectuals in 1930s. It then considers how they reacted to political changes, such as the first communist occupation of Lithuania in 1940, the subsequent Nazi occupation in 1941, and the return of the Red Army in 1944, when most of the architects in private practice emigrated to the West. Finally, it illustrates how those architects who remained adapted to the new political rule in Soviet Lithuania in the 1950s.

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“…22 Yet these controversies profoundly changed the architect's profession in the first half of the twentieth century and cemented its role as engaged brokers of modernity and social change. 23…”

Section: Racing To Modernity In Post-imperial Eastern Europementioning

confidence: 99%

Modernist architects and the age of extremes in Eastern Europe, 1920-1950: Introduction

Kohlrausch

Bocharnikova

2020

J Mod Eur Hist

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This article demonstrates the social and political impact of modernist architects in Europe’s age of extremes beyond the narrower confines of architecture. In East Central Europe with its ideological tensions, massive socio-political ruptures and eventually the establishment of communist regimes, architects’ social visions and the states’ aspirations led to intense interactions as well as strong controversies. In order to unravel these, we stress the relevance of modernism as a belief and knowledge system. In so doing we point to often unacknowledged continuities between the interwar and the immediate post-war period thus re-politicising the work of modernist architects as a project of worldmaking in the context of competing ideologies and sociotechnical imaginaries.

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Brokers of Modernity

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

Claiming the Countryside: Ekistics, Socio-Political Conflicts, and Emerging Cold-War Geopolitics During Greek Reconstruction

Migrant modernists: The making of national architects in Lithuania in the 1930s and their survival strategies in the 1950s

Modernist architects and the age of extremes in Eastern Europe, 1920-1950: Introduction

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