Post-war/Cold-War in the Region

Abstract

Khan-Magomedov’s publication Pioneers of Soviet Architecture (1987, English translation) provided scholars outside of the socialist world with an introduction to what we now know as Russian Constructivist architecture and how it gave shape to the early ideals of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Sigfried Giedion did not mention the Constructivists or the entire field of Soviet and Soviet-influenced architecture in Europe in his seminal Space, Time and Architecture. In fact Soviet architecture barely rated a mention aside from in the work of a small group of specialist scholars in the late 1960s. European and North American scholarship on the Bauhaus eventually introduced the Constructivists and looked elsewhere as a response to the perceived ills of architecture in Western Europe. At the time of Khan-Magomedov’s publication, a massive compilation and examination of previously unseen visual and documentary material, western architectural historiography especially in the English-speaking world was at best uninformed, at worst disinterested in architecture of the communist and socialist world. For those working and teaching or learning in western institutions, architectural history was missing the part played by the architects and educators in the communist and socialist worlds. Once the moment of the Constructivists was appropriated into the teleology of the western avant-garde, the architectural shaping of communist and socialist society beyond the 1920s was further distanced and increasingly derided. And yet after World War II, a paradox emerges. The “postwar” is a predominant trope for the history of modern architecture and its instrumental role in the modernisation of society; but how can the post-war be conceptualised as separated from the Cold War, when both are internal to the same periodisation of history? It is the tension between this chronological overlap and yet discursive absence that has given rise to the theme of this issue of Fabrications, and which is presented by the formatting of the diagonal slash, reminiscent of the theoretical double coding of the 1990s, a decade that marks the end of the Cold War. Following the defeat of Hitler and Nazi Germany by Stalin’s Red Army in 1945, the world was caught in the grip of a political confrontation between the USA and the USSR, one which dominated the international environment for more than 40 years (1947–1991). While the Cold War meant the end of WWII in Europe, wars erupted in the Asia-Pacific region, most obviously in Vietnam and Korea, but also in Indonesia, Malaysia and Cambodia to name just a few. The Cold FABRICATIONS 2021, VOL. 31, NO. 2, 147–152 https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2021.1938815