Cold War and Architecture: The Competing Forces that Reshaped Austria after 1945

Abstract

agency of Eastern European architects and planners should not be ignored, who actively employed this discourse of difference to secure new commissions overseas, to claim more resources back home, and to make sense of their deployment abroad. Stanek also characterises Eastern European architectural labour in the Global South as postcolonial. He illustrates how the arrival of Eastern European architects was perceived as offering the hope of breaking the vicious circle of postcolonial underdevelopment in which the damage inflicted by colonial dominance could be undone only with the resources and knowledge from the former colonisers. While a radical break from that circle had not been achieved, Stanek suggests that the presence of socialist design labour certainly complicated the scenarios and offered alternative possibilities. Stanek conceptualises practices of global cooperation between socialist and developing countries as socialist worldmaking, but the conception remains under-developed. While the term “worldmaking” was coined by Nelson Goodman (1978) to conceptualise worlds as malleable constructs based on different views, theories, or workings of the world, Goodman has not been mentioned at all in the book. Édouard Glissant’s notion of worldness (mondialité) is only mentioned in passing. Lacking fuller explication of the notion of worldmaking, the difference between worldmaking and globalisation Stanek seeks to articulate remains obscure. His arguments on socialist worldmaking could be further strengthened by offering more evidence and analysis on its effects from the perspectives of developing societies under study. It would also help to add an assessment on how this contributed to the building of the Soviet Union as a global player in the carefully controlled game of the Cold War through both material and discursive processes. Despite these minor problems, Architecture in Global Socialism makes a significant contribution to both Cold War studies and architectural history. Based on extensive archival research, Stanek offers an insightful and integrative historical investigation into Cold War modernism by showing its global actualisations as continually shifting geometries of multiple determinations and heterogeneous actors among diverse sites. Illustrated with a good range of previously unpublished images and written in an accessible style, this interdisciplinary book will interest both scholars and general readers.