We wanted to give members an opportunity to hear about 2020’s Award-winning work. Join us for an evening with Dr Łukasz Stanek, whose book Architecture in Global Socialism won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion.
This talk will present Architecture in Global Socialism, a book that rewrites the history of global urbanization and its architecture during the Cold War through the lens of socialist internationalism. By focusing on Accra, Lagos, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City, I will discuss how local authorities and professionals in these cities drew on Soviet prefabrication systems, Hungarian and Polish planning methods, Yugoslav and Bulgarian construction materials, Romanian and East German standard designs, and manual laborers from across Eastern Europe. I will explore how the socialist development path was adapted to tropical conditions in Ghana in the 1960s, and how Eastern European architectural traditions were given new life in 1970s Nigeria. In particular, I will show how state socialist design institutes and construction companies exploited the differences between socialist foreign trade and the emerging global construction market in the Middle East during the closing decades of the Cold War. I will argue that these and other practices of global cooperation by socialist countries—what I call socialist worldmaking—left their enduring mark on urban landscapes in the postcolonial world.
Łukasz Stanek is senior lecturer at the Manchester School of Architecture, The University of Manchester. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020). Before Manchester, Stanek taught at the ETH Zurich, and held visiting positions at Harvard University and the University of Michigan.
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