[PDF] Manufacturing A Socialist Modernity eBook

Author : Kimberly Elman Zarecor
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 48,57 MB
Release : 2011-04-10
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 082297780X

GET BOOK

Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country's transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.

Author : Elijah Miller
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,29 MB
Release : 2022-09-20
Category :
ISBN : 9781639895465

GET BOOK

Socialism is one of the various political, social, and economic theories which advocates for collective or government ownership of the means of production. It includes numerous political theories and movements associated with such social systems. Social ownership of the means of production is the one common element of these systems. There are various opinions about the degree of regulation of the economy required, intervention of the society and whether government is the correct means for change. The condition of social existence that is significantly different from all the previous forms of human experience is termed as modernity. This book provides comprehensive insights into the field of socialist modernity. The topics covered in it deal with the core subjects of this field. A number of latest researches have been included in this book to keep the readers up-to-date with the global concepts in this area of study.

Author : Amy F. Ogata
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 512 pages
File Size : 14,53 MB
Release : 2013-04-21
Category : History
ISBN : 145293925X

GET BOOK

The postwar American stereotypes of suburban sameness, traditional gender roles, and educational conservatism have masked an alternate self-image tailor-made for the Cold War. The creative child, an idealized future citizen, was the darling of baby boom parents, psychologists, marketers, and designers who saw in the next generation promise that appeared to answer the most pressing worries of the age. Designing the Creative Child reveals how a postwar cult of childhood creativity developed and continues to this day. Exploring how the idea of children as imaginative and naturally creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II, Amy F. Ogata argues that educational toys, playgrounds, small middle-class houses, new schools, and children’s museums were designed to cultivate imagination in a growing cohort of baby boom children. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, making creativity an emblem of national revitalization. Ogata describes how a historically rooted belief in children’s capacity for independent thinking was transformed from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational ideal that persists today. From building blocks to Gumby, playhouses to Playskool trains, Creative Playthings to the Eames House of Cards, Crayola fingerpaint to children’s museums, material goods and spaces shaped a popular understanding of creativity, and Designing the Creative Child demonstrates how this notion has been woven into the fabric of American culture.

Author : Annie Besant
Publisher : Good Press
Page : 59 pages
File Size : 42,64 MB
Release : 2020-12-08
Category : Nature
ISBN :

GET BOOK

Modern Socialism is a work by Annie Besant. It delves into the topic of finding an alternative to the capitalist system, by interjecting a spiritual basis for transformation.

Author : Judit Bodnaŕ
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 29,12 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780816635849

GET BOOK

"Fin de Millenaire Budapest combines historical narratives and ethnographic accounts with quantitative evidence to create a detailed picture of a city subjected to the forces of great local and global change. In the privatizing of public space, the decline of manufacturing, the rapid growth of services, and the opening of opportunities for entrepreneurs, Bodnar captures global urban patterns - with a distinct, central European accent. In particular, she shows tensions between the liberating and fragmenting effects of the increasingly private use of urban space and some ways in which the new urban patterns both resemble and transcend cultural patterns from Budapest's socialist past."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Ana Miljacki
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 34,43 MB
Release : 2017-02-03
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1315460114

GET BOOK

The Optimum Imperative examines architecture’s multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia’s entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops’ occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzík and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal. Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects’ optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.

Author : Peter Beilharz
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 21,41 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0816660859

GET BOOK

This first collection of Peter Beilharz's highly influential thought traces the themes and problems, manifestations, and trajectories of socialism and modernity as they connect and shift over a twenty-year period. Woven throughout Beilharz's analysis is the urgent question of modern utopia: how do we imagine freedom and equality in modernity? The essays in this volume explore the relationship between socialism and modernity across the United States, Europe, and Australia from the mid-1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century, a time that witnessed the global triumph of capitalism and the dramatic turn away from Marxism and socialism to modernity as the dominant perspective. According to Beilharz, we have seen the expansion of a kind of Weberian Marxism, with the concept of revolution giving way to the idea of pluralized forms of power and the idea of rupture giving way to the postmodern sense of difference. These changes come together with the discourse of modernism, both aesthetic and technological. Socialism and modernity, Beilharz argues, are fundamentally interrelated. In correcting the conflation of Marxism, Bolshevism, and socialism that occludes contemporary political thinking, he reopens a space for discussion of what socialist politics might look like now-in the postcommunist-postcolonial-postmodern moment.

Author : Frederick Engels
Publisher : Good Press
Page : 53 pages
File Size : 29,54 MB
Release : 2021-04-10
Category : Nature
ISBN :

GET BOOK

This book is an excellent introduction for anyone who wants to understand Marxist theory but does not feel ready to dive headlong into Das Capital. It explains socialist theory clearly and then looks at various ideologies connected with socialism.