The optimum aesthetic
de Ana Miljacki
The pas de deux of ideology with a capital "I" produced by party and state officials and ideology as the constellation of narratives that the Czech architectural profession relied on to propel its daily activities was a peculiar Second World dance, unlike anything that the postwar First World architects experienced. Proposing that the Second World specificity of postwar Czech architecture is located in its continual disciplinary struggle to describe and approximate its own ideological role within the larger logic of the building of socialism in Czechoslovakia, this dissertation reconstructs the postwar Czech project of optimizing architecture. The project of constructing utopia through optimizing its architecture was completely prefigured by the Second World's central myth--class struggle coming to an end in socialism--and was anticipated in the mid 1940s and reformulated in the 1950s and 1960s within the same underlying ideological framework. This dissertation examines three different instances of the Czech postwar discourse that correspond to each of these decades and were directly involved in articulating what was at stake in architecture under socialism. The work begins with the last pre-war years of the Czech functionalist discourse and the wartime expansion of functionalism that introduced the issue of poly-functionality as the appropriate architectural analytic. At the threshold of the socialist era in Czechoslovakia, in the immediate postwar theoretical work of Karel Honzík, Bohuslav Brouk and Ladislav Zák, poly-functionality tended towards the conception of lifestyle both as an analytic and as its specifically socialist manifestation. The post 1948 work of Karel Honzík continued the thread of lifestyle into the 1950s and 1960s. This dissertation follows Honzík's work in detail setting up the larger disciplinary context around it, eventually examining the discussion around the most important architectural project of the late 1950s: the Czech pavilion for the 1958 Brussels Expo, which solidified the program for a total, synthesized work of architecture, whose purported "synthetic totality" was its ultimate message. The only way to figure utopian aspirations at the moment of the loss of utopia's image from within it--both spatially and temporally--was still through a spatial concept, a synthetic environment. The hopeful and reformist 1960s were in large part still determined by the ideological tentacles from the previous era, as all of the aspects of the 1960s reform were imagined from within the system. From an increasingly differentiated architectural field, this dissertation singles out the practice of a particularly progressive group of architects from Liberec in the 1960s. Their work and practice are seen as one of the few plausible alternatives to a neo-avant-garde that the Second World could offer. What is at stake in this work is, on one level, a basic introduction of some of the trends of the architectural discourse of socialist Czechoslovakia. On another level, even though we know the class-less society of the Second World to have been a myth, its products and practices were determined by its utopian aspirations, both sincere and ideological. The only way to release those aspirations is by smashing open the products and practices in question against the ideology that allowed and requested their existence, while accepting the "naive sincerity" released in the process as a manifestation of the indispensable ghost of our own utopias.
