The extreme spatial hierarchies of the jingoistic memorials, boulevards, palaces and secret policemen's castles of high Stalinism or of Ceausescu were grotesque, for all their occasionally compelling architectural qualities, and their claim to being in the lineage of any idea of 'socialism' is astonishingly tenuous. Yet the immense housing estates, however much they were a negation of the Marxist idea of the 'self-activity of the working class', were nothing if not egalitarian, if not a total attack on the notion of urban hierarchy, with all the architectural compositions based on the refusal to let any one object take primacy at any given time, and surrounded with a sea of completely public, free space.
No comments:
Post a Comment