Who cares for the architectural remains of the recent past? On whose behalf, with what intention and by what means? Our architectural heritage is determined by the answers to these questions. During the last 30 years, the perception of architectural remains from the socialist era has been radically
transformed. Initially subject to general disregard, rejection and devaluation, socialist modernist architecture was rediscovered by young artists, photographers, architects and architectural historians.
Community activists and civic initiatives created a cultural climate of re-appreciation. New perspectives were established through dynamic collaborations which made these specific remains visible and allowed for the reintegration of a conflicted legacy into the public realm. A field of discourse was opened up for the negotiation of this heritage’s public value, challenging by the way the established national systems of heritage preservation. During last year, we invited various expert opinions from central and eastern Europe to participate in a series of online talks on the current state of the modernist architectural heritage in post-socialist countries. The lectures covered questions of architectural history and the construction of cultural identity as well as processes of preservation and mediation of objects still near to us and yet already foreign. In critically discussing current approaches towards the legacy of "socialist modernism", we intended to reflect different experiences and social conditions in a broader European context. Our series of talks took us from Croatia to Uzbekistan, from Poland to Bulgaria, from Brussels to Moscow. It seemed important to stress the transnational connectivity and interdependency of this heritage. After all, shared heritage arises from the awareness of shared responsibility. Likewise, we realized the growing engagement of a younger generation mostly unaffected by own memories of the socialist era.
The lecture will summarize the different insights from these talks in regard to ongoing processes of re-appreciation and the general challenges in conserving modern architecture. It will focus specifically on the agency and historic perspective of those engaged. Different approaches are taken depending on who cares and with what perspective, resulting in different conservation outcomes. The decisions we make are all the more significant where we act for the first time with the intention to preserve. Possibly, the private initiatives and interests in these cultural assets symptomize the particularization of heritage claims, and the accentuation of and fascination with an often derelict state is relinquishing claims of durability, provoking new concepts of permanence.
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Who cares for the architectural remains of the recent past? On whose behalf, with what intention and by what means? Our architectural heritage is determined by the answers to these questions. During the last 30 years, the perception of architectural remains from the socialist era has been radically
transformed. Initially subject to general disregard, rejection and devaluation, socialist modernist architecture was rediscovered by young artists, photographers, architects and architectural histori...
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