Cracovia: Ghost of the Local Past or Part of a World-Class Architecture?

SEJKOVÁ, Apolónia. Cracovia: Ghost of the Local Past or Part of a World-Class Architecture? In 13th Conference of the European Sociological Association. 2017.

Základní údaje

Originální název

Cracovia: Ghost of the Local Past or Part of a World-Class Architecture?

Autoři

SEJKOVÁ, Apolónia

Vydání

13th Conference of the European Sociological Association, 2017

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Další údaje

Jazyk

angličtina

Typ výsledku

Prezentace na konferencích

Obor

50000 5. Social Sciences

Utajení

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

Organizační jednotka

Fakulta sociálních studií

Klíčová slova anglicky

cultural sociology, urban memory, postsocialism

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Anotace

V originále

Modernist architecture in the Eastern Block has been mostly labeled as boring, ugly or uninteresting for the past decades. After the fall of communist monopoly on creating urban spaces, the pool of actors with access to shaping the face of cities has been enlarged, which also brought other kinds of “ugly buildings”. This experience, together with a gradual change in the plurality of evaluations of the communist era legacies in the collective memory of East-Central European countries has made it possible to spread the expert discourse on value of (socialist-)modernist architecture. Based on cultural sociological theories of meaning shifts and collective memory in connection with French pragmatic sociology, I want to offer a way to understand the process of reevaluation the meaning of a specific building in Cracow, Poland. Hotel Cracovia, just across the street from Polish National Museum, was built in the 60’s according to plans of architect Witold Ceckiewicz. It had already been planned for demolition, however an intervention by a group of architecture theoreticians in cooperation with activists brought a temporary halt of demolition. Subsequent negotiations didn’t bring much hope to conservationists, until a deus ex machina moment, when the ministry of culture bought the building to make it into a museum of Polish design. But still, the socilaist-modernist architecture critique and justification in a anti-communist discourse continues…