Current Issue

2021 / The Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones 31

The 31st issue of Notebook is devoted to “Architecture and the Voice of the People”. The texts have been selected by the guest editor Hubert Guzik from the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University (ČVUT). In particular, this issue will examine how state socialist regimes worked with sociological data on the housing needs and wishes of the inhabitants of housing estates. The authors represented are from various countries, and the topic is investigated in the form of four studies and one review. In the first text, “Propaganda, Mission, and Public Opinion”, Krzysztof Mordyński examines a survey conducted by the communist authorities at the start of the 1950s among the inhabitants of the socialist-realist Marszałkowska Residential District (MDM) in Warsaw. Eva Novotná’s article “Sociological Surveys of the First Half of the 1960s and the First National Housing Debate” looks at a more extensive survey carried out in Czechoslovakia slightly later. Like Mordyński, Novotná highlights the tension between the regime and architects who were trying to incorporate the identified needs of the general public into their designs. In this respect, the situation was particularly difficult in Romania, where sociology itself was either banned or subject to severe restriction, a topic examined in “A Strained Relationship” by Dragoṣ Dascăl. In the final essay of this issue, Karolina Jirkalová looks at the anachronistic basis of a survey conducted in the 1980s by a team headed by Jiří Musil, which was subsequently published in the book Lidé a sídliště (People and Housing Estates). This issue of Notebook concludes with Milena Bartlová’s reviews of two historical monographs relating to the broader context of the topic under consideration: Architekti dlouhé změny (Architects of the Long Change, by Kopeček et al.); and Řídit socialismus jako firmu (Running Socialism like a Company, by Sommer et al.)

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