Demolishing Soviet Modernism
tribunemag.co.uk
tribunemag.co.uk
But that photo from Makhachkala looks rather pretty and on a human scale. I imagine when the trees are green it must be a nice place (judging only from this one photo, don't know it IRL).
[1] The Ship https://www.google.com/maps/@55.7108903,37.6218164,3a,75y,21...
These things aside, for someone visiting Crimea, for example, these buildings do matter a lot. They basically move you in time. You can actually get a strong feeling of things that you know maybe from very early childhood or mostly from books or documentaries. It is very, very different from anything you could see in the West.
I agree it's indeed pretty ugly, but if you want to destroy every building looking that ugly, you will have to tear down half the cities in Europe -- and probably also many other places.
Honestly, without the written cyrillic, this could be many places in e.g. France or Italy.
Because you were lucky enough to avoid the worst parts:
- Paris: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8235336,2.3674101,3a,75y,342...
- Marseille: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2890541,5.437606,3a,75y,185....
- Toulouse: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.5804085,1.4105313,3a,75y,287...
Tolouse is not pretty - one of the Corbusier's or Corbusier-inspired crimes, but at least it does not have the scale.
That said even a tall and long building doesn't have to be dramatically bad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falowiec#/media/File:GDANSK,_F...
I live in Paris; believe me, the best and the worst are two streets away. There are quarters in the 18th or the 13th that make OPs photo look like a dream.
https://itinerrance.fr/app/uploads/2019/05/head-fresques-bou... https://p1.storage.canalblog.com/11/75/1224518/120815785_o.j... https://www.blackandwood.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Paris...
Now there is a lot of subjectivity here, and to be honest, I'm not fond of the Warsaw building either, so I might be a very poor judge of modern architecture.
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What I suppose they're driving at when they say that "expedition" carries "orientalist associations" is that describing a trip to post-Soviet states in today's world as "an expedition" is reductionist in that it implies those places are akin to the savage frontier into which Europeans and Americans ventured in search of land to appropriate from the indigenous populations.
Now, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a Dagestan native might take umbrage at a trip to their home being referred to as an expedition, as if Dagestan is wild and untamed frontier ripe for staking land claims and colonization. It's somebody's home, hypothetically.
But considering the author is a Russian who probably speaks English as an nth language, I'm not so sure that I'd agree with the TFArticle's characterization of the term "expedition". I speak French and my command of the vocabulary is not nearly as good as in English for me. Words have subtext and nuance, and unless you master a language you're bound to choose inapt words that might give off the wrong connotation inadvertently.
It reads like virtue-signalling to me on the part of Valeria Costa-Kostritsky.
Somewhat ironically, the "Orientalism" you are referring to is an American-centric interpretation, which doesn't really have global acceptance as a theory. Orientalism was attempted to be redefined single handedly redefined in 1978 by an American professor (Edward Said with a book of the same name).
Notably, America is pretty unique in considering "oriental" an offensive term - Europe & elsewhere use the term freely without any negative connotations.
You are wrong, some do, some don't. I would debate that its reduction is usage is because of the negative connotations, but let's leave it at that.
Edward Said has been hugely influential also in Europe's academia and intellectual discourse. I would also be astonished if there had been no influence in "the orient".
I'm betting that the "offensiveness" of the term, if it ever takes root here, would likely be a invasive American import than homegrown.
that's not true - a friend of mine, an European academic in (east) Asian studies - told me the whole academic field in Europe considers the term outdated and incorrect.
That's an interpretation I never heard. Here in France (and in Europe as far as I know), Orientalism is an artistic current from the 18th to the early 20th focused on taking inspiration from the faraway, exotic, attractive Eastern cultures. To make a crude comparison, it would be much closer to “weeaboos” (albeit larger in scope, ranging from Maghreb to Afghanistan) than to the White Man Burden.
Although there were a lot of cliches born there (the Turkish harems, the Arabian cheikhs, the wild and free Bedouins, the proud and fierce Afghan warrior, etc.), there was definitely no feeling of need of settling or taming, as the whole point was the fascination for these cultures that hadn't really seeped through Europe until then.
The artistic cliches were froth that made these distant locations somewhat comprehensible to home audiences. Not incidentally, they also sold them as investment opportunities and potential locations for personal commercial and military adventures - and occasionally artistic and erotic adventures too.
Just like nowadays, exhibiting a taste for Vietnamese or Bengali culture doesn't imply that you are a staunch supporter of children's slavery, 19th century people fantasizing about lascivious odalisques and fierce Cheikhs or Byron writing about Transoxania doesn't have much to do with the Concessions harbours.
> Orientalism is an artistic current from the 18th to the early 20th focused on taking inspiration from the faraway, exotic, attractive Eastern cultures.
You’re not wrong, but Said’s work really changed the way that movement is generally understood.
With all due respect to Said, I'm not yet willing to accept the complete redefinition of a term well-anchored in European art history for over two centuries on the basis of a book by a single American scholar -- book which is, moreover, highly debated by other academics of the field.
Your original response to parent was “I haven’t heard this before, so it must be wrong”. That’s a very boring way to approach the world.
Now you’ve pivoted from saying the usage is unfamiliar to dismissing it as “highly debated by other academics in the field”, implying that you are familiar with it after all! Okay.
Anyway, what a weird hill to die on.
It's rather that all of the definitions of orientalism I have been taught both at home, at school, and in the literature revolve about culture, all the uses of it I have witnessed talk about culture, I have read Salambo, Zadig, and other classics, I have visited museum filled to brim with European paintings from the period depicting odalisques, harems, bedouins, tuaregs, mosques, fantasia, Turkish baths, city drooling of sun on the Mediterranean, I have assisted to Les Indes Galantes, Der Entführung aus dem Serail and the Italian in Algiers, and the only mention I heard of Orientalism being used in this meaning comes from a few Americans, and a mention in the US wiki stating “Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, much academic discourse has begun to use the term "Orientalism" to refer to a general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies”. So no, I don't intend, for now, to replace the semantic of this centennial word because of a controversial publication.
> implying that you are familiar with it after all!
Familiar with it, as “I just read the wiki page of the author, which is extremely critical against the book”.
And when they do they are often built to a gigantic scale that is drafty and relatively exposed.
Nooks and crannies vs 90 degrees of flat concrete.
Brick, wood, stone vs stainless steel and glass.
Window sills with moulding you can sit on. That's warm because its made of wood.
Which buildings look closer to a prison?
Modern architecture has been such a mistake.
And this has nothing to do with my political views.
In fact it makes me sad that poor folks more commonly have to deal with living in these bland monoliths.
Monumental, uncompromising modernism to me expresses the desire to boldly go, as a civilization, and conquer nature both inside and outside of us. Today this desire is very controversial for pretty much all mainstream sensibilities - but I don't think we should rob the future generations of a chance to interact with this on their own.
Regarding Warsaw specifically, most of those monuments are still in existence because they didn’t depict actual people, only generic workers. There were plenty of other monuments of individual political leaders that have been torn down since the collapse of the USSR.
In any case, many of these buildings are interesting but I’m not sure I’d ascribe a positive aesthetic opinion to them. Most of the best urban design in ex-Soviet countries is in pre-Soviet cities.
Surely not - what does is declaring one's taste the main test for demolishing stuff or not. It may not be strictly architecture, but for a long time in the 20th century folklore scholars refused to document things that weren't "pure" enough in their folkloriness, but were "contaminated" by references to the urban/modern culture. We lost quite a bit of cultural history because of that. There should be some humility here, the generations after you can have different tastes.
> Especially when much of it was forced upon the populace at the point of a gun.
I can sympathize in some of that logic - that's why I said that we should have the right to move or alter things that are blatantly against our values. It's good that the monuments of Lenin and such were torn down. But if we follow that to the extreme, maybe the whole historical city of St. Petersburg should be demolished (if you know how it was built), and the Pyramids, and maybe even most of the old royal residences and castles around the world.
Warsaw is filled to the brim with Socialist Realist architecture, which itself was far, far more political than basically any form of pre-20th century architecture like that found in St. Petersburg. It was explicitly designed to convey an ideological program that was forced upon the country.
It’s also the remnant of a state which terrorized and oppressed the country for half a century. Not to mention that Warsaw was only rebuilt because the Soviets let the Warsaw Uprising fail and then let the Nazis destroy the city block by block.
It’s a false equivalence.
All that aside, I’m sure there will be plenty of the buildings preserved for posterity. I wouldn’t worry too much about that...there are simply so many of them.
I'm not saying what the good values are, this is purely your invention. The only thing I assume is that maybe people want to be led by some coherent logic in what they do, regardless of the specific values that they have. Aside from pointing out that destruction, well, destroys things.
The old architecture wasn't built because it was just "pretty" either. If you don't see oppressive politics and an ideological program that was forced upon the country in tsar Peter I's works it just means that you 1) are forgetting some history, 2) aren't reading the architecture close enough (as mainly art historians are taught its deeper idioms) or 3) just care less about things than happened a sufficiently long time ago. Which is what will also happen with people's perception in the future, sadly or not.
edit: I didn't see your last paragraph when writing my response, and maybe wouldn't be prompted to write if I did. All I can say is, maybe.
BTW I find the centres of some US cities with their very dense skyscrapers and always shadowed streets as much bad and distopian.