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Comment by agrostis | Hacker News Reader

I share your opinion that post-WW2 architecture is nightmarish, but do you seriously think that it has to do with political pressure exerted on the architects and engineers by communist authorities? Compare Warsaw with, e. g., Rotterdam, another city which suffered wide-scale destruction in the war. Netherlands never had a communist government, Rotterdam consistently elected its mayors from the ranks of liberal parties (PvdA and VVP), and the engineers there were presumably Dutch rather than Soviet. The results, however, if we talk about the architecture of re-built city sections, were as dismal as in Warsaw. The same goes for other Western European cities extensively developed after WW2: Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Milan, Nantes, you name it.

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It has. I would really like to enlighten you somehow, but I don't know how to do it in short, so I can only redirect you to reading about Warsaw reconstruction history, look for names/keywords like Bierut, Gomułka, who they were and what they did for/to Warsaw. You can take also a look at the link from my other comment.

I pretty much know the context — I'm from Moscow, we had it no less tough here than you Varsovians. Still, I stand to it that the degradation of architectural aesthetics in the second half of the 20th century was not limited to the Eastern bloc.

Yeah, but ugly is one thing, around here they wanted to make sure Warsaw gets stripped away of its history and culture (and they accomplished it not only by architectural decisions). Making the new version of Warsaw a place much less pleasant to live compared to the pre-ww2 one was kind of part of the plan by the party. The impact was huge and that's why people even from Poland or even some from here just don't like it as a whole, not only how it looks. (Future establishments also made a lot of mess here on top of it, but that's another story)

One thing I can agree is that cities that had to be rebuilt share the common thing that they are often an architectural mess and by that means they are ugly. Let's compare say, Berlin (which actually I like, because I feel it's a better version of Warsaw), even the west part, and gorgeous Prague.

> we had it no less tough here than you Varsovians.

I know.

> Netherlands never had a communist government, Rotterdam consistently elected its mayors from the ranks of liberal parties

Ba aware that to many conservative Americans, "liberal" is pretty much the same thing as "communist".

Hmm. One funny thing is that VVD, one of the parties in question, is generally labeled as “conservative-liberal”. Your average American con would probably suffer a mental breakdown when trying to sort it out. (I'm conservative myself, by the way, whatever that might mean here in Russia.)

It's because the US version of conservatism in most of the world is called liberalism.

Hm, not really. The problem is that the USA has a two-party system where each party is in favor of some of the tenets of classic liberalism (civil liberties on one hand, a lightly regulated and taxed economy on the other) but opposed to others, and somehow "liberal" was chosen as a label for the pro-civil-liberties side, ignoring the other aspects of classic liberalism.

In other parts of the world, you have more parties, which makes room for liberal parties that are in favor of both gay marriage and tax breaks for the rich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_Sta...

"The meaning of "conservatism" in America has little in common with the way the word is used elsewhere. As Ribuffo (2011) notes, "what Americans now call conservatism much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism."[21]"

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