Re-humanizing Architecture. New Forms of Community 1950-1970

The two-day international conference ‘Re-humanizing Architecture: New Forms of Community 1950-1970’ will open a forum for current research in the history of architecture and urbanism in Europe aiming to produce a new comparative picture of architectural transfer and competition in the early period of the continent's political divide.

Since the end of World War II, Europe has undergone several phases of building and re-building under the influence of different political systems and, connected to these systems, different ideas concerning the built environment and its production. State-socialist countries and capitalist welfare states alike enlisted architecture and urbanism in the organization of new social and economic environments not only to meet basic needs, but to establish new forms of community and cultural identity. While the two systems initially embraced ideological and aesthetic difference, discourses that emphasized the functional and rational aspects of modern architecture became characteristic for economic recovery on both sides since the late 1950s. Nevertheless, across Europe protagonists such as Team X urged for a re-establishment of traditional and regional patterns in order to "humanize" environmental design. They proposed new forms of community, criticizing functionalist principles of urbanism as propagated by the CIAM.
The conference addresses the question how different actors (architects, theorists and intellectuals, public planning institutions, and others) have developed concepts, strategies, and models to meet human needs in modern industrialized societies. By placing them in the context of intellectual debates around New Humanism, aesthetic concepts such as (Socialist) Realism and philosophical currents like Existentialism we seek to re-assess the role of alternative discourses and spatial concepts about the forms of community in post-war modernization processes.

Keynotes: Wojciech Balus, Hilde Heynen, Béla Kerékgyártó, Annie Pedret, Cor Wagenaar

To attend this conference, please register by sending an email to professur.moravanszkygta.arch.ethz.ch. The conference fee of CHF 30 should be paid upon arrival. The fee includes morning and afternoon coffee, the program and book of abstracts. Students are free to attend but asked to register, since seats are limited.

PROGRAM

ETH Zürich, Campus Hönggerberg, Gebäude HIL

FRIDAY 16 MAY

9.30 –10.00, HIL H 40.4
Registration

10.00 –11.00
Hubert Klumpner (ETH Zurich)
Dean’s Welcome

Ákos Moravánszky (ETH Zurich)
Introduction

11.30 –13.00
Annie Pedret (Seoul National University)
CIAM and the »spiritual needs« of people

Béla Kerékgyártó (TU Budapest)
Was humanized socialist modernism possible after all?


14.30 –16.30
Panel A1 Architects and programs, HIL H 40.4
Session Chair: Mateusz Kapustka (University of Zurich)

Vladimir Kulić (Florida Atlantic University)
Bogdan Bogdanović and the search for a meaningful city

Sven Sterken (KU Leuven)
Urban planning and Christian revival. The Institut Supérieur d’Urbanisme Appliqué in Brussels under Gaston Bardet, 1947–1961

Luca Molinari (Second University of Naples)
Re-humanizing post war Italian architecture. Giancarlo De Carlo in Urbino and Terni, 1958 –1972


14.30 –16.30
Panel A2 National perspectives, HIL H 40.9
Session Chair: Karl R. Kegler (ETH Zurich)

Dana Vais (TU Cluj)
Social efficiency and humanistic specificity. Double discourse in Romanian architecture in the 1960s

Erik Sigge (KTH Stockholm)
From new empiricism to state structuralism. Failed attempts of re-humanizing Swedish governmental architecture, 1950 –1970

Sigrid Brandt (University of Salzburg)
Socialist Realism in the GDR as »other modernism«

17.30 –19.30
Keynote lectures, HIL E 4

Hilde Heynen (KU Leuven)
Architecture as construction, places of encounter and civic centers. Snapshots of architectural debates in postwar Europe

Wojciech Bałus (Jagiellonian University, Cracow)
Mieczysław Porębski. Man and architecture in the iconosphere


SATURDAY 17 MAY

9.00 –10.00, HIL H 40.4
Cor Wagenaar (TU Delft)
Similarities and differences in the planning of new housing estates in the Western welfare states and the socialist countries in Central Europe


10.30 –12.30
Panel B1 Transfers and encounters, HIL H 40.4
Session Chair: Tom Avermaete (TU Delft)

Renata Margaretić Urlić and Karin Šerman (University of Zagreb)
Case New Zagreb. Evolution of models and strategies of socialist community building

Marcela Hanáčková (ETH Zurich)
Three examples of »humanistic« architecture in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s

Mejrema Zatrić (ETH Zurich)
New ways of abstraction. Architects’ operative concepts and the (re)visions of modernist epistemology in the East and in the West


10.30 –12.30
Panel B2 Urban and rural, HIL H 40.9
Session Chair: Laurent Stalder (ETH Zurich)

Karin Hallas-Murula (Tallinn University)
Sociological and environmental psychology research and the critique of Soviet mass-housing

Juliana Maxim (University of San Diego)
The microraion as socialist village. The vernacular ideal and the new housing districts in Bucharest, 1955 –1965

Nelson Mota (TU Delft)
Dwelling in the middle landscape. Reconciling art and nature in mid-1950s architecture of rural communities


14.00 –16.00
Panel C1 Public space and everyday life, HIL H 40.4
Session Chair: Torsten Lange (ETH Zurich)

Nikolas Drosos (NGA, Washington)
Together we build. The synthesis of the arts in a divided Europe during the 1950s

Iliana Veinberga (Art Academy of Latvia, Riga)
Our battlefield is invisible. Public space and formation of non-conformist groups in Soviet Latvia, 1960 –1970

Elke Beyer (IRS Erkner, Berlin)
From new elements of settlement to the Old Arbat. The Soviet NER group’s search for socialist urbanity and spaces of community in the 1960s and 1970s


14.00 –16.00
Panel C2 Spaces of escape, HIL H 40.9
Session Chair: Judith Hopfengärtner (ETH Zurich)

Susana Constantino (University of Coimbra)
Between city and university. New monumentality as a humanistic counter-image for the architecture of Estado Novo’s rhetorical apparatus

Domonkos Wettstein (ETH Zurich)
Desire for innocence? Collectivity and regional architecture on the lake Balaton, 1957–1968

Michael Zinganel (Vienna)
Unexpected side effects of international mass tourism at the Croatian Adriatic coast


16.30 –18.00, HIL H 40.4
Final discussion