Housing a New Identity

HOUSING A NEW IDENTITY

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE SYMBOLIC VALUE OF THE HOUSE IN POST-SOCIALIST POLAND

JAKUB RYNG

1

"Life in the towns and villages will have overcome the legacy of greyness, uniformity, anonymity, and ugliness inherited from the totalitarian era. It will have a genuinely human dimension.

Every main street will have at least two bakeries, two sweet-shops, two pubs, and many other small shops, all privately owned and independent. Thus the streets and neighbourhoods will regain their unique face and atmosphere. Small communities will naturally begin to form again, communities centred on the street, the apartment block, or the neighbourhood. People will once more begin to feel the phenomenon of home."

Vaclav Havel Summer Meditations1

This is an essay about the house, taken as a metaphorical construct, pertaining

1) Havel, V., 1992. Summer meditations. Trans. P. Wilson.

to the expression of self-hood and self-identity through architectural means.

New York: Alfred Knopf. p.104.

While drawing on the extensive literature theorising on the topic of house symbolism accumulated throughout the ages across many disciplines, I have

2) Simmel, G., 1906. The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies. American Journal of Sociology, 11(4).

opted to situate the conceptual house in post-socialist Poland. This particular interest is based upon the premise that the economic, social and most importantly cultural transformations that had taken place in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Block exerted a considerable and lasting influence not only on the form, but also the meaning of the contemporary single-family dwelling. To this extent, I argue, that the fall of the socialist system brought about a radical return to the Enlightenment notion of a house as an instrument of self-expression or, in the words of Georg Simmel, of "property as an extension of the ego"2. In addition, I also attempt to address the recent theoretical analogies drawn between the post-modern and the post-socialist identities and examine its bearing on the concept of the postsocialist house. In some respects, the essay can therefore be viewed as an attempt at a socio-cultural substantiation of the present-day landscape (or is it cityscape) of the Polish suburbia with a particular emphasis on post-socialist residential development.

In terms of its structure the essay is divided into three parts. Part I will isolate the house as a concept and present it in light of the wide body of literature, supporting its characterisation as the apparatus of self-hood. This will then be transposed onto the territory of post-socialist Poland in Parts II and III, with the hope of clarifying the mechanisms behind the processes, which have taken place in the Polish suburbia over the last quarter of a century.

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Part I: Consolidating the Meaning of the House The belief that a house should suit its inhabitants is one which in some ways permeates the entire history of architecture, throughout time and across the globe. Borrowed from the ancients and developed during Renaissance times, the principle of decorum stipulated that the design and decoration of a building must reflect the owner's status, wealth and lineage - all within a specific socio-cultural setting. It was only upon the arrival of Enlightenment thinkers, most notably John Locke, when the concepts of property, privacy, labour and selfhood opened up hitherto unexplored channels of architectural communication3. Increasingly designers became preoccupied with expressing in their works, traits and characteristics, which went beyond the owner's social rank, and moved onto much more individualistic qualities, such as their "character, occupation and history", to quote John Ruskin in his Seven Lamps of Architecture 4.

Linking the increasing dependence on the house as a means of self-expression with the growing forces of suburbanisation, one can discern two distinctive ways in which this metaphorical status is achieved: first - through the physical isolation of the property away from the city and, ideally, the neighbours, second - through a variety of architectural and stylistic treatments, both on the interior and exterior of the house.

The gradual retreat from the medieval house model of a casual community ushered in the eighteenth century paradigm of incessant withdrawal into one's dwelling and the wilful exclusion of the world beyond it5. The natural means of achieving this sense of isolation were indeed, in moving out of the city. To this extent, 3) Archer, J., 2008. Architecture and Suburbia: From

the pursuit of privacy and personal identity can be described, after John

English Villa to American Dream House, 1690-2000.

Archer, as contrapositional to the urban6. As Jurgen Habermas has put it: the

Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press. p.27.

private, detached house, situated away from the urban centre, "provided the

4) Ruskin, J., 1989. Seven Lamps of Architecture. New York: Dover Publications. p.182.

bourgeois family with its consciousness of itself"7. Simultaneously, an everexpanding architectural vocabulary comprising a variety of available styles and typologies presented the owners with material means of expressing their

5) Williamson, T. and Bellamy, L., 1987. Property and

aesthetic preferences, which often were a manifestation of their personal

Landscape: Social History of Landownership and the

identity, occupation or political allegiance. From the 18th century onwards, a

English Countryside. London: George Philip.

6) Archer, p.27

growing body of published pattern books would serve to advise the swelling home-owner population on their stylistic decisions. The American architect Andrew Jackson Downing suggested for instance the use of "Grecian or

7) Habermas, J., 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity. p.44.

Roman style" for the "classical scholar", "modern Italian style" for those with a "passionate love of pictures and especially fine landscapes", "baronial castle" or perhaps a "castellated dwelling" for the wealthy and a "Tudor villa"

8) Downing, A. J., 2013. A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. London: Forgotten Books. p.412.

for the gentleman8.

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Upon the endemic rise of the middle class suburban home in the twentieth century, the optimism and idealism, which characterised much of the earlier house building, seemed to have waned - at least amongst the upper-classes and the intelligentsia. Especially in the post-war years many theorists embarked on a fervent crusade against the suburban house, which William J. Newman had portrayed as "a sort of fortress where the self can be attained"9. Their criticism was directed chiefly against the suburb's notorious homogeneity and isolation away from the public sphere. The premise was that in a manner somewhat analogous to Gaston Bachelard's conception of the house-owner relationship, the standardised houses will produce standardised individuals. Arguing against this harsh indictment were the various theorists of lateand post-modernity. By the end of the century, their focus seems to have appropriately shifted to studies of consumption. In a spirit echoing Walter Benjamin's optimistic portrayal of mass consumerism, theorists like Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Daniel Miller have argued that in today's world consumption becomes the primary mechanism of identity-creation and positioning oneself within a social structure, prompting Russell Belk to proclaim: "We are what we own"10. In this context the house, as described by James Duncan, becomes "an extremely important aspect of the built environment, embodying not only personal meanings but expressing and maintaining the ideology of prevailing social orders"11.

9) Newman, W. K., 1957. Americans in Subtopia. Dissent.

43. p.257.

10) Belk, R., 2000. Are We What We Own? In: Benson, A.L., ed. I Shop Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for Self. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. p.76.

11) Duncan, J., 1981. Housing and Identity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. London: Croom Helm. p.1.

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5

Figure 1 Four photographs depicting Polish 'kostka' houses built largely throught the 1970s.

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Figure 2 Stills from the Polish TV series Alternatywy 4 first aired in 1986.

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Part II: The Post-Socialist House The rise of the suburban freestanding house in the last 25 years of Polish history can hardly be detached from the plethora of changes - political, economic, cultural and sociological - that have swept across Central and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet system. In some ways, its emergence and subsequent metamorphosis can serve as a kind of barometer of the set of ideological transformations that have taken place. Having set up a theoretical basis for the house as metaphorical facilitator of selfhood in the first section of the essay, this part will trace the development of Polish domestic architecture in a time and place defined by Manuel Castell's concept of a frantic "search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed" serving as the "fundamental source of social meaning"12.

For a comprehensive overview of the set of mutations, which the polish house has undergone, one must look first at the pre-revolutionary situation of the communist years. This was a landscape characterised by Vaclav Havel, as one full of "greyness, uniformity, anonymity and ugliness"13. Following the tenets of modernist urban design, most people were housed in "prefabricated high-rise blocks and other gigantic housing developments"14. Since the public, communal space was given priority, privacy came in the compromised form of miniscule flats15, and sometimes not even then. The failures of this communist modernity to contain peoples' private lives within a set of four sheetrock walls, is perhaps best illustrated in the satirised form of the Polish TV series Alternatywy 4, in which the residents of a certain block of flats are constantly plagued by leakages, noise spillage, crumbling walls and ceilings (Fig. 2). Semi-professional advice in the form of lifestyle magazines, focused

12) Castells, M., 1997. The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. p.3.

mostly on rational, ergonomic solutions to cope with the shortcomings of the housing sector. Dwelling - was essentially presented as a problem to be tackled on a daily basis16.

Individuality and self-expression were also suppressed. As Sonia Hirt marks in her study of the post-socialist city, "uniformity of design and construction prevented individuals from expressing difference or deviating from the norm"17. Even in the form of the detached dwelling,

13) Havel, p.104.

14) ibid., p.104.

15) The average usable area of dwelling in 1988 was 59m2 - 30% below Western European standards.

Leszek, J., 1991. Housing. In: Blazyca, G. and Rapacki, R., eds. Poland into the 1990s Economy and Society in Transition. London: Pinter. p.68.

which emerged as an alternative to blocks of flats during the 1970s, was monotony impossible to shake off (Fig. 1). Based on a limited range of designs, published in governmental catalogues, the houses, which in their

16) Jewdokimow, M., 2011. Zmiany społecznych praktyk zamieszkiwania. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego. p.170.

appearance hardly deviated from the prefabricated aesthetics of the highrise blocks, soon came to be known by their hardly affectionate nickname: "klocki", translated simply as "little blocks".

17) Hirt, S. A., 2012. Iron Curtains: Gates, Suburbs and Privatization of Space in the Post-socialist City.

Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons. p.106.

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The transition to capitalism was as swift and wide-reaching as it was unexpected.

Upon the euphoric importation and implementation of the doctrines of neo-liberalism, taken as the most potent formula for socioeconomic restructuring and revival18, the housing sector was to be rebuilt completely. A legal and economic revolution brought about a multitude of changes to both the supply- and the demand sides of the market. The former included the mass restitution and privatisation of suburban land, the privatisation of the building sector and the weakening (just short of a complete eradication) of the planning system19. The latter comprised commercial pressures on the downtown, a shortage of public investment in urban areas and the rapid increase in car ownership, all of which contributed to a mass exodus away from city centres20.

And yet, there was much more to the suburbanisation process taking place, than simple economic reasons.

As Hirt argues in her account of suburbanising Sofia, echoing Archer's and Robert Fishman's theories on the eighteenth- and nineteenth century roots of bourgeois suburbia21, the rise in popularity of the detached, suburban house in Poland was largely a "cultural phenomenon", triggered by - to quote Lewis Mumford - "the collective effort to live a private life"22. In the same vein, the architecture of the typical suburban house can thus be read as a physical manifestation, or indeed, the final coagulation, of this ideological process, infused with the individual's needs and aspirations.

18) Sykora, L. and Stanilov, K., 2014. The Challenge

Specifically, these include the emerging desire for isolation and fortification,

of Postsocialist Suburbanisation. In: Sykora, L. and

the employment of stylistic devices to differentiate oneself from others, as

Stanilov, K., eds. Confronting Suburbanization: Urban Decentralization in post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Chichester: Wiley & Sons. p.9.

19) Hirt, p.106.

20) ibid., p. 106.

21) Fishman, R., 1987. Bourgeois utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia. New York: Basic Books.

22) Mumford, L., 1938. The Culture of Cities. London: Mariner Books.

well as the wider mediating forces of a national search for identity.

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Figure 3

A New Privatism From its beginnings in the early 1990s, suburbanisation in Poland has been described by researchers as a form of urban escapism23, bringing to mind Archer's concept of contrapositional migration. For the most part this has manifested itself in a popular glorification of country life. Dorota Mantey's study of Warsaw's suburbs cites pleasant environments and tranquillity as the main reasons for moving out of the city given by the new residents (72 and 67 percent respectively), ahead of other concerns such as lower land prices or lower building cost24. Similarly, surveys of public opinion suggest that the single-family detached dwelling has become the most

23) See for example Hirt, p.107. or Lisowski, A., Mantey, D., Wilk, W., 2014. Lessons From Warsaw The Lack of Coordinated Planning and Its Impacts on Urban Sprawl. In: Sykora, L. and Stanilov, K., eds. Confronting Suburbanization: Urban Decentralization in postSocialist Central and Eastern Europe. Chichester: Wiley & Sons. p.241.

24) Mantey, D., 2009. Wybrane społeczne aspekty żywiołowej suburbanizacji w południowo-zachodniej strefie podmiejskiej Warszawy. In: Maik, W., ed.

Aglomeracje miejskie w Polsce na przełomie XX i XXI. Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane WSG. p.367.

desirable housing option for 83 percent of the population at the turn of the century25. Nourished by a romanticized portrayal of country life in Polish

25) Kaltenberg-Kwiatkowska, E., 2005. Warunki

TV programs such as Away from the City, or foreign imports like Escape to

mieszkaniowe w świadomości społecznej. In:

the Country, the public perception of suburban living became increasingly

Frąckiewicz, L., ed. Przeszłość i przyszłość polskiej polityki mieszkaniowej. Warsaw: IPiSS. p.155.

idealised. "Peace and quiet", "paradise", "fairy tale", "dream idyll", "oasis", "refuge" - those are some of the phrases used by the new suburbanites upon

26) As noted by Katarzyna Kajdanek in Springer, F. 2013.

making the decision to move out of the city26.

Wanna z Kolumnadą - Reportaże o Polskiej Przestrzeni.

Wołowiec: Zarne. p.34.

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Taking this individual isolationism one step further is the prevailing phenomenon of dwelling fortification and securitisation. Based partially on Faith Popcorn's concept of cocooning, taken as a way of "insulating oneself from the harsh realities of the outside world, and building the perfect environment to reflect one's personal needs and fantasies"27, this process is perhaps best summarised by Hirt's theory of privatism, a kind of nihilistic antithesis of the socialist-modernist preoccupation with the public and the communal. Physically manifesting itself in a proliferation of walls and fences (Hirt coins here the poetic term: "new iron curtains") as well as the increasing obsession with security and monitoring devices2/, the phenomenon finds justification in the results of a survey undertaken in 1998 to gauge the public understanding of the concept of "home", in which the majority (32 percent) of respondents described it as predominantly "a place of safety, a haven, a refuge, a shelter - the house as a place protected from the influences of the world"29.

The architectural manifestations of the manic quest for seclusion are as crude and blatant as one would expect. Beginning with the late 1980s a new aesthetic can be traced in the design of Polish single-family housing - the castle dwelling. While there appears to be no precise definition of what constitutes such a house - indeed the contradictory aesthetics escape any conventional stylistic classification - there are a number of possible distinctive features: castellated parapets, circular or hexagonal tower elements, small, historicising windows, a fortress-like, vertical disposition. A less verbose, but equally intimidating take on this theme is offered by Robert Konieczny's design for a villa outside Warsaw, emphatically christened the Safe House (Fig. 4). This dark-grey cuboid alternating between a villa by day and a fortress by night, reliant on a number of mechanical elements (sliding walls, rotating panels, 27) Quoted in Krier, B. A., 1987. The Essence of Cocooning. Los Angeles Times. 7 August.

28) A review of the content of the popular house building magazine Murator across the decade from 1990 until 2000, reveals a growing number of articles concerned with various means on how to protect one's home.

29) CBOS, 1998. Czym Dla Polak贸w Jest Dom? Przemiany W 呕yciu Codziennym Polskiej Rodziny [pdf] Available at: <http://www.CBOS.pl>.

a drawbridge) is perhaps the high-tech apotheosis of the Polish obsession with domestic security and privacy.

11

Figure 4 Safe House designed by Polish archiect Robert Konieczny.

Okrzeszyn near Warsaw.

12

A cross-section of the covers of the Murator magazine from the years 1990-2000.

13

14

Figure 5 Five house desings of the New Polish Romanticism.

Drawn up by the Polish archiect Beata KazimierskaKorsak.

Alabaster Sphinx

Grand Palais

Villa Mefisto

An Englishman's Polish Dream

Polish Ranch

15

Figure 6

Image and Identity Somewhat paradoxically, this physical withdrawal away from anything remotely public, has been accompanied by an unprecedented explosion of stylistic and aesthetic exuberance. Marked by a definite desire for difference and discontinuity, this kind of domestic architecture employs colour, scale, style and history to achieve a quality of permanent anti-contextualism30. Its abundance is particularly perplexing given the high degree of ethnic homogeneity of the Polish population31, largely disqualifying attempts to explain it by cultural differences.

On the whole, the proliferation of this chaos seems to have predominantly relied on appropriating existing models of dwelling, often derived from foreign importations. A close examination of the early issues of the popular house building journal Murator in the 1990s, reveals an intense fixation particularly with American suburban houses . Cultural

30) Hirt, p.170.

31) Szczygielski, K., 2008. Geografia mniejszości narodowych i etnicznych w Polsce. Ujęcie ilościowe.

Opole: Wydawnictwo Instytut Śląski. p.27.

32

borrowings, like the ABC-produced TV series, Dynasty, first emitted in

32) A review of the content of the popular house building magazine Murator across the decade from

Poland in 1990 (9 years after its original premiere in the "free world"), or

1990 until 2000, reveals a great number of American-

its CBS precursor Dallas, featuring sprawling oil-funded mansions, seem to

inspired designs, especially in the early 1990s. Many

have ignited in the popular subconscious an intense desire to recreate this

issues also feature interviews with US architects

capitalist dream at home - even if only a fraction of it33. Simultaneously, this

commenting on Polish house building.

search for an identity overseas has been accompanied by a rise of, what some

33) Wiśniewski, M., 2010. Dom z Ziemi Polskiej.

of its proponents have termed, New Polish Romanticism. This essentially

Autoportet. 2(31), p.16

amounted to a historicising emulation of the traditional houses of the Polish nobility originating in the seventeenth century34. The confusion of

34) Choptiany, M., 2010. Skazani na Dwór. Autoportet.

2(31), pp.8-13,

influences, both foreign and nationalistic, is perhaps best conveyed by the names of some of the residential designs from the 1990s: Alabaster Sphinx, Grand Palais, Villa Mefisto, An Englishman's Polish Dream or The Polish Ranch35 (Fig. 5).

35) All are names of designs produced by the architect Beata Kazimierska-Korsak available on her website at: Domy Polskie, 2014. Domy Polskie [online]. Available from: <http://www.domypolskie.pl/.>.

16

An insightful reading into the phenomenon is offered by Marcin Jewdokimow's study of Polish lifestyle changes following the transformation, in which his examination of popular home decorating magazines at the start of the new millennium reveals a striking evolution of the attitudes towards dwelling: in the post-soviet world, the house is no longer portrayed as a functional challenge, to be dealt with using rational thinking and efficient furniture layout; instead it is elevated to the status of an existential task - a vehicle for the creation of the self36. The thesis holds true in spite of the fact that the vast majority of single-family houses built in the post-socialist years are ready-made projects to be picked out of a catalogue (researchers estimate the ratio of customdesigned to catalogue houses at 1:2037). The proliferation of paper and online design catalogues offering uncounted options and unlimited modifications has taken the process of home-identity formation to another level. Websites tend to divide up their schemes into a variety of "styles", sometimes under rather dubious names: suburban, modern, traditional, fantastical, manor house, rustic, castle38. Some companies vow to pick the ideal design for their prospective clients, using online applications, which assign "dream houses" based on a series of lifestyle questions39. Is this the twentyfirst century equivalent of a pattern book: the ultimate replacement of architectural ingenuity by an algorithm?

36) Jewdokimow, p. 170.

37) Przesmycka, N., 2012. Kierunki rozwoju budownictwa jednorodzinnego w Polsce na tle tendencji europejskich. Budownictwo i Architektura. 11. p.31.

38) This particular selection was taken from the search engine of a website called DOM.pl.

DOM.pl, 2015. DOM.pl. [online] Available at: <http://pracownia-projekty.dom.pl/> 39) sointeractive, 2010. Archon Dom Twoich Marzen. [online]. Available at: <http://www.sointeractive.pl/portfolio/archon/>

17

Figure 7 A set of house designs from Archon Studio, showing the flexibility and possible variations in the style of each project.

Figure 8

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Part III: Analysing the Dream As the first part of this essay makes clear, the search for isolation and individuality within the confines and character of one's house may be as universal as the concept of housing itself, and therefore hardly unique to the Polish setting. In recent times, the theorists of late- and post-modernity have offered useful criticism, which may help situate the Polish house within a larger geo-political sphere. Of particular relevance here are the contributions of Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman, both of whom have written extensively on the increased significance of the individual in today's world.

Before any extensive analysis can take place, however, an important conceptual connection must be established between the premises of post-modernism and the reality of post-socialism. In an attempt to make sense out of the rapid set of revolutions that have swept across Central and Eastern Europe, many theorists have tended to view the collapse of the Soviet Block as indicative of the failures of modernism as a whole.

Bauman, famously described communism as "modernity's most devout, vigorous and gallant champion"40. More importantly for the argument in this essay, he goes on to portray socialism's downfall as the "most resounding defeat of the modern project" and "the most spectacular triumph of post-modern values"41. While the particulars of this close affinity between post-socialist and post-modern societies are complex and numerous, suffice it to say, that they have both been characterised by the rise of laissez-faire neo-liberalism, the shrinking of the public sector, a new cultural pluralism and subjectivism and, as Jean-Francois Lyotard, might

40) Bauman, Z., 2003. Intimation of Postmodernity.

have put it, a departure from "meta-narratives" .

London: Routledge. p.179.

42

It is against this background, where modern institutions such as class

41) ibid., p.25.

or community have suffered continuous dissolution, that Beck proposes the

42) Lyotard defines post-modernity as "incredulity

concept of individuation understood as an individual's "compulsion to find

toward metanarratives" in Lyotard, J. F., 1984. The

and invent new certainties for oneself" - a "compulsion for the manufacture, self-design, and self-staging" of one's life43. The prime mechanism for this

Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.

G. Bennigton and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p.24.

new form of identity-creation, he argues, is consumption. There are clear echoes here of Miller's anthropological approach to modern consumerism, which holds that individuals often appropriate objects - including mass-

43) Beck, U., 1994. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order.

Stanford: Stanford University Press. p.14.

20

Your house is your success

Figure 9

21

produced objects - in order to "utilise them in the creation of their own image"44.

In the case of post-socialist Poland there seems to be no better object - and it is by and large, a mass-produced one - than the self-contained, single-family house, ushered in, with all its stylistic options and permutations, by the neo-liberalism of the transformation. Bauman's own succinct definition of the individuation process as the transformation of "human identity from a given into a task"45 bears a striking resemblance to Jewdokimow's description of the changing attitudes in popular lifestyle magazines discussed earlier. The economic hardships and socio-cultural liminality of the transition, marked by a sense of "ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy", as Mariusz Czepczyński characterises the period in his study of the post-socialist landscapes46, are also highly reminiscent of Beck's portrayal of late-modernity and his allusions to the "disintegration of certainties"47. Under these circumstances, the need for consumerist individuation becomes quite relatable.

And yet, there is more to the post-socialist suburban landscape, than this postmodern lethargy. As various scholars have argued in relation to the post-socialist city as a whole, the post-socialist house must in some ways transcend the simple comparison with the post-modern one48. One might argue that in its determined drive for individuation, the Polish house is more westernised than the western home, and, by extension, more post-modern. The extensive reasoning behind such a reading is complex and as such beyond the scope of this essay. I would however, like to propose one particular interpretation to do with the emergence of, what could be termed,

44) Miller, D., 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p.175.

oppositional identity in the post-socialist reality.

45) Bauman, Z., 2001. Identity in the Globalizing World.

Evident in many sociological texts on the developing identities of the

Social Anthropology. 9(2). p.121.

Polish people is an alarmist trend, pointing to the emergence of a radicalised

46) Czepczyński, M., 2008. Cultural Landscapes of

concept of negative freedom (freedom from-, rather than freedom to),

Post-Socialist Cities: Representation of Powers and

based partially on George Konrád's model of anti-politics, positioning the

Needs. Adlershot: Ashgate. p.113.

individual as necessarily turned against the wider society in an ultra-sceptical

47) Beck, p.14.

stance49. Crucially, the unitary basis for this new individualism is depicted as the nuclear family and there seems no better place to practice this amoral

48) Czepczyński and Hirt ask similar questions

familialism than the confines of one's house. More importantly though, the

with respect to the post-soviet city in, respectively:

sense of oppositional identity, is also provided by the continued presence of

Czepczyński, p.151. and Hirt, p.66.

the socialist remnants in the post-socialist reality - whether they are physical

49) Sidorenko, E., 2008. Which way to Poland? Re-

or psychological. In this sense, the process of individualisation described

emerging from Romantic unity. In: Cox, T. and Myant,

above, takes on a new retrospectively antithetical character. The house,

M., eds. Reinventing Poland: Economic and Political

consequently becomes a vehicle for contrast and negation of the past.

Transformation and Evolving National Identity.

London: Routledge. p.121. also see Sztompka, P., 1993. Civilizational Incompetence: The Trap of PostCommunist Societies. Zeitschrift fur Sociologie, 2, p.94.

22

The architectural implications of this phenomenon are numerous but most are based on crude oppositions. The modernist preoccupation with the public, was inevitably answered by mass privatisation. By the same token, the post-socialist aversion to flat-roofs has inevitably led to daring experimentation with pitches, mansards, domes, towers. The popular perception of the communist years as times of greyness, inexorably resulted in an explosion of colours in the new reality. A paint manufacturer's advertisement from 1995 (Fig. 11) sums it up perfectly: Stalin's most enduring architectural gift to Warsaw, the 231 meters-tall Palace of Science of Culture is presented here painted in a multitude of colours; the company's slogan proclaims "rainbow against the greyness". Turning once again to television, one could perhaps point to the American reality series Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which arrived to Poland not long after its original premiere. Somewhat humbler in scale than the TV makeovers, but certainly more extreme in their ambitions, are the many conversions of the communist "Kostka" houses left scattered around Poland. Whether the transformation was achieved through the simple act of repainting the exterior or completely remodelling the roof, the popular need seems to have generated a market of Figure 10

its own, with growing numbers of architects offering new drastic solutions to perform this architectural surgery50.

Ironically, it would seem, the ongoing architectural experimentation around the Polish house, has earned the more conspicuous specimens, the rather unflattering nickname of Gargamel - the evil wizard and chief antagonist of The Smurfs saga. The term has been used extensively in both popular and professional press51 as a derogatory term pointing, conceivably to the building's apparent ugliness and lack of contextual considerations. And yet, a closer reading of some of the socio-political interpretations, spun around the TV programme, reveals an interesting parallel to the Polish post-socialist condition. The utopian community of the Smurfs has for quite some time been portrayed as the ultimate apotheosis of the Marxist-communist ideals, consequently positioning Gargamel as the personification of the hostile capitalist dogma. The analogy to the post-modern, anti-contextual Polish house, conceived in a spirit of opposition to the failed modernising project of communism, is most likely coincidental and, at best, subconscious. It nonetheless, provides an interesting insight into the contrapositional origins

50) Geremek, R., 2010. Klocek Bywa Piekny. Newsweek.

7 September.

51) For examples of the latter see for instance: Rozwadowska, E., 1997. Gargamele czy Styl Narodowy?

Archiektura-Murator. 7. pp.52-54.

of the identities embedded in the post-socialist Polish house.

23

Figure 11

The Colours of Freedom

Believe what you see! We are giving you a true set of colours. Pure, healthy and permanent colours. Thousands of colours that will help change your reality. Let everyone finally feel the change. Inside their own home, on their very own walls.

Beckers Rainbow against the Greyness

24

Conclusion In recent years, the aesthetics of the Polish suburbia, the breeding ground for the Polish post-socialist house, have come under severe criticism from all sides. While the academic offensive has indeed been in place for quite some time52, a slow rise in popular press articles, critical of the new "suburban dreams" has also been noted53.

Lately, even the very top of the Polish officialdom seems to have joined in, with the President initiating a comprehensive report on Poles' living conditions54, and the former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Radosław Sikorski lamenting the "chaos and kitsch" dominating the public realm of today and calling for a new (presumably national) "distinguishable style"55. And yet, as this essay has attempted to show, the imagery related to the Polish house has a much more complex, ideological derivation related in a considerable part to the process of identity formation in a post-socialist state. If statistics are any indication of the their widespread popularity, then the current post-modern landscapes are indeed a populist creation56. As Hirt argues in her account of the post-socialist city, they comprise "a post-modernism of the masses"57. Crucially, in the attempt to rectify the communist past and legacy, the house is used as the prime beacon of a new oppositional identity based on negative freedom. Vaclav Havel's daydreaming about a utopian, post-socialist community, have hardly come true. In the hands of the Polish house-builders George Konrád's antipolitics, seems to coagulate into Hal Forster's anti-aesthetics.

52) See for example. Lisowski, A. and Grochowski, M., 2008. Procesy Suburbanizacji. Uwarunkowania, Formy i Konsekwencje. Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press.

53) Kajdanek, K., 2012. Suburbanizacja po Polsku.

Cracow: Nomos. p.16.

54) Sepioł, J. 2014. Przestrzeń Życia Polaków [pdf]. Available at: <http://www.sarp.org.pl/ pliki/1908_53fdc64bb3140-pzp_spistresci_1.pdf.> 55) Agencja Prasowa. 2013. Sikorski: Polska potrzebuje własnego stylu. Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych. 24 April.

56) According to a 2010 study an overall majority (82%) of Poles find the built environment around them pleasant and attractive. CBOS, 2010. Polacy o Archiekturze [pdf]. Available from: <http://www.CBOS.pl> 57) Hirt, p.172.

25

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