Workshop: Politics & Architecture

Pushkin House invites to join the workshop, exploring the topic, how does architecture interact with people’s everyday lives; and how does is it deployed (and manipulated) by political and economic power brokers. This workshop will focus in particular on the relationship between politics and architecture in Eastern Europe (especially Russia and Poland) during and after the socialist period.

The workshop will begin with a focus on two architectural case studies, both of which are the centre of Michal’s research: the Stalin-era Palace of Culture in Warsaw (and its life after the fall of socialism in 1989); and Moscow’s Zaryadye Park, newly opened in the shadow of the Kremlin (and nicknamed Putin’s Paradise by sceptical locals).

What Moscow’s Palace and Warsaw’s Park have in common with buildings in London and elsewhere. What other Palace and Paradises – as well as purgatories and hells – are we familiar with? How are these Palaces and Paradises and Purgatories linked to political decisions, and to protest and political contestation?

Examples of buildings in London designed by East European communist architects, include Bevin House – formerly Lenin House – designed by Berthold Lubetkin, in Islington; but also other new quasi-public spaces or monuments and Paradises, where the influence of politics or economics is particularly marked: examples of Johnson-tecture – or Johnsonist Paradises – such as the bizarre Orbit Tower; or the failed Garden Bridge; as well as even weirder hybrid Paradises, such as the bizarre developer-built elevated “art park”, which has recently been opened next to the Millennium Dome.

Michal Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and of cities based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where he is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies. During 2017-2018, he is carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow, where he is a Research Fellow at the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, Higher School of Economics. Michal’s work focuses on the complex social lives of monumental buildings and on the architecture and planning of Eastern European communism. He is especially interested in the powerful – and subversive – impacts that communist-era built environments continue to exert on the capitalist cities of the 21st century.

The event will be held in English and open to anyone interested in architecture and/or politics, Russia and/or Poland: whether you are a practicing architect, a writer, scholar or student, or just have a general interest in architecture or aesthetics.