Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland

Florian Urban is a Professor of Architectural History and Head of History of Architectural and Urban Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. He was born and raised in Munich, Germany, and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Berlin, an MA in urban planning from UCLA, and a PhD in history and theory of architecture from MIT. He is the author, among others, of Neohistorical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970–1990 (2009), Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing (Routledge, 2012), and The New Tenement: Architecture in the Inner City since 1970 (Routledge 2018). In 2018–19 he was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.

"In Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland Florian Urban creates a complex view of Polish architecture of the 1980s. The author guides the readers through New Old Towns and prefabricated residential areas, prestigious sacral objects and the rural bottom-up churches. He goes beyond a dry description of listed buildings, establishing them in a wide context of socio-political changes. Urban proves that, although naming it as 'architecture of resistance' will be a simplification, postmodern architecture under the declining socialist regime was an agent of transformation."Dr. Błażej Ciarkowski, Lodz University of Technology"In this compelling new book, Florian Urban casts a completely new light on postmodern architecture, hitherto widely disparaged as a frivolous creation of American and Western European fashion-stylists working in an unholy alliance with neo-capitalist reactionaries. He shows how, semi-detached from Western postmodernism’s discourses of playful irony, a postmodernism of a different and altogether more socially embedded kind was able to emerge in a country such as Poland, where it significantly helped in the process of reconciliation following the traumatic ruptures of the 20th century."Miles Glendinning, The University of Edinburgh "Florian Urban describes the most interesting and important architectural implementations of Polish postmodernism by putting them into the wide context of political and economic changes in Poland in the 1980s and 1990s. It makes this book on architecture not only about buildings but also economic and social phenomena that are crucial for the end of the 20th century." Anna Cymer, Architecture historian, author of Architecture in Poland 1945–1989

• Introduction. 1. Architectural Debates in Late Socialist Poland. 2. Churches, Semiotics, and Patriotism. 3. Bottom-Up Village Churches. 4. Postmodern Mass Housing Complexes. 5. Postmodernism from the Spirit of Historic Conservation: The New Old Town of Elbląg. 6. The Urban Context. Conclusion. Pronunciation of Polish Names. Index of Buildings. Index of Architects. Index of Subjects.