Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland

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. Blazej 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