The optimum aesthetic2007

The pas de deux of ideology with a capital "I" produced by party and state officials and ideology as the constellation of narratives that the Czech architectural profession relied on to propel its daily activities was a peculiar Second World dance, unlike anything that the postwar First World architects experienced. Proposing that the Second World specificity of postwar Czech architecture is located in its continual disciplinary struggle to describe and approximate its own ideological role within the larger logic of the building of socialism in Czechoslovakia, this dissertation reconstructs the postwar Czech project of optimizing architecture. The project of constructing utopia through optimizing its architecture was completely prefigured by the Second World's central myth--class struggle...