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After two decades of being ignored, the architecture of the so-called ‘former East’ has recently been discovered by global mass media. The photographs of Soviet sanatoria, Bulgarian resorts, Central Asian bus stops, and Yugoslav war memorials can now be seen in print publications, in music videos, and even in sci-fi movies, as well as endlessly circulating within social networks. The phenomenon contradicts the previous negative stereotypes of socialist architecture—the overblown monumentality of the Stalinist period and the drabness of prefabricated mass housing—introducing the formerly adventurous structures of the 1970s and 1980s as objects of genuine fascination. Presented through the seemingly objective medium of photography, however, these buildings are nevertheless firmly inscribed into the old ideological framework inherited from the Cold War that reduced all agency under state socialism to totalitarian control. Contradicting recent scholarship that has revealed a great deal of complexity in the construction of the socialist built environments, these new media representations constitute a novel form of Orientalism. Its object is still coincidentally located in the East—Europe’s own East—but this time around the alleged otherness rests on ideological rather than cultural or racial grounds. The paper analyzes two widely known projects responsible for this neo-Orientalist turn, Jan Kempenaers’ Spomenik and Frederic Chaubin’s Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, which pose fundamental questions for the historians of European architecture: Who should have the right to shape the public perception of architectural history? How is architectural history used to maintain the geopolitical divisions and hierarchies within Europe itself?

Orientalizing Socialism: Architecture, Media, and the Representations of Eastern Europe