Housing

In his opening chapters, Hurka did an excellent job of "touring" the Czech scenery, helping the reader visualize the space and how fractured it was. His descriptions helped me think about Communist architecture as a unique part of the landscape--more so than Mandelstam's descriptions, perhaps because he was describing a city as historically diverse as Prague, perhaps because he was commenting on the scenery after the fact. As Hurka and Mira ride the bus into the city from the airport, Mira comments on the hopelessness emitted from the architecture:

Apartments put up during Communist times. Aren't they terrible?

The reader understands that there's not only a difference between how people lived in and out of communist times, but also where they lived and what their homes were allowed to look like. The ahistorical, equalizing aim of Stalinist/communist regimes used architecture as a way of overwhelming all other narratives that would witness on behalf on any other way of doing things. Fascist architecture, too, sought to enforce a propagandist narrative, but did so with bombastic ties to the past and future, making their imagined architecture "fabulous"and expansive; compared to the communists regulations. It would be terrible to have to see architecture that reflects too perfectly your repulsion toward your ugly government--Hurka himself draws the parallel to neighborhoods in Harlem he'd passed on the way to airport. I was reminded of other times architectural relationships have influenced my perception of "home"--in South Florida, where I grew up, you can tell how long ago a certain neighborhood was supposed to be the avant-garde by observing how up-to-date is the design of their fast-food buildings, when the restaurant chains stopped investing in new state-of-the-art locations. In Gainesville, where I went to college, you can tell how old the campus buildings are by observing whether there are windows on the ground floor or not--the buildings built during the 60's and 70's were made riot-proof against the heavy student activist threat (a trait common to many American college buildings built during this time, I've found/heard). But, under those communist regimes, the imposed style of government-built buildings and the difficulty in getting materials if an individual wanted to build their own house would seem to totally delay or repell all attachments people would have to their homes or communities. But I think Hurka shows that those attachments are somehow much more difficult to sever than one might think. In America there's a pretty even divide between American-born adults who still live in or near their hometowns and those who move from home to home after leaving home. We try for that balance of people moving around and bringing new ideas to new places and of people staying put and improving communities they know.