Studies of material culture too often dissolve into either constructionist truisms or ANT-like descriptions. While most sociologists would ultimately agree that materiality is crucial, how to go about studying it—and how such a study would push forward sociological work and theorizing—remains a challenge. Virág Molnár’s book, Building the State, is thus a rare accomplishment: a book that is both careful and fascinating on an empirical level, while pushing the disciplinary boundaries of the study of culture.
Using archival sources and interviews, the work traces the vicissitudes of Soviet and post-Soviet architecture in East Berlin and Hungary from the end of the Second World War to this day. In doing so, Molnár shows some of the ways in which built space is related to state formation, imperial (and post-imperial) politics, professional social worlds, and global cultural environments. The book thus emerges simultaneously as political sociology, a sociology of professions, and a paradigmatic example for future studies of materiality.
The book is original on both narrative and methodological grounds. By moving among cases and countries, Molnár manages to tread the line between intimacy and estrangement. Each of the cases is thickly described, with its actors, multiple historical contexts and architectural histories. At the same time, by zig-zagging between cases, Molnár foregrounds the theoretical narrative, not allowing her readers to completely lose themselves in the specifics of each case. This narrative choice would have fallen flat on methodological grounds if Molnár had assumed that the cases were interchangeable—after all, not only are the countries different, but the comparative unit of analysis, a city and a country, is a problematic juxtaposition. But this is not the argument. Rather, Molnár makes a more minimalist and defensible claim—that as Soviet satellites, the cases are similar enough to sustain a theoretical narrative while saying something more general about culture, materiality, and historical change.
Internally, each of its chapters centers on a few crisis-events. In a style reminiscent of the extended case method employed in anthropology, Molnár uses moments of crisis and conflict as luminous methodological provocations from which to begin to unravel the social skein. These moments, as Molnár shows, not only elicit the taken-for-granted, but also serve as moments of crystallization: where new articulations, alignments and effects emerge.
The book is short, dense, almost breathless. While dotted with illustrations and photographs that make its subject matter come alive, it still requires readers to remain focused, often needing to read sections more than once. Readers who are up to the task, however, will find the intellectual payoff to be considerable.
Thus, the first empirical chapter (chapter 2) tells the story of Eastern German architecture in Berlin, in the aftermath of the destruction of WWII. With much of the city in ruins, German architects were presented with a rare opportunity to re-imagine the city. As this was a Soviet satellite, however, architects were not free to imagine the city as they wished. Although Berlin was known for its modernist architecture, after a pilgrimage to Moscow, German architects were presented with a manifesto, a set of principles for the crafting of a socialist realist architecture. This was a hard pill to swallow—with its historicist embellishments and powerful contours, socialist realism was uncomfortably reminiscent of Nazi architecture. Architects had to carefully balance the new and politically “correct” architectural form, and its material similarities to a dark past. And then, as architects finally eased into socialist realism, Stalin died and Khrushchev re-cast the architectural lines. Suddenly, the historicist adornments of socialist realism became a sign of unnecessary bourgeois self-aggrandizement, and the simplicity of modernism was once again considered to be proletarian. In one of the many ironies Molnár traces, East German architects could not easily seize on this change—they were both wary that this was one more fad that would be quickly reversed, but they also needed to differentiate themselves from West Berlin’s modernist architecture. Caught between these pressures, the architects ended up developing an architectural style that incorporated both socialist realism and modernism.
Moving from Germany to Hungary, Chapter 3 picks up the narrative where the German chapter ended. In the mid 1950s and the 1960s, thanks to certain material advances, it was the prefabricated modernist housing project that became the architectural ideal blowing from Moscow. In opposition to it, rather than modernism, were the self-built houses of socialist Hungary. As Molnár tells of the rise and fall of architectural debates, readers can begin to grasp the theoretical stakes involved—the role of materiality, of internal status distinctions, and of surprisingly creative attempts. We see, for example, the debates regarding villages in which cookie-cutter Alpine-looking cottages became status symbols, and the attempts to push prefabricated housing to a radical aesthetic in which long strips of housing snake along the horizon, showing how political and professional lines intersect.
This architectural nexus becomes even more poignant in chapter 4. In what is probably the tightest chapter in the book, Molnár traces “the tulip debate” of 1970s Hungary. After the victory of prefabricated modernism depicted in the previous chapter, the boundaries of what could and could not be part of the movement—between minor adornment and perceived nationalist aesthetics—came to the fore. When a small group of architects naively planned prefabricated houses that use tulip motifs, a Hungarian nationalist symbol, it sparked an all out war in architecture circles. To understand this debate, as Molnár convincingly argues, we need to understand not only the Soviet politics of materiality, but also the way that “Urban” vs. “Populist” strands in cultural disputes in Hungary arose in the early 20th century. The language of the tulip debate was thus overdetermined, as was the “loss” of those who attempted to adorn prefabricated modernism.
Lastly, returning to Berlin, Chapter 5 shows how, with the fall of the Berlin wall, the city was again re-imagined, this time through the lens of a “traditional European city” that attempts to circumvent the charged history of East and West Berlin—eschewing the inroads of “the American city” of high rise glass, and opting for an architectural style referring back to the 19th century. Here, much as in the first empirical chapter, Molnár shows how architectural debates provide a window into the complex ways in which both professional contests and geo-political shifts play into the built environment.
As this partial outline suggests, Molnár’s book is bold, using an immense historical and geographical canvas to draw a compelling picture. Like most books, however, there were places where Molnár could have done more. This is precisely for the reasons that make the book so exciting to read—its density and ambition, the way in which Molnár allows the richness of the materials to engage in multiple theoretical conversations at the same time. Thus, I believe the book would have benefited from being slowed down and lengthened. And while this is a matter of style, the narrative density seeps into the structure of the argumentation. At times it feels as though Molnár was running so fast to capture all the book’s themes, theoretical threads and empirical narratives that she did not have the room to bring together all that she had done in a coherent statement. Her theoretical discussions are too often punctuated by “and” rather than “therefore”, and the reader is thus often left to reconstruct the overarching narrative.
That being said, the book succeeds in what I see as its central ambition. Molnár shows that whether material construction operates as a “cultural representation”, a “cultural medium”, or a set of strategies for change is not something that can be answered a priori. By focusing on the same general professional arena over a long period of time and across space, she shows how the “same” arena is transformed as it changes its relation to local and global power structures and histories––how the material etching of the world emerges simultaneously as an almost “total social fact” and as a powerful way to shape future action. What emerges, then, is a nimble study of culture that truly takes its objects seriously—avoiding easy prefabricated answers, while showing how material culture is brought into action.
