In this original study of modernism in interwar east central Europe, Martin Kohlrausch sets an ambitious agenda to study modernist architects as a group of experts. Noting that architects are typically studied individually or in small groups, he brings a fresh perspective to the topic by stepping away from the traditional concerns of architectural history such as style and focuses instead on group formation and the emergence of a shared professional discourse. The book is primarily about interwar Poland, despite the title's claim to a larger geography and longer time span.
The book's introduction and first four chapters establish the role of Polish and other east central European architects in international networks and particularly within the iconic CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture), founded in Switzerland in 1928. The final two chapters look at specific proposals for Warsaw by Polish architects before and after World War II. The introduction and Chapter 1 set out Kohlrausch's argument that interwar east central Europe, defined here as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, was an ideal testing ground for modernists, what he calls “a space of opportunities” (37), because it was less industrial and less urban than western Europe and was led by modernizing politicians who saw architects as allies. In these chapters, and throughout the book, his arguments rest primarily on evidence from Poland, which leads him to underplay differences between the countries. The second chapter focuses on the emergence of architects as experts after 1918 and the role of Poland's first architecture department, founded in Warsaw in 1915, in the profession's scientific development. The argument about technical education is weaker for east central Europe as a whole since departments of architecture were founded in Prague in 1864 and in Budapest in 1871. Ákos Moravánsky and others have shown that locally trained architects were prominent figures already in nineteenth-century national movements.
Chapters 3 and 4 look at the members of CIAM who participated in the group as national representatives in a configuration like an architectural League of Nations. Existing historiography of CIAM written by Eric Mumford and others emphasizes the voices of west European male architects. Kohlrausch explicitly wants to recalibrate this balance between east and west and also promote the work of women by highlighting the contributions of the Polish delegation, including Helena and Szymon Syrkus, as well as others from the region including Czech critic Karel Teige and Hungarian architect Alfred Forbát. In Chapter 3, he brings methodologies from the history of technology to explore how these experts gained power through the dynamics of the group, including sub-groups such as a CIAM-Ost that for a short time brought together architects from the countries along the Danube for additional meetings.
Chapter 4 is a study of the methods for communicating ideas about modernism through photographic techniques, books, journals, and architectural exhibitions that proliferated in Europe at the time. The chapter weaves together the known history of publishing by members of CIAM, including co-founder Le Corbusier with lesser known examples from east central Europe, including the Polish journals Architektura i Budownictwo and DOM. These two chapters add significantly to knowledge about the Polish presence in international architectural discourses between the wars, but specialists will not find much new material on Czechoslovakia or Hungary.
In Chapters 5 and 6, Kohlrausch turns to specific examples of Polish projects influenced by CIAM. Chapter 5 investigates the origins of a proposed modernist plan for Warsaw, Warszawa Funkcjonalna, completed by Szymon Syrkus and Jan Olaf Chmielewski in 1934, but which was never acted on. Kohlrausch calls this project “one of the most remarkable planning documents of the interwar period” (223). He argues that it was the first demonstration of how CIAM urban design principles could be applied to a specific city. In Chapter 6, he brings the book to a close by exploring what happened to the Polish CIAM architects during and after World War II. Warszawa Funkcjonalna appears here as the starting point for the city's postwar planning strategy, even though Helena Syrkus is best known to historians of the period as a modernist who unexpectedly declared support at a 1949 CIAM meeting for the faithful reconstruction of the historic center of Warsaw based on the principles of socialist realism.
In the epilogue, Kohlrausch exposes something of the book's biases when he writes that while developing the project he encountered personal materials in the CIAM archive contributed by Helena Syrkus in the 1970s. She wanted to ensure that Poland's contributions to the group would not be forgotten despite Cold War divisions. Through this lens, the book reads as a corrective to standard histories of modernization in Europe that discount the experiences of east central Europeans. The analysis of CIAM as a group shows how the presence of these architects, especially those from Poland, contributed to and shaped the discourse of CIAM and architectural modernism in ways that an analysis of individual contributions could never uncover.
