The Optimum Imperative ─ Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938-1968

The Optimum Imperative examines architecture's multiple entanglements within the problem of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia.

Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia's entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops' occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzík and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal.

Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects' optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.

Ana Miljacki is a critic, curator and Associate Professor of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches history, theory and design. She has previously taught studios and seminars at Columbia University, City College in New York and Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She holds a Ph.D. (2007) in history and theory of architecture from Harvard University, an M.Arch. from Rice University and a B.A. from Bennington College. Her research interests range from the role of architecture and architects in the Cold War era Eastern Europe, through the theories of postmodernism in late socialism to politics of contemporary architectural production. Miljacki was part of the three member curatorial team, with Eva Frank i Gilabert and Ashley Schafer, of the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, where their Biennale project, titled OfficeUS, critically examined the last century of US architectural offices; their professionalization and their concomitant global contribution.

Miljacki has recently edited together OfficeUS Agenda (June 2014) OfficeUS Atlas (February 2015), as well as the proceedings of Under the Influence conference she had organized at MIT in 2013. She has guest edited Praxis 14: True Stories, and curated and produced an exhibit on the role of copying and originality in architecture, Fair Use with her students at MIT. Its latest instantiation, UnFair Use, co-curated with Sarah Hirschman was on the view at the Center for Architecture in New York from September 2015 through January 2016. She is currently preparing The Terms of Appropriation collection of historical essays with Amanda Reeser Lawrence, with Routledge.