Books and exhibitions like David Crowley’s Cold War Modern have shown that the architectural ideology of late modernism were a key front in the ideological war between the two sides of the iron curtain. In the countries of the former Soviet bloc that architecture has since ended up on the trash heap of history. Subsequent exhibits, books, and other publications defend or simply describe the art created under communism, including socialist modernism, which turned out simply to be “ill-born,” as Filip Springer’s terrific title suggests. With the innocent eye of someone born just seven years before Poland’s first free elections, this journalist and photographer examines monuments of a prior era and asserts that “after all, it’s good architecture.”

Ill-Born is also a book of photography – made up of valuable archival items as well as new photographs by Springer himself – as well as a collection of reportage on these bastard-buildings. These two halves complement each other wonderfully. Beyond the stigmatized constructions themselves, Springer highlights the fates of the architects, thereby illuminating the reality of the Polish People’s Republic in a rich and nuanced light. Springer investigates what happens to the wartime generation, which sought out some local version of modernity. Particularly fascinating are their games with power.

Filip Springer, then, places his emphasis on people, not on architecture. Nevertheless, the lives of the buildings since 1989 also emerge from among the pages of this book, in the rebuilding and fencing in of socialist spaces, in the ruination of their structures by new investors. The question remains open: are these artistically brilliant, modern symbols of the official style of “socialism with a human face” actually livable?

(Max Cegielski, courtesy of the Book Institute)