464-484 University of California Press on behalf of the ... · The Cultural Center: Architecture as Cultural Policy in Postwar Europe W hen the Stadthalle of Chemnitz, then named

The Cultural Center: Architecture as Cultural Policy in Postwar EuropeAuthor(s): Kenny CupersSource: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 74, No. 4 (December 2015), pp.464-484Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2015.74.4.464 .Accessed: 03/12/2015 16:41

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The Cultural Center: Architecture as Cultural Policy in Postwar Europe

When the Stadthalle of Chemnitz, then named Karl-Marx-Stadt, opened in October 1974, officials touted the modern building as exem-

plary of the German Democratic Republic’s cultural policy.1 “In the German Democratic Republic,” the policy maker Hans Koch claimed, “there is no vast mass of anonymous ‘consumers’ consuming the fare placed before it by an élite of ‘creators.’ Cultural progress is increasingly being seen as a creative process in which everyone participates.”2 To facili-tate such culture—which could range from J. S. Bach and Bertolt Brecht to folk dancing and clay sculpting—the multi-functional complex featured an array of meeting spaces and a large flexible hall that could host anything from theater performances to exhibitions, dance parties, and conferences (Figures 1 and 2). In light of the GDR’s regime of censorship, surveillance, and repression, the calls for participation under-lying this project can easily be dismissed as the ideological mirage of a puppet state. Yet a similar rhetoric accompanied the multifunctional culture halls that were being built on both sides of the Iron Curtain at this time. Some, like the Maison pour Tous of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines on the out-skirts of Paris, resembled the Stadthalle in formal and func-tional terms. This government-funded building, literally a “house for all,” was to be a participatory machine for making community. Like the Stadthalle at Karl-Marx-Stadt, it com-prised a flexible performance hall, workshops, meeting spaces, and a restaurant, while also adding a music school.

And it was laid out on a similar hexagonal grid, allowing its various spaces to blur into one another (Figures 3 and 4).

The similarity between these building projects is striking, especially when we consider their radically different political and ideological contexts. It is not a coincidence that can be explained simply as a result of transnational exchange among architects across the Cold War divide. In order to understand the reasons for this correspondence, we must expand our analytical purview to include the governmental regimes underlying the production of these architectural forms. The idea of culture as policy—that culture can be rationally and comprehensively administered, including through architecture—was a product of state bureaucratization dur-ing the postwar period. Government involvement in culture and the arts can be traced back much further, to the forma-tion of the modern state in Europe and the establishment of public institutions such as theaters and museums.3 Only in the postwar period, however, did the term cultural policy emerge in national politics and international debates, denot-ing an assemblage of ideological principles, legislative texts, and administrative practices. This development is what underlay the large-scale building programs for new cultural institutions in the postwar decades, not just in the GDR and France but also in West Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other European countries. With their combination of artistic and recreational facilities, the modern culture halls often dwarfed—if not in size then at least in quantity—the classical theaters of previous centuries.

Despite the massive shift these buildings represented for how “culture” was managed in postwar Europe, little has been written about the role of architecture in this process. The few existing architectural histories of culture halls are largely divorced from the cultural and political history of

kenny cupersUniversity of Basel

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 4 (December 2015), 464–484. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2015 by the Society of Architectural Histo rians. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p=reprints, or via email: [email protected]. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2015.74.4.464.

474December2015The Cultural Center

464



postwar Europe.4 Following the emergent discipline of transnational history, architectural historians have recently begun to examine the politics of global circulation shaping modern architecture in the postwar period.5 This article extends such scholarship by demonstrating how an impor-tant but overlooked type of institution, which proliferated

across the Cold War divide, helped reshape the very defini-tion of “culture” throughout much of Europe.

Analyzing the roles of bureaucrats, policy makers, and designers, the article reveals how culture became an explicit domain of state policy and why the architecture of modern cultural centers or culture halls became central to this

Figure 1 Rudolf Weißer,

Stadthalle, Chemnitz (then

Karl-Marx-Stadt), GDR, opened

in 1974: 1, foyer; 2, large

performance hall; 13, small

performance hall; 17, foyer; 24,

greenhouse; 26, brasserie; 27,

hotel restaurant; 30 and 31, self-

service restaurants (Architektur

der DDR, no. 4 [1975], 229).

T H E C U LT U R A L C E NT E R 465


http://www.jstor.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1525/jsah.2015.74.4.464&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=347&h=578



Stadthalle, Chemnitz, GDR,

opened in 1974 (photo by

Reinhard Höll, 2006).

Figure 3 Pierre Venencie,

Maison pour Tous, Saint-

Quentin-en-Yvelines,

France, opened in 1975

(Recherche & Architecture

35 [1978], 40).

466 J S A H | 74 . 4 | D E C E M B E R 2 01 5





project. The discussion focuses on the GDR and France to illustrate the significance of this Cold War European project beyond the radically different political uses of such institu-tions in their national contexts. Stated intentions and archi-tectural design reveal little about the role culture halls actually played in people’s everyday lives. Examining these spaces across the Cold War divide in Europe, however, reveals how modern architecture articulated cultural politics in which participation was harnessed to bolster the interven-tion of the state in everyday life—whether through seem-ingly unqualified support, as in France, or oppressive regulation, as in the GDR.

Cultivation and RecreationThe culture hall is an institutional type with diverse histori-cal precedents. Postwar policy makers and architects saw the culture hall as the modern answer to Europe’s grand tradition of building public institutions for the cultivation of good taste and civic responsibility. Since the popularization of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Bildungstheater at the end of the eighteenth century, intellectual elites had upheld the theater—and other institutions of high culture—as a means for the intellectual and spiritual development of the citizenry.6

Nevertheless, cultural institutions in the nineteenth century were more often geared toward amusement. For example, in Germany the Stadthalle was developed as a specific type of urban institution for staging bourgeois sociability. The Stadthalle was a large, multipurpose hall used for concerts, banquets, and exhibitions.7 Other important historical prec-edents to the culture hall were the “house of the people” and the settlement house, which were late nineteenth-century working-class and reform institutions.8 The house of the people, variously called casa del popolo, Volkshaus, maison du peuple, or volkshuis, was an independent space for political discussion, associational life, and popular culture. Such locations were established by socialist and workers’ move-ments across continental Europe.9 In the 1920s, the Soviets set up similar institutions, which they called workers’ clubs; these were meant to promote a new, communist proletarian culture.10

The designers of the culture halls in the second half of the twentieth century drew on the histories and forms of these older institutions.11 In doing so, they merged the competing interests of the bourgeoisie and the working class. This convergence was a result of the transformation of public welfare from a collection of class-based civil-society initia-tives to a bureaucratic state-led regime of mass provision.

Figure 4 Pierre Venencie, Maison pour Tous, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France, opened in 1975 (photo by Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Communauté d’agglomération).





Underlying the development of culture halls was a new approach to culture. Even though historically class-based distinctions between high and low culture persisted, the postwar state now approached culture as a neutral collection of goods and services for which it would assume responsibil-ity of distribution by means of cultural “facilities.” The belief was that culture could now be rationally administered, just like access to water or health care. Despite important national differences—the United Kingdom, for example, in contrast to Germany, had relatively limited public intervention in the arts before the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946—this desire for rationality was at the basis of cultural policy across Europe.12

Not surprisingly, the legacy of European fascism in cul-tural policy remained unmentioned in discussions at the time. Yet the shift away from class-based interests in cultural affairs and toward a “comprehensive” approach to governing culture would likely have been unthinkable without the far-reaching cultural and recreational programs established by fascist governments during the 1930s. The German organization Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) and the Italian-fascist Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National Recreational Club) had drawn countless people into the totalitarian project.13 After World War II, Western European policy makers were eager to avoid any semblance of such totalitarian control over the private sphere. Nevertheless, state intervention in culture and the arts did not disappear in France, West Germany, and elsewhere—although officials emphasized that their cultural policy in no way shaped the content of artistic creation.14 Eastern European rulers were equally vigorous in their denunciations of fascism, but in many cases they continued to exert direct control over cultural affairs, both public and private. The GDR’s far-reaching surveillance apparatus suppressed artistic expression that did not seem to support official ideology. At the same time, it cultivated what were once bourgeois, private hobbies as the cultural carriers of socialism. The Kulturbund, an important state control organ, encouraged hundreds of thousands of East Germans to join hobby communities and take up stamp collecting or the study of local history.15

Despite these antithetical trajectories, Western and Eastern European states shared more than just a long history of gov-ernment intervention in the arts. Their cultural policies were based on shared assumptions about the relation between cul-ture and citizenship. Even though state-led modernization shed the overtly ideological agendas of nineteenth-century social movements, cultural policy continued to rely on a lofty, if vaguely defined, ideal of cultivating citizens. The ideal of Bildung, or self-cultivation, was based on the assump-tion that subjectivity could be shaped and perfected through education, art, and philosophy and that such cultivation, in turn, would shape society.16 This assumption continued to

underlie cultural policies throughout postwar Europe. The older notion of making cultured citizens was thus grafted, in an at times unrecognizably diluted version, onto the postwar ethos of state-led modernization.

In the GDR, officials reframed the ideal of Bildung by de-emphasizing its individualistic basis in favor of the collec-tive and by situating it within the Soviet artistic doctrine of socialist realism.17 Even though Soviet officials initially denounced the “degenerate formalism” of the 1920s, social-ist realism relied on the modernist notion of art as a vehicle in the formation of political subjectivity. Instead of the for-malist road, which meant breaking with bourgeois culture but accepting the institution of art, socialist realism aimed to unite art and life by radically democratizing only those elements of bourgeois culture that were deemed conducive to making socialist subjects.18 The GDR’s rulers sought to make cultivated and spiritually elevated socialist citizens, and the construction of Soviet-inspired palaces of culture (Kulturpaläste) was a primary means of achieving this goal. Initially built near industrial locations, these new institutions were animated by the workers’ unions of the country’s large state-managed companies under the aegis of the Socialist United Party. Even if such institutions facilitated working-class culture and fostered collectivity rather than individual experience, officials conceived of them as conduits of classical Bildungsgut (educational heritage)—in particular the works of Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.19 This is what legitimated the historicist, often neoclassical designs of the first genera-tion of postwar Soviet bloc culture halls. “National heritage” was thus made instrumental to the state project of building German socialism—spurring workers’ productivity while at the same time fostering national unity.20

The state project of cultivating citizens also shaped cul-tural policy in postwar France, even if the specific methods and political goals differed radically from those in the GDR. France’s Ministry of Culture was created in 1959 under the leadership of André Malraux, a renowned intellectual and personal friend of Charles de Gaulle. Malraux stated that one of the ministry’s main goals was to “render accessible the masterpieces of humanity, and first of all France, to the largest possible number of Frenchmen.”21 Despite its popu-list allusions, the “culture” of Malraux’s cultural policy was first and foremost high culture, including the canonical works of art from previous centuries as well as contemporary modernist art and literature, but excluding traditionalist and socialist realist art. Yet, as in the GDR, culture was presented as a basic right of all citizens, to be guaranteed and adminis-tered by the state. Malraux’s government officers summa-rized the goal of French cultural policy: to “provide art books and classical music records to the dock workers of Le Havre, or to play Shakespeare at Ménilmontant” (a working-class part of Paris).22 Such aspirations masked the continued rule

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of cultural elites under the welfare state and their growing anxiety about the impact of mass culture on French society. Some libertarian voices in France opposed what they under-stood to be a technocratic and elitist approach to culture. Nevertheless, for the majority of politicians, state involve-ment in culture meant progress, democracy, and national grandeur.23 Access to high culture would promote self- cultivation, and “personal development” (épanouissement) was a corollary to national development. Like the economy, policy makers claimed, “culture” could be comprehensively planned.24 And in a nation as centralized as France, access to high culture meant territorial distribution, ensuring that those living in the provinces had as much exposure to culture as those living in Paris. Central to Malraux’s policies, there-fore, was the construction of maisons de la culture—funded partly by the state and partly by local authorities—in provin-cial towns across France.25

In addition to the goal of cultivating citizens, cultural policy across Cold War Europe was shaped by the shared challenge to accommodate new forms of mass recreation and popular culture. In the early 1960s, the sociologist Joffre Dumazedier proclaimed the advent of a new “leisure civiliza-tion” of paid holidays, popular music and movies, and an explosion of new hobby cultures.26 In the GDR, many of these consumer pleasures remained more aspirational than real. Yet the Bitterfelder Weg, a top-down cultural reform project coinciding with the Khrushchev Thaw, can be inter-preted as a shy nod to such a leisure society. The reform was presented as a shift “from the art-loving to the artistically active worker.”27 Familiarizing workers with the “treasures of art and literature” was not enough—building socialism required engaging workers’ “cultural and creative forces.”28 Underneath this rhetoric of a new, active role for the socialist citizen lurked the regime’s anxiety about controlling con-sumer culture. While the East German state initially relied on strict rationing, officials during the “socialist sixties” showed more acceptance of the fact that popular leisure and consumption had become constitutive aspects of everyday life—even if many citizens’ material needs and desires remained painfully unfulfilled.29 Consequently, cultural policy should aim not just to cultivate socialist citizens but also to recreate them. This shift provided new impetus for the design of cultural institutions such as the Stadthalle of Karl-Marx-Stadt and signaled a softer, more insidious approach to instilling socialism.30 Citizens would be given more opportunities to “participate” in culture even as state control over their everyday lives increased.

Similar questions about the kinds of culture that should guide state policy arose on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In Western Europe, cultural policy needed to accommodate not just mass recreation and consumerism in an age of affluence but also the growing influence of youth, civil rights,

and leftist social movements that criticized traditional dis-tinctions between high and low culture. The more funda-mental critiques of universalism might have been far removed from the concerns of policy makers, at least before 1968, but the “culture” of cultural policy across Western Europe grad-ually shifted from a focus on the highbrow arts to an empha-sis on how culture is socially embedded. In France, Malraux’s assumptions about democratizing access to high culture were under increasing attack during the 1960s. In their land-mark study of 1966, L’amour de l’art: Les musées et leur public, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel showed that the experi-ence of art museums was systematically socially determined—comfortable to the elite, unsettling to those least educated.31 Their conclusion was that museums, rather than democratiz-ing high culture, actually upheld and even reinforced the barriers of social class. Such studies prompted a reorientation of cultural policy toward what experts called the “sociocul-tural,” and it had direct repercussions for the conception of cultural centers.32 Cultural institutions—went the argument, especially on the political Left—should become sites of par-ticipatory production and not just passive consumption. Rather than satisfying existing needs, policy makers insisted, such institutions should “awaken and stimulate the demand, and thus help the public to discover new ways of achieving their cultural aspirations.”33 This ambition informed the conception of institutions such as the Maison pour Tous.

The architecture of the culture halls that were built throughout much of postwar Europe, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, is explained not just by the transnational spread of architectural modernism but also, first and fore-most, by the shared assumptions and challenges of cultural policy. As popular recreation entered into the purview of policies aimed at cultivating citizens, governments increas-ingly cast citizens as active participants in culture. This is why culture halls across Cold War Europe facilitated not only classical theater and concerts, events at which people would be “passive consumers,” but also recreational, com-munity, and sports events in which they would be active par-ticipants. Such “participation” was not a vehicle of political emancipation, however; instead, it bolstered the legitimacy of the state. Even if culture halls were no longer conceived as classical temples of high culture, one assumption remained intact: that culture—high and low—had a predetermined effect on people, and, therefore, this effect could be pro-duced by the state through both policy and design. This is where modern architecture came in.

Polyvalence and IntegrationIn France, the conception of maisons de la culture was directly informed by Malraux’s ambition to democratize access to artistic masterpieces. Because democratization implied




geographic decentralization, the resulting building projects were largely situated in the provinces. Even though some of them, such as the successful cultural center in Bourges, were housed in existing buildings, Malraux emphasized architec-tural modernism for symbolic and programmatic reasons.34 Unlike the bourgeois theaters and operas of the nineteenth century, the maison de la culture should not be an isolated monument, he believed, but “at once a popular, familiar place and a cultural shrine, a kind of ‘café du commerce’ and secu-lar cathedral.”35 The new cultural institutions needed to attract people of all ages and backgrounds and make them feel at home and engaged with the artistic activities and dis-plays the institutions facilitated. Officials also promoted architectural transparency to stimulate the engagement of passersby and visitors, and advocated seating arrangements in auditoriums that would not imply social class distinctions but instead suggest egalitarianism in spectatorship. Some administrators even proposed auxiliary services, such as snack bars or nurseries, for the convenience of families and those coming directly from work. Even though its primary aim was to offer elevating aesthetic experiences, the maison de la culture needed to attract everyone.36

As a result of these policy goals, the first generation of maisons de la culture shared an architectural vision. Each would be multifunctional, meaning that in addition to a large performance hall, the building would contain exhibition spaces, meeting spaces, and a variety of spaces for more specialized uses, such as a library, a discotheque, a television room, a restaurant, a bar, or a day nursery.37 A second impor-tant feature was polyvalence, defined as the possibility of using given spaces in different ways. Movable partitions and other mobile architectural elements allowed foyers to be converted into exhibition halls, and auditoriums facilitated

a variety of performance and event types. Polyvalence, first articulated by interwar modernist architects in projects such as the maison du peuple of Clichy in the Parisian suburbs (designed by Marcel Lods, Eugène Beaudouin, Jean Prouvé, and Vladimir Bodiansky), thus came to define the main-stream architectural production of the postwar French wel-fare state. The Ministry of Culture held up the maison de la culture of Amiens, designed by Pierre Sonrel and opened in 1965, as a new standard in this regard (Figure 5).38 The building contained several flexible performance spaces, a library, a television room, and a cafeteria. Its main theater had mobile seating to allow performances with the audience facing in different directions.39 Despite its austere exterior appearance—a concrete post-and-lintel structure with grand windows centered in each of its four bays—policy makers and observers celebrated its transparency and its open character, seeing it as “a vital element of the city, in sync with the city from the morning until the night.”40

Critical voices quickly emerged during the 1960s, how-ever. The critics denounced Malraux’s built projects for failing to create inclusive spaces, despite their break with traditional bourgeois institutions. A 1965 government report warned that many “factors of cultural inhibition” precluded participation beyond the cultural elite—a conclusion similar to the one reached by Bourdieu and Darbel in their museum study. In addition to material barriers, such as entry prices and geographic distance, the report pointed to social barriers, including the architectural form, which created distanced, “sacred” spaces removed from the everyday.41 By 1968, only eight maisons de la culture had been opened, with an additional dozen or so under construction or in the planning stage.42 Perhaps because they had remained symbols of the elite, many of them were occupied by protesters during the civil

Figure 5 Pierre Sonrel,

maison de la culture,

Amiens, France, opened in

1965 (postcard courtesy of

David Liaudet).

470 J S A H | 74 . 4 | D E C E M B E R 2 01 5




unrest of May 1968. At that time the buildings effectively served as sites of participatory democracy, veritable public “forums,” albeit not in the way state officials had intended. The maison de la culture of Amiens, for instance, became a vibrant space of impromptu public debates, community gatherings, and political protest. Protesters demanded the elimination of admission fees as a way of taking down what they experienced as the invisible walls of culture.43

After 1968, discussions about the architecture and poli-tics of the maisons de la culture changed fundamentally in tone. The Ministry of Culture now explicitly criticized its own projects as “soulless places of cultural consumption” whose “sumptuous architecture” dissuaded anyone but the cultural elite from participating.44 In a speech delivered at Grenoble in summer 1968, Malraux proclaimed that the maisons de la culture should not just serve artistic display and diffusion but should “in the first place provoke interroga-tion, contestation even, and engender dialogue.” To do so, they needed to become “the unfinished image of a living culture, for those who participate in it and create it.”45 The challenge after May 1968 was to make cultural institutions spaces of creative participation rather than just places of consumption or diffusion—not unlike the stated goal of the Bitterfelder Weg.46 At stake was the very definition of cul-ture; even Malraux, the ardent protector of France’s cultural heritage, now proclaimed, “There is no culture without lei-sure.”47 By the late 1960s, Dumazedier’s leisure civilization was a reality and had become a central subject of public policy. Moreover, the view that leisure was culture corre-sponded to attitudes among community workers, who had long advocated for the integration of social, cultural, and community facilities in France’s newly built suburban developments.

Despite this revolution, the architectural conception of the maisons de la culture was not entirely discarded. The ear-lier concepts of flexibility, polyvalence, and spatial openness instead gained a more radical political charge. Following widespread calls in the years after 1968 to deinstitutionalize society, architects such as Ionel Schein hailed polyvalence as a tool to dismantle the institutional walls of culture itself.48 No longer sacralized or privileged spaces of display, maisons de la culture should become “crossing points” rather than pal-aces. Monumentality was considered anathema, and policy makers instead envisioned “light, malleable facilities that allow all forms of communication and artistic activities.”49

The Maison pour Tous in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, designed by Pierre Venencie in 1971–72, registers these new social and architectural ambitions (see Figures 3 and 4).50 The cultural center was a key element in the master plan for the new urban center of Les Sept Mares, part of the new town of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. (President Charles de Gaulle launched the French new towns in 1965 as a way to

decentralize the Paris region and spur regional economic development.)51 Funded by the Ministries of Culture, National Education, Youth and Sports, and Public Health, among other institutions, the Maison pour Tous was a product of the centralized state and integrated art and performance spaces with a variety of community facilities.52 The building comprised a large multipurpose hall, an auditorium, a school of music, and a restaurant (which served the nearby second-ary school), as well as smaller spaces for meetings, games, and workshops, a nursery, administrative spaces, and an apart-ment for the concierge.53 This mix was engineered to engage people from a variety of backgrounds and age groups. A res-taurant, for instance, was integrated into the complex in order to maximize its daytime usage.54 A similar rationale guided the creation of a meeting space for the elderly, which was situated in a quiet zone of the building with a view onto the park.

Formally, the program was organized on a hexagonal grid that followed the shape of the main performance hall. Designers in France and abroad had been experimenting with such hexagonal formal systems during the mid-1960s, and the design had gained traction among more mainstream architects in the 1970s. Venencie himself had already built a youth center designed as the aggregation of hexagonal prisms.55 For the architect, such formal systems promised to “give a maximum of suppleness to the organization of performances.”56 This quality was most important for the main performance hall. With its mobile seating structure, it allowed for varying types of scenarios, including theater, cinema, balls, conferences, and exhibitions (Figure 6).57 The peripheral circulation around this hexagonal hall provided access on different levels and to the auxiliary workshop and meeting spaces. Circular and hexagonal theater spaces such as this had emerged in the 1960s in response to an interna-tional movement advocating experimental theater forms, first tested on a modest scale and subsequently employed in the design of mass performance spaces.58

Venencie responded to the widespread calls for deinstitu-tionalization by inserting three types of public space into his design. Running through the middle of the building was a covered public walkway, which negotiated the differences in levels between the natural terrain and the dalle, or raised platform, onto which the entire urban development was elevated to separate pedestrians from vehicular traffic below (Figure 7). In addition, a central foyer functioned as the pub-lic “plaza” of the complex, connecting directly to the restaurant, cafeteria, and main performance spaces. Finally, the roof level was designed as a publicly accessible “sculpture garden.” The music school, also located on this level, was organized into separate, well-insulated pavilions for music practice. These pavilions transformed the roof into a mineral landscape for strolling and playing (Figure 8). The interior




street, the plaza, and the sculpture garden were design fea-tures that, at least metaphorically, brought urban public space into the institution. Despite the building’s massive appearance, the choices of materials were motivated by the idea of avoiding the impression of an imposing institution and creating “an intriguing and welcoming, immediately familiar” experience.59 The soft, brownish brick used for the exterior walls and the oxidized copper used for the roofs produced an informal aesthetic image, as opposed to the prestigious modernist look of Malraux’s institutions, such as Sonrel’s maison de la culture in Amiens (see Figure 5). The structure’s material heaviness was meant to evoke not monu-mentality but a porous environment that would attract users and surprise them as they appropriated it.60

Three years before the official opening, planners had already begun organizing cultural and social activities to welcome the arriving population in the new town of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.61 They subsequently established the Association pour la Promotion des Activités Socio- culturelles de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (APASC) for the center’s cultural programming.62 The goal of this association was to “develop the creative capacities of everyone” and to “reduce that enormous gap between the minority of creators, inventors, and producers of new models, and the large majority of those undergoing these ‘messages.’ ”63 Cultural programming would thus not only produce creative, partici-patory citizens but also overcome the gap between elite and disadvantaged social groups. The architecture of the complex worked both for and against these social ambitions. Because many of its interior spaces were publicly accessible, the build-ing was notoriously difficult to manage. Some spaces were impossible to secure, so gates and alarm systems were added, and the exhibition area was moved to one of the performance spaces a few years after the opening.64 At the same time, the building’s porosity facilitated efforts to engage a diversity of users. Its spaces proved ideal for hosting experimental public events, drawing in youth collectives and immigrant workers often living on the margins of French society.

Similar cultural centers were built across France during the 1970s. While they effectively broadened the types of cultural events and activities that received government sup-port, policy makers’ goals of participatory citizenship and “cultural democratization” were rarely if ever fully realized. A 1976 government report explicitly warned of the naïveté of assuming that contact with art and culture would auto-matically lead to democratization.65 This realization was the death knell for Malraux’s optimistic cultural policies and the modernist architectural experiments that had helped shape it. While cultural centers offered new ways for people to come together and enjoy themselves, their polyvalent and integrated forms of architecture did not, in and of them-selves, remold participants into participatory citizens.

Monumentality and CommunicationBecause the GDR was directly shaped by its relationship with the Soviet Union, so too was the design of its cultural institutions, at least initially. With the rise of Stalinism, Soviet architects abandoned the modernist idea of workers’ clubs and instead built “palaces of culture” in historicist styles. In the early 1950s, the GDR adapted this Stalinist type of architecture and its underlying ideology of socialist realism by looking to “national traditions.”66 For Germany, the architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel was key.67 Following his neoclassical designs

Figure 6 Pierre Venencie, Maison pour Tous, Saint-Quentin-en-

Yvelines, France, six options for the organization of the main

performance space (“Maison pour Tous d’Elancourt,” Techniques

et Architecture, no. 310 [Aug./Sept. 1976], 76–77).

472 J S A H | 74 . 4 | D E C E M B E R 2 01 5




for public institutions, GDR architects developed a monumen-tal prototype for the Kulturpalast (Figure 9).68 Published in the regime’s official organ Deutsche Architektur, the design featured a symmetrical building layout with a large theater space, vesti-bule, foyer, and side wings housing auxiliary spaces such as club rooms. Its form reflected a dual cultural policy: small meeting spaces for hobbies and popular culture were separated from, and sidelined by, the central shrine to high culture that was the theater space. The theater took on special importance in the making of citizens in the Eastern bloc, and in the GDR in

particular. Its strong tradition of politically engaged theater, following the work of Brecht, among others, soon informed changes to the design of new theater spaces and Kulturpaläste.69 Initially, however, the regime employed neoclassicism as a political message, speaking antagonistically to the modern architecture of the capitalist West.

Since only a few large state-owned companies had the funds to build in the first half of the 1950s, only a small num-ber of Kulturpaläste were built. Most of these followed the published prototypes; for instance, the stripped-down

Figure 7 Pierre

Venencie, Maison pour

Tous, Saint-Quentin-

en-Yvelines, France,

opened in 1975 (photo

by J.-B. Schwebig,

1977).

Figure 8 Pierre

Venencie, Maison pour

Tous, Saint-Quentin-en-

Yvelines, France, roof

level, opened in 1975

(“Les 7 Mares

Elancourt-Maurepas,”

CRÉÉ Architecture

intérieure, no. 45

[Dec.1976], 22).






classicist Kulturhaus of Maxhütte in Unterwellenborn, designed by Hanns Hopp, Josef Kaiser, and Thomas Reimer ( Figure 10). Despite the architects’ insistence on historical forms to promote both “community experience” and “critical art appreciation,” the project was built with modern industrial techniques.70 Even if the ideal of Bildung through high culture shaped such designs, builders on the ground were more aware of working-class needs for recreational spaces. For the Kul-turhaus of Rüdersdorf, finished in 1956, the builder, Emil Lei-bold, was mandated to use a standard prototype. He nevertheless questioned its practical functionality and argued for a multifunctional hall instead of a classical theater space. This was something officials were just beginning to consider on their own as the state gradually abandoned Stalinist neo-classicism in the second half of the 1950s.71

The mass construction of cultural institutions in the GDR did not take off until the 1960s. By this time, the Soviet Union had reevaluated its position on modernist architecture, and GDR architects cautiously followed suit. In addition to shifting to a modernist idiom, the new designs articulated a different, broader concept of culture. A key player in shaping the new Kulturpalast type, even more than architects or party elites, was the Büro für Technologie kultureller Einrichtungen (Bureau for the Technology of Cultural Facilities), later renamed the Institut für Kultur-bauten (Institute for Cultural Buildings), established in 1960 and led by Klaus Wever and Wladimir Rubinow.72 The institute proposed two fundamental changes to the Kultur-palast. First, the program would center on a new type of space: a flexible, multipurpose performance hall that would allow artists and nonartists to be brought together in the way set out by the Bitterfelder Weg cultural reformers. Even if this ambition remained unacknowledged, it reinscribed in GDR theater design the modernism of the 1910s and 1920s, from the Festspielhaus Hellerau designed by Heinrich Tessenow and Adolf Appia in 1912 and the Bauhaus experi-ments of Oskar Schlemmer to Walter Gropius’s unexecuted Total Theater project (Figure 11). Such modernist theater designs had already focused on the reorganization of stage and audience, insisting on a more direct and dynamic rela-tionship between spectacle and spectator in order to invest the theater with a renewed social function.73 Yet during the postwar decades, such experimental and interactive strategies had become widespread across Europe and thus no longer represented a particularly socialist or revolutionary agenda.

Second, the institute argued for a close integration of “active and passive zones” in the building at large. Meeting rooms and workshops needed to be spatially and functionally integrated with the performance spaces, so that in all spaces “the public would actively process what is made and thereby become the maker.”74 Unlike the Stalinist palaces of culture, the institutions of this new generation were located not close

to industry but in the heart of the city. Planning was effectively coordinated with urban renewal projects, which during the 1960s were cast as a way to turn existing cities into socialist ones.75 State officials continued to stress the need for monu-mentality, so that the Kulturpalast symbolically marked the proud transition to socialism on the skyline. At the same time, these officials increasingly emphasized the communicative role of Kulturpaläste in the city and their function in everyday life.

The Kulturpalast in Dresden registers these changing approaches. The first design ideas from 1951 included a monumental tower, a strong theme in GDR urbanism, reminiscent of Bruno Taut’s early twentieth-century con-cept of the Stadtkrone (city crown) as a representation of national community.76 In 1959, the Dresden City Council organized a competition for an enormous House of Social-ist Culture, with the explicit requirement of a tower form. Only one of the twenty-eight design entries, Leopold Wiel’s modernist design, dispensed with the tower in favor of an integrated horizontal organization (Figures 12 and 13). Even though the jury insisted on monumentality and modernist “formalism” was still politically sensitive at this time, the city council ultimately selected Wiel’s proposal, albeit in a reduced version.77 The project, which was

Figure 9 Standard plan for Kulturhaus, 1953 (Hellmuth Thunert and

Herbert Reichert, “Schemapläne für Kulturhäuser,” Deutsche

Architektur, no. 4 [1953], 171).

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eventually changed in name to Kulturpalast, was built from 1967 to 1969. Its design was centered on the new type of performance space dev eloped by the Institut für Kultur-bauten, with which Wiel collaborated closely.78 The main hall had a stage that could be moved up and down, so that a flat floor could be created for different types of events. According to the designers, the goal of this high-tech installation was directly political—an architectural response to the Brechtian theme of theater as life. Because it could put performers and spectators literally on the same footing, the design would overcome the “ capitalist separation between producer and consumer.”79

Some commentators even argued that because “all spaces are public” and “the people work in all of them,” visitors could become cultural producers in their own right, accord-ing to their own “cultural needs.”80 Many spaces through-out the building could work together and thus potentially facilitate new kinds of mass events. Programmatically, the building was designed as a ring of interconnected, communicating spaces so that, the designers claimed, “every space can be used with every other” (Figure 14). The assumption was that such a layout would automati-cally lead to cultural exchange between professional art-ists and nonartists. How this would be concretely

Figure 10 Hanns Hopp, Josef

Kaiser, and Thomas Reimer,

Kulturhaus, Maxhütte,

Unterwellenborn, GDR, 1952–

55 (photo by Uwe Klimpke).

Figure 11 Walter Gropius,

Total Theater for Erwin

Piscator, Berlin, 1927 (drawing

by unidentified artist; Harvard

Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger

Museum, Gift of Ise Gropius,

BRGA.24.145).






achieved, however, remained unclear.81 Thus, the notion of communication did not just inform architectural pro-gramming; it also allowed designers to articulate their ambitions for participation, even if participation was fun-damentally constrained by the political regime.

The project for Dresden paralleled attempts elsewhere in Europe to design cultural institutions that would prompt users’ participation and communication. Yet, unlike designers such as Cedric Price, whose Fun Palace project for London in the early 1960s took a cybernetic approach to participation that meant the near dissolution of architectural form, the designers of the Kulturpalast continued to emphasize tradi-tional monumentality and what they deemed to be a more

explicitly socialist aesthetic. Opened in 1969, the building was dotted with myriad works of public art depicting socialist scenes—for instance, Gerhard Bondzin’s mural Wegs der roten Fahne, which represented the German labor movement.82

East German architects, state officials, artists, and theater makers were well aware of European design trends and enjoyed abundant international exchange at this time. The journal Bauten der Kultur provided extensive coverage of Western European and Soviet bloc projects, and members of the Institut für Kulturbauten often traveled internationally.83 Even though many of their socialist ambitions and architec-tural aesthetics were unique to the GDR, the East German Kulturpaläste also reflected a pan-European architectural

Figure 12 Leopold Wiel with Institut für Kulturbauten, Kulturpalast, Dresden, 1967–69 (photo by Mahlum, 2006).

Figure 13 Leopold Wiel with

Institut für Kulturbauten,

Kulturpalast, Dresden, 1967–69

(Manfred Schröter and Wolfgang

Grösel, Dresden Kulturpalast

[Leipzig: Seemann, 1974], 4).

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development. The Miesian solution, of large cubic volumes with glazed foyers, was commonly used for public buildings across European cities in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in West Germany. East German architects studied flexible designs for multiuse cultural centers in the Soviet Union as well as the Frank van Klingeren project De Meerpaal in Dronten, the Netherlands, which also fascinated French architects such as Schein (Figure 15).84

A second paradigmatic project in the GDR was the Stadthalle of Karl-Marx-Stadt by architect Rudolf Weißer, who moved more resolutely away from monumentality to design a place that would stimulate cultural and social encounters (see Figures 1 and 2). As at Dresden, the project was a key part of the master plan for the town center, which had suffered heavy wartime damage.85 Its construction started in 1969 and it opened in February 1974, but the proj-ect originated with a 1959 competition, when it was called the Haus der Kultur und Wissenschaften (House of Culture and Sciences).86 The initial, tower-based design evolved significantly over the 1960s.87 Local officials eventually decided to use the tower not for the cultural program but for a hotel, since the tower would be the most expensive part of the project and the idea followed “international standards.”88 To define the program for the cultural complex itself, the city council consulted with local associations, including the

Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth), about their needs.89 The idea of a flexible, multipurpose design was thus not only pushed by the centralized state but also embraced at the local level.90 In what was almost a physical embodiment of this idea, Weißer placed the hotel tower directly on top of the Stadthalle, so that the two shared the ground-floor lobby.

The cultural complex, designed in collaboration with the Institut für Kulturbauten, borrowed the Dresden model in its emphasis on programmatic interconnection. Yet it offered one key innovation: the hexagonal grid. The grid facilitated industrialized construction methods and, more important, allowed for a nonhierarchical spatial organization that inten-sified possibilities for interconnection and integration ( Figure 16). The design of the Palast der Republik in Berlin (1973–76) would further pursue this hexagonal formal strategy while encasing the ensemble in an oblong. The Stadthalle, by contrast, expressed its interior organization in a composition of hexagonal prisms, abandoning axial planning and symmetrical ordering in favor of complex, interlocking forms. According to the designers, its varie-gated massing expressed the building’s role as an active “organizer” and “stimulator” of social life.91 Such inten-tions—of functional integration and the animating role of architecture—corresponded closely to trends across Europe at this time, particularly in France.

Figure 14 Leopold Wiel with Institut für

Kulturbauten, Kulturpalast, Dresden,

program diagram (Klaus Wever, “Ein

neues Saalprinzip für kleinere

Kulturhäuser,” Scena, no. 7 [1970], 2).





The Stadthalle was a built diagram of “cultural communi-cation.” Its sprawling lobby was conceived as the central crossroads that connected the various event and performance spaces and would ensure a maximum of interaction between people and activities. At the same time, it remained grand, exuding a socialist splendor (Figure 17). Surprisingly, in an echo of capitalism’s relentless fabrication of new desires, the city council members’ explicit rationale for such archi-tecture was its capacity to elicit unknown needs and uncon-scious desires among visitors.92 The building included

two large multiuse performance halls designed to facilitate a variety of public events. The designers understood the events as forms of communication and organized the hall to accom-modate “linear contact” (e.g., concerts or theater perfor-mances), “ring contact” (e.g., for folk dancing or fashion shows), and “directionless contact” (e.g., ball games or exhi-bitions) (Figure 18).93 Open day and night, weekdays and weekends, the Stadthalle offered programming focused on what in official jargon was called sozialistische Unterhaltungs-kunst (socialist entertainment art), which included anything

Figure 15 Frank van Klingeren,

De Meerpaal, Dronten,

Netherlands, 1965 (photo by Jan

Versnel/MAI Fotoarchieven

Amsterdam, 1966).


Stadthalle, Chemnitz, GDR,

industrialized construction

method, opened in 1974

(Architektur der DDR, no. 4 [1975],

228).

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from theater and cabaret to dance parties and Christmas shows.94

Subsequent GDR culture halls embraced mass recreation wholeheartedly. Some, like the Freizeitforum (leisure forum) in Marzahn, incorporated a panoply of sports facilities, becoming in effect full leisure centers.95 Official design guide-lines published by the Institut für Kulturbauten promoted Funktionsverflechtung—the weaving together of functions—as the key concept for all cultural facilities.96 The term could denote a range of concrete architectural strategies to combine uses, create free spaces, and maximize social interaction. Yet what made it more specific as a design strategy, according to pol-icy makers, was the understanding of culture as “communica-tion.”97 The Kommunikationsbereich, a distribution and traffic area that also functioned as meeting and event space, thus became the architectural and programmatic core of the cultural complex.98 Just as the GDR needed to integrate “Bildung, recreation, and gastronomy,” as Werner Prendel argued, it also needed to build these integrated facilities “so that the smallest economic effort will lead to the largest soci-etal effect.”99 Even though the same logic of efficiency domi-nated discussions of integration in France and elsewhere in Europe, Prendel proclaimed that integrated cultural facilities would help build socialism and create communal sociability in the GDR’s neighborhoods and cities.100

By the 1980s, hundreds of cultural centers, small and large, were spread across East Germany (Figure 19).101 How they shaped the everyday experiences of East Germans is hard to assess. Events at the GDR’s prestigious culture halls were, almost certainly, carefully monitored, and they excluded elements that could be interpreted as critical of the

Figure 17 Rudolf

Weißer, Stadthalle,

Chemnitz, GDR, main

lobby, opened in 1974

(Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-

N1005-005; photo by

Wolfgang Thieme).

Figure 18 Rudolf Weißer, Stadthalle, Chemnitz, GDR, options for

the organization of the small performance hall (Wladimir S. Rubinow,

“Die Stadthalle Karl-Marx-Stadt,” Bauten der Kultur, no. 1 [1976], 19).






state. The institutions were thus vehicles of state control rather than of citizen participation—at least in the sense of direct empowerment as it was understood in Western Europe after 1968. Yet “participation” should be understood here in its historical context: it was first and foremost a means for the state to apply control in more indirect ways. With fickle interests and a consumer culture of mopeds, cassette players, and music bands, “youth” had become a special concern of state officials during the 1970s. Houses of culture, with their special youth programming, were part of a strategy to avert potential uprisings by situating youths in settings where their activities could be controlled (Figure 20). In such a vexed political context, designers and policy makers not coinciden-tally legitimated communication and Funktionsverflechtung

as architectural strategies to accommodate “spontaneous, unprogrammed use of free time.”102

ConclusionWhen seen through a Cold War lens, the culture halls of the GDR are polar opposites to those in France or elsewhere in Western Europe: the first were instruments of state control intended to prevent social resistance and directly mold cul-ture to political ends; the latter, spaces of free expression in a market-oriented public sphere. While such a characteriza-tion is not inaccurate, it hides as much as it reveals. Culture halls on either side of the Iron Curtain shared correspon-dences not only in design but also in the basic assumptions

Figure 19 Locations of GDR cultural facilities

(Kulturelle Freizeiteinrichtungen in der DDR [Gotha

Haack, 1976], Staatsbibliothek Berlin, map

collection, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und

Geschichte [bpk]).

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that undergirded cultural policy. Whether in Western or Eastern Europe, culture halls were state-funded institutions with a specific political goal—namely, to foster a type of citizen who would actively participate in cultural life within specific bounds set by the state. In this way architecture par-ticipated in the Cold War invention called “cultural policy” and helped articulate the divergent cultural politics of social-ism and liberal capitalism.

During the 1960s and 1970s, policy makers framed the cultural center, perhaps paradoxically, as an institution that was universally applicable to and independent of political economy, or of politics altogether. In December 1967, at one of the first conferences on cultural policy organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO), policy makers analyzed cultural facilities from France to Poland and from Ecuador to the Soviet Union as part of a single movement toward “cultural development.”103 Even if they distinguished the different directions cultural policy might take at the national level—for example, the “popularization of masterpieces” versus “ workers’ education”—they emphasized that cultural policy was fundamentally based on “making people participate” by “endeavoring to stimulate their powers of creation.”104 In 1969, a meeting between the French and Polish delegations to UNESCO came to similar conclusions, finding that cul-tural policy was a tool for both individual and national dev-elopment, irrespective of political ideology or cultural difference. Underlying cultural policy was a vaguely defined

Figure 20 Cultural facilities for GDR youth

in the mid-1970s (Ruth Stein and Karsten

Kresse, “Jugendklubs als spezifische Form

kultureller Einrichtungen,” Bauten der Kultur,

no. 1 [1976], 11).





humanism: the “right to culture,” to be guaranteed by the state through the construction of cultural facilities.105 The Council of Europe was another key institution promoting this idea.106 As early as 1964, its Council for Cultural Co-operation described the goal of cultural policy as “enabling the individual at all times and throughout his life to take advantage of the widest opportunities for cultural development and self-fulfillment” and “to reach out beyond the small minorities who have traditionally appreciated ‘highbrow’ activities like serious music, theatre and the fine arts, to the broad mass of the population.”107

Such high-minded goals, however, were founded on a rela-tionship between state and citizen that seemed universal but was in fact political and historically determined. Jacques Coenen, a policy maker at the Council of Europe, succinctly voiced this paradox by pointing out that state intervention in culture, a domain of life that most people consider essential to their sense of privacy, freedom, and individuality, constitutes a “dirigisme which would like to be non-dirigiste.”108 Yet, despite such wariness, the council still advocated for a vigorously inter-ventionist cultural policy, because “active experience [is] prefer-able to passivity, and participation in community affairs [is] better than exclusive preoccupation with family life and private pursuits.”109 Many policy makers in Western Europe empha-sized that their policies supported only the institutional frame-work of culture rather than its content. Yet the state project of turning passive consumers into participatory citizens was hardly neutral, even if it was presented as such.

Notes1. I would like to thank Prita Meier, Florian Urban, Patricia Morton, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments that have helped improve this text.2. Hans Koch, Cultural Policy in the German Democratic Republic (Paris: UNESCO, 1975), 11.3. See Michael Müller, ed., Autonomie der Kunst: Zur Genese und Kritik einer bürgerlichen Kategorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972); Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Penguin, 1965).4. On the history of cultural policy in France, see Vincent Dubois, La poli-tique culturelle: Genèse d’une catégorie d’intervention publique (Paris: Belin, 1999); Philippe Urfalino, L’invention de la politique culturelle (Paris: La Doc-umentation Française/Comité d’Histoire du Ministère de la Culture 1996). On the architectural history of maisons de la culture, see Richard Klein, “Des maisons du peuple aux maisons de la culture,” in André Malraux et l’architecture, ed. Dominique Hervier (Paris: Moniteur, 2008). Scholarship on cultural politics in the GDR includes Manfred Jäger, Kultur und Politik in der DDR: Ein historischer Abriß (Cologne: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1982); David Bathrick, The Power of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). On cultural institu-tions in the GDR, see Bruno Flierl, “Das Kulturhaus in der DDR,” in Städtebau und Staatsbau im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper and Hiltrud Kier (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1996); Ulrich Har-tung, Arbeiter- und Bauerntempel: DDR-Kulturhäuser der fünfziger Jahre: Ein architekturhistorisches Kompendium (Berlin: Schelzky & Jeep, 1996); Christine Meyer, Kulturpaläste und Stadthallen der DDR: Anspruch und

Realität einer Bauaufgabe (Hamburg: Kova , 2005). On cultural centers in Flanders, see Miek de Kepper, ed., Culturele centra op zoek naar een profiel (Brussels: FEVECC, 1993). A more international perspective has been offered recently in Alistair Fair, ed., Setting the Scene: Perspectives on Twenti-eth-Century Theatre Architecture (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2015).5. Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Tom Avermaete and Łukasz Stanek, eds., “Cold War Transfer: Architecture and Planning from Socialist Countries in the ‘Third World,’ ” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 13 (2012); Florian Urban, Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970–1990 (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009).6. See Erika Fischer-Lichte, History of European Drama and Theatre ( London: Routledge, 2002), 199–201.7. Meyer, Kulturpaläste und Stadthallen der DDR, 10–25.8. On France, see Klein, “Des maisons du peuple aux maisons de la culture.”9. Maurizio Degl’Innocenti, Le case del popolo in Europa: Dalle origini alla seconda guerra mondiale (Florence: Sansoni, 1984).10. John B. Hatch, The Formation of Working Class Cultural Institutions during NEP: The Workers’ Club Movement in Moscow, 1921–1923 (Pittsburgh: Uni-versity of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1990).11. For an introductory history of the “houses of culture,” see Richard Klein and Bernard Toulier, eds., Architecture de la culture: Relais du pouvoir européen, les réseaux de la modernité du XXe siècle 2 (Paris: Docomomo Inter-national, 2009).12. UNESCO, Cultural Policy: A Preliminary Study (Paris: UNESCO, 1969).13. Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tour-ism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).14. See Studies and Research Department, French Ministry of Culture, Some Aspects of French Cultural Policy (Paris: UNESCO, 1970), 9–10; German UNESCO Commission, Cultural Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany (Paris: UNESCO, 1970), 13.15. Helmut Meier, “Der Kulturbund der DDR in den 70er Jahren: Bestandteil des politischen Systems und Ort kultureller Selbstbestäti-gung,” in Befremdlich anders: Leben in der DDR, ed. Evemarie Badstübner (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2000), 599–625.16. On the history of Bildung in German intellectual history, see Walter Horace Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: “Bildung” from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).17. I refer here to socialist realism in the arts more generally, even though the historical trajectory of the movement differs across countries and is often discipline-specific. For example, in the GDR realistic painting per-sisted as part of socialist realism, whereas neoclassical architecture was abandoned in the mid-1950s.18. Boris Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin: Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion (Munich: C. Hanser, 1988).19. See Anna-Sabine Ernst, “Erbe und Hypothek: (Alltags-)kulturelle Leitbilder in der SBZ/DDR 1945–61,” in Kultur und Kulturträger in der DDR: Analysen, ed. Stiftung Mitteldeutscher Kulturrat (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 16.20. See, for example, Walter Ulbricht, Die nationale Mission der DDR und das geistige Schaffen in unserem Staat (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1965).21. Malraux (Décret No. 59-889 du 24.07.1959), cited in “Les maisons de la culture: Principe fondamental de l’action culturelle: Conséquence immédiate de ce principe,” internal report, Jan. 1965, p. 12, CAC 19840754/1, National Archives, France. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.22. Ibid., 2.23. “La France promise à la culture,” Etat Républicain, 14 Oct. 1967.

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24. See Dubois, La politique culturelle, 191–98.25. Even though these were presented as new institutions, the estab-lishment of maisons de la culture goes back to the 1930s. See Urfalino, L’invention de la politique culturelle, 23.26. Joffre Dumazedier, Vers une civilisation du loisir? (Paris: Seuil, 1962).27. “Maßnahmeplan in Auswertung der Autorenkonferenz des Mitteldeut-schen Verlages am 24. April in Bitterfeld,” internal report, 1959, BAr-chB DR1/7841, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Germany. See also John Erhard, Uta Burggraf, and Werner Geidel, Beiträge zur Entwicklung sozialistischer Kulturbedürfnisse (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975).28. Harald Bühl, Kulturhaus: Interessant, lehrreich, unterhaltend (Berlin: Verlag Tribüne, 1962), x.29. See David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, “Style and Socialism: Moder-nity and Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe,” in Style and Social-ism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe, ed. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (New York: Berg, 2000), 12.30. Hans Bentzien, the minister of culture in the first half of the 1960s, even argued that the Stadthallen should be modeled on the popular turn-of-the-century Volkshäuser, but that idea was quickly dismissed as reformist. Meyer, Kulturpaläste und Stadthallen der DDR, 161.31. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, with Dominique Schnapper, L’amour de l’art: Les musées et leur public (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1966).32. During the early 1960s, the French Ministry of Culture was at pains to distinguish its new maisons de la culture from other state-funded collective facilities being built at the time, in particular the youth centers, or maisons des jeunes et de la culture. Established by the state department for youth and sports, these institutions facilitated painting, photography, and theater workshops and club meetings. Separating such creative and recreational activities from the high culture of the maisons de la culture was problem-atic to many policy makers. See Jacques Charpentreau, Pour une politique culturelle (Paris: Les Éditions Ouvrières, 1967), 7–15. See also Urfalino, L’invention de la politique culturelle, 75–78.33. Studies and Research Department, French Ministry of Culture, Some Aspects of French Cultural Policy, 15.34. On the center in Bourges, see André de Baecque, Les maisons de la culture (Paris: Seghers, 1967), 42–46.35. “Les maisons de la culture: Principe fondamental de l’action culturelle,” 5.36. Pierre Moinot, “Etude visant à degager les caracteristiques fondamen-tales d’une architecture theatrale de notre temps,” May 1961, p. 6, CAC 19840754/1, National Archives, France.37. “Programmes des maisons de la culture,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, no. 112 (Feb./Mar. 1964), 24.38. Sonrel collaborated with Jean Du Thilleul and Marcel Cogois and the sce-nographers Demangeat and Candaes. Malraux emphasized the importance of this project as a prototype in his inauguration speech of 19 March 1966. “Les maisons de la culture: Historique des premières réalisations (1959–1967),” inter-nal note, undated (ca. 1967), n.p., CAC 19840754/1, National Archives, France.39. Baecque, Les maisons de la culture, 47.40. “Les maisons de la culture: Historique des premières réalisations.”41. J. Fious, “L’action culturelle,” report, 1965, CAC 19840754/1, National Archives, France.42. “Maisons de la culture,” internal note, May 1968, CAC 19840754/3, National Archives, France.43. Commission Charte de Villeurbanne, Compte rendu de la réunion du 10 juin à la Maison de la culture d’Amiens, 1968, CAC 19950514/1, National Archives, France.44. Francis Raison, “L’action culturelle: Bilan et perspectives,” internal report, Oct. 1968, p. 15, CAC 19840754/8, National Archives, France.45. Quoted in André Rollier, “Les centres culturels en France: Réunion d’experts sur le développement des centres culturels, UNESCO, Budapest, 16–20 July 1968,” p. 10, CAC 19840754/52, National Archives, France.

46. Commission Charte de Villeurbanne, Compte rendu de la réunion du 10 juin à la Maison de la culture d’Amiens.47. Quoted in Rollier, “Les centres culturels en France,” 4.48. Ionel Schein, L’espace global polyvalent (Paris: Vincent Fréal, 1970).49. Raison, “L’action culturelle,” 27.50. Venencie designed the Maison pour Tous in collaboration with scenog-rapher C. Demangeat and sculptor M. Rossigneux.51. For more information on the French new towns, see Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), chap. 5.52. “Le quartier de Maurepas-Elancourt,” note, undated (ca. 1973), 1701 W 1048, Departmental Archives, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France. Centralized state funding supplied 43 percent of construction costs; local authorities contributed 57 percent.53. “Equipements intégrés Elancourt-Maurepas, prefecture de la region parisienne,” internal report, undated, CAC 19840756/205, National Archives, France.54. “Ville nouvelle de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. ‘La maison pour tous’ Quartier des Sept-Mares,” internal report, 1974, n.p., CAC 19840756/205, National Archives, France.55. One of the first maisons de la culture proposals on a hexagonal grid was by the Atelier d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture (AUA), for the maison de la culture for La Part-Dieu in Lyon. Venencie’s maison des jeunes et de la culture in Fresnes was already finished by this time. See L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, no. 129 (1966–67), 67–68.56. Les 7 Mares Elancourt-Maurepas, VNSQY, brochure, undated, p. 2, CAC 19840756/207, National Archives, France.57. Nevertheless, such flexible theater spaces were already being con-tested in France, a result of the controversy surrounding the “factory-like” Théâtre National de Chaillot, designed by AUA. See “L’espace transform-able en question,” Techniques et Architecture 310 (Aug./Sept. 1976), 42–78.58. L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, no. 112 (Feb./Mar. 1964), 28–37; Simon Tidworth, Theatres: An Architectural and Cultural History (New York: Praeger, 1973), 196–212.59. Les 7 Mares Elancourt-Maurepas, VNSQY, 2.60. This intention mirrored late Brutalist ambitions such as those that influenced AUA’s design of L’Arlequin in Grenoble.61. The planners hired ORGANON, a company consisting of four peo-ple: a writer, a musician, and two actors. See “Etude des types d’animation pratiques à partir des équipements de la maison pour tous des 7 mares, Elancourt-Maurepas,” undated (ca. 1977), 1701 W 1366, Departmental Archives, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France.62. APASC brought together representatives from the local municipalities, the planning team, several ministries, and local associations.63. APASC, Orientations 1976, letter of 24 Feb. 1976, p. 1, 1701 W 1395, Departmental Archives, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France.64. “Etude des types d’animation pratiques,” 25.65. “Culture does not propagate itself only through a sort of game of con-centric circles. That process does not work for those who this language cannot touch.” Rapport du Groupe culture, Commissariat général du Plan, Apr. 1976, p. 8, CAC 19840754/23, National Archives, France.66. Alexander Karrash, Die “Nationale Bautradition” denken: Architekturide-ologie und Sozialistischer Realismus in der DDR der Fünfziger Jahre (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2014).67. The late 1940s saw a brief period of experimentation with modernism, including by architects such as Hermann Henselmann, who subsequently designed projects in the neoclassical style.68. In December 1950, a competition for a Kulturhaus prototype was organ-ized, and the results were published as a series of guidelines in Deutsche Architektur, no. 4 (1953). Schriftwechsel des Institutes mit verschiedenen Ministerien über die Projektierung und den Bau von Kulturhäusern, 1951–54, BArchB DH2/3065, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Germany.




69. Even though Brecht did not produce his best-known work during his GDR years, the impact he had on East German theater in subsequent dec-ades was considerable, not only because he had trained the next generation of theater makers but also because his wife, Helene Weigel, continued to work at the Berliner Ensemble for decades after Brecht’s death. Wilhelm Hortmann, “Revolutions in Scenography on the German Stage in the Twen-tieth Century,” in A History of German Theatre, ed. Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 298–300.70. Josef Kaiser, “Die Methode des sozialistischen Realismus in der Architektur, am praktischen Beispiel eines Typenentwurfes für ein Kulturhaus mit 300 Saalplätzen, Berlin,” July 1954, pp. 15–17, BArchB DH2/3358, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Germany.71. Kulturhaus Rüdersdorf, 1954, folder, BArchB DH1/38623, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Germany.72. Entwurf für einen Plan der notwendigen Maßnahmen zur Einrich-tung eines Instituts für Forschung und Entwicklung auf dem Gebiet der Theatertechnik und Aufgaben des Instituts, 1960, BArchB DR1/5776, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Germany.73. See William F. Condee and Thomas Irmer, “Experiments with Archi-tectural Space in the German Theatre,” in Williams and Hamburger, A History of German Theatre, 248–74; Wendell Cole, “The Theatre Projects of Walter Gropius,” Educational Theatre Journal 15, no. 4 (Dec. 1963), 311–17. Even though Brecht’s ideas were situated in such modernism, his GDR-era Berliner Ensemble insisted on using an old theater building. See Iain Mack-intosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience (London: Routledge, 1993), 79.74. “Das Großkulturhaus mit Mehrzwecksaal,” Scena, no. 5 (1963), 3.75. Flierl, “Das Kulturhaus in der DDR.”76. These first designs resulted from a competition. See Prof. Hemmer-ling and Dipl.-Ing. Wever, “Stellungnahme zu den bisher durchgeführten Projektierungsarbeiten für das Haus der sozialistischen Kultur Dresden und Befürwortung der Weiterprojektierung, 08.12.1962, Berlin,” report, p. 2, BArchB DH2/20254, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Germany.77. Sitzung des Preisgericthes am 12.07.1960, internal note, BArch DH 2 II/07-3/8, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Germany; Thesen des Rates der Stadt für die Grundkonzeption “HdK,” 22.7.1960, internal note, 114310 RdB Dresden, BT: 5449, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, Germany.78. Deutsche Architektur, no. 4 (1968), 212–18.79. “Haus der sozialistischen Kultur, Dresden: Aufgabenstellung nach Anordnung no. 6 zur Vorbereitung und Durchführung des Investitions-planes vom 14.03.1959,” report, 114310 RdB Dresden, BT: 5449, Haupt-staatsarchiv Dresden, Germany.80. Hemmerling and Wever, “Stellungnahme zu den bisher durchgeführten Projektierungsarbeiten für das Haus der sozialistischen Kultur Dresden,” 2.81. Wladimir Rubinow, “Flexibilität des Mehrzwecksaales,” Scena, no. 26 (1971), 4–12.82. Manfred Schröter and Wolfgang Grösel, Dresden Kulturpalast (Leipzig: Seemann, 1974), 2.83. Institut für Kulturbauten, 1971–80, folder, BArchB DR1/17912, Bundes-archiv Berlin, Germany.84. Wladimir Rubinow et al., Kulturelle Einrichtungen in gesellschaftlichen Zentren: Grundlagen für den Neubau und die Rekonstruktion von Kulturbau-ten (Berlin: Institut für Kulturbauten, 1975). On the Dronten project, see Marina van den Bergen and Piet Vollaard, Hinder en Ontklontering: Archi-tectuur en Maatschappij in het werk van Frank van Klingeren (Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2003), 100–111.85. See Karl Joachim Beuchel, Die Stadt mit dem Monument: Dokumente und Notizen eines Stadtbaudirektors zur Baugeschichte von Chemnitz/Karl-Marx-Stadt zwischen 1945 und 1990 (Chemnitz: Dämmig, 2006).86. See Lothar Hahn, “Gestaltung und Aufbau des Zentrums von Karl-Marx-Stadt,” Deutsche Architektur, no. 7 (1959), 362–65.

87. Erarbeitung von Gestaltungsvorschlägen für das HKW der Bezirkshaupt-stadt Karl-Marx-Stadt, 15.03.1962, 33842, Staatsarchiv Chemnitz, Germany.88. Pfefferkorn, Grobe, überschlägige Betrachtung zu Nutzungsmöglich-keiten und Nutzeffekt des Hochhausteiles des HKW Karl-Marx-Stadt, 5.10.1964, 28469, Staatsarchiv Chemnitz, Germany.89. “Volkswirtschaftliche Aufgabenstellung für des Investitionsvorhaben,” report, undated, 28470, Staatsarchiv Chemnitz, Germany.90. Vorlage für die Sitzung der Plankommission, 02.10.1961, Vorberei-tung des Baus “Haus der Kultur und Wissenschaften” in Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1614, Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Germany.91. Wladimir S. Rubinow, “Die Stadthalle Karl-Marx-Stadt,” Bauten der Kultur, no. 1 (1976), 21.92. Rat der Stadt Karl-Marx-Stadt, Inhaltliche Konzeption zur Nutzung der Stadthalle Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1973, p. 4, 12030, Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Germany.93. Rubinow, “Die Stadthalle Karl-Marx-Stadt,” 18.94. “Zu einigen Erkenntnissen über die Unterhaltungskunst,” letter from Direktor Haase to the minister of culture, 30.12.1977, 5305, Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Germany; Konzeptionen zur Entwicklung des geistig-kul-turellen Lebens und des künstlerischen Volksschaffens, 1976–80, 5318, Stadtarchiv Chemnitz, Germany.95. Meyer, Kulturpaläste und Stadthallen der DDR, 176.96. Joachim Näther, director of the Institut für Kulturbauten after 1974, oversaw the publication of six handbooks for the construction of cul-tural facilities throughout the GDR. See, for example, Dieter Schölzel, Kulturhäuser und Klubs: Grundlagen für den Neubau und die Rekonstruktion von Kulturbauten (Berlin: Institut für Kulturbauten, 1975).97. Leo Fiege, Zum Platz territorialer kultureller Einrichtungen im Proceß der sozialistischen Kulturentwicklung (Berlin: Akademie für Weiterbildung bein Ministerium für Kultur, 1977).98. Rubinow et al., Kulturelle Einrichtungen in gesellschaftlichen Zentren.99. Werner Prendel, Gesellschaftliche Bauten: Einrichtungen der Bildung, Kultur, Versorgung, Gesundheit und Erholung (Berlin: Verlag fur Bauwesen, 1974), 67.100. Ibid., 129.101. The GDR reportedly had 600 to 1,100 Kulturhäuser. Even if these institutions served to legitimate the state apparatus, they did more than just represent official propaganda, or “party culture.” Thomas Ruben and Bernd Wagner, “Kulturhäuser in Brandenburg: Bestandsaufnahme und Problemanalyse,” in Kulturhäuser in Brandenburg: Eine Bestandsaufnahme, ed. Thomas Ruben and Bernd Wagner (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1994), 14.102. Schölzel, Kulturhäuser und Klubs, 13.103. UNESCO, Cultural Policy, 8.104. Ibid., 30, 48.105. “Journées d’études Franco-Polonaises sur l’utilisation culturelle des loisirs, 18–21 mars 1969, Maison de l’UNESCO, Paris,” report, p. 13, CAC 19840754/52, National Archives, France.106. The Council of Europe created the Council for Cultural Co-oper-ation in January 1962 to draw up proposals for the Council of Europe’s cultural policy. See Council for Cultural Co-operation, Managing Facilities for Cultural Democracy: Symposium on “Methods of Managing Socio-cultural Facilities to Be Applied in Pilot Experiments” (San Remo, 26–29 Apr. 1972) (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1973).107. Stephen Mennell, Cultural Policy in Towns: A Report on the Council of Europe’s “Experimental Study of Cultural Development in European Towns” (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1976), 13.108. Jacques Coenen, Leisure and Socio-cultural Facilities (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1970).109. Mennell, Cultural Policy in Towns, 13.

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464-484 University of California Press on behalf of the ... · The Cultural Center: Architecture as Cultural Policy in Postwar Europe W hen the Stadthalle of Chemnitz, then named