vernissage / 15.09.2023 / 17.00 / Gallery Korytarz in the Jeleniogórski Cultural Center at Bankowa Street 28/30
More than 12 million citizens in Poland today live in apartments built under socialist mass housing programs. That's almost a third of the country's total population. In the 1960s and 1970s, these apartments were particularly popular. Unlike pre-war buildings, the concrete houses offered a modern standard of furnishings with running hot water, district heating, bathrooms, balconies and - in the case of multi-story buildings - an elevator. Yet even before the political transformation in 1990, prefabricated housing estates had earned the nickname of monotonous, dehumanizing residential neighborhoods due to their mass use. The new geopolitical perspective caused Polish society to look back on the years 1945-1990 as a period of near-sovereignty and economic misery. This has resulted in the architectural heritage of the period before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc being widely regarded in Poland as "foreign" and socialist". The term "socialist" has negative connotations in Polish public opinion and is automatically associated by many with terms such as "communist" or even Soviet. As a result, architecture from the 1945-1990 period is often seen as somewhat dictated from the outside. Since mass housing is the largest part of this socialist" building substance, it is automatically classified in the mental construction of society as an architectural representation of the previous system par excellence.
