A House for Culture Nicolas Grospierre
A House for Culture Nicolas Grospierre
October 31—November 17, 2024
SARP Pavilion, 2 Foksal St., Warsaw
House of Culture
“Naukšēni” kolkhoz, Naukšēni, Latvia
4 Illusions lost. An ex post manifesto for modern architecture
—Nicolas Grospierre
10 From Utopia to Reality and Back: Nicolas Grospierre’s “A House for Culture” —Yuval Yasky
18 Innocent Eyes. Nicolas Grospierre looks at the Collective Farm —Owen Hatherley
32 Bio, Colophon
Nicolas Grospierre
I have been interested in modernist architecture since the late 1990s. Architectural modernism represents, to me, an exceptional plastic and formal expression, emanating from a certain societal project, based on the idea of progress (even if the latter seems illusory). I have been photographing it passionately, even obsessively, since 2001. I first encountered the kibbutzim on a trip to Israel in 2008, and three years later I had come up with the idea of juxtaposing their forms with the architecture of the kolkhozes.
What fascinated me the most, was that these two phenomena—which are both unique and similar due to their common roots—although they developed in completely different contexts, in places spread 5 thousand kilometres apart, led to results that are quite comparable in terms of formal and urban qualities. They both exemplify a kind of public space devoid of any commercial aspect, which I think is far too scarce in the current architectural paradigm. Finally, their character, which is hardly known outside their countries of origin, prompted me to bring their stories to a wider audience.
I developed the project in 2012 and took the photographs between 2014 and 2015. It seems like the world has been turned upside-down since then. In
February 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula without much protest from the international public opinion. Eight years later, its army attacked Ukraine, triggering a full-scale war that continues to this day. In October 2023, Hamas struck Israel, to which the government of Benjamin Netanyahu responded with a retaliatory war in which tens of thousands of people have been killed so far. I want to make it absolutely and unequivocally clear that I radically and totally condemn these events, which, apart from the horror they wreaked—demonstrate a kind of relationship with the “other” that I consider foreign to my values. Although it may sound naïve, I am interested in kolkhozes and kibbutzim insofar as they embody a vision of a society built on peace. I would never want this project to be associated in any way with the warmongering impulses of Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu But then, you may ask, if presenting your project runs the risk of being associated with the policies of these regimes, why do it at all? The answer is simple: to not fall victim to self-censorship and to defend what I believe is right in my work.
Having said that, the fortuitous coincidence of these worldly events and the publication of my works makes this text necessary as a clarification of my intentions. The current geopolitical climate also prompts me to make a few additional comments on the nature of this project and photography at large. The external events brought to light some aspects of the project, which I was conscious of before, but which had not been explicitly formulated. I strove to view the kibbutzim and the kolkhozes as visions of a society in which architecture is an instrument of social engineering and its role is to create spaces for living, including public spaces. However, I had not emphasised clearly enough other features of these modernist countryside settlements, especially those related to their foundation—the colonial shadows they cast and, more generally, their attitude towards otherness.
In the Baltic countries, the kolkhozes were a result of Soviet domination. Even if the process of collectivisation in the region was not as brutal as at other times or in other places, e.g. in Ukraine in the interwar period, it remains a fact that it was nonetheless imposed by the Soviet regime. Although the circumstances were more nuanced in the case of Israel, it must be said that many kibbutzim were founded on the land of displaced Palestinian villages. This too is a form of colonialism—a particular one, that
certainly differs from the colonialism of European empires, as it was based on the belief in the legitimacy of reappropriating land that Jews consider their own, regardless of whether this is rightful or not. Anyhow, in both cases of establishing new settlements in the countryside, there was a lack of neighbourly harmony, consideration for the subjectivity of others, and relationships built on acceptance and respect.
I expect that these sidenotes will enrich the reception of my project and enable a deeper understanding. The events of the last decade acted as a prolonged immersion in the (photographic) developer bath, bringing out the contrasts and highlighting the (sometimes painful) complexity of the architectural phenomena depicted. Moreover, I am struck by how my book A House for Culture, published in 2022 (before this exhibition), became almost overnight a testament to the partial—and perhaps outdated ?—approach to modernism, where fascination with the form and ideals of a project outweighs its darker aspects. From today’s perspective, the modernist project can appear inextricably linked to colonialism, as an expression of a social projection based on the idea of progress, whether voluntary or coerced.
I find it fascinating how exogenous events can affect photographs that were taken before them and that have remained objectively the same. In 2011, my primary intent was to depict unknown architectural phenomena. At the time, I did not feel the need to emphasise their dark and difficult sides. The photos were taken. They have not changed since then, but the commentary that accompanies them is different—more nuanced, richer, less idealistic. Our gaze must not be naïve, and the image must be accompanied by a text. Otherwise, there is a danger that it becomes a two-dimensional artistic gesture. Wojciech Wilczyk wrote in another context that “there is no such thing as an innocent eye.” Today I feel the depth of these words, which for me the form of a maxim about the essence of photography. I leave the reception of this work to the viewer. Although neither my intention, nor its form have changed since its creation, it can be understood as a retroactive palimpsest in which the passage of time and external events emphasise layers of meaning that were less clear before. My fascination—or even love—for modernism prevails, my desire to communicate it remains unchanged, but my illusions about the purity of its intention have been shattered.
Health-Improving Centre
“The 25th Meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” Sovkhoz Juknaičiai, Lithuania
Stanislovas Kalinka / Petras Grecevičius (interiors), 1982 892 residents
Library Kibbutz Shoval, Israel
Technical Department of the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, 1970
From Utopia to Reality and Back: Nicolas Grospierre’s “A House for Culture”
Yuval Yasky
Topos: From Utopia to Reality
“Our goal in our settlement is to live the life of a large society, a working society, which overcomes the artificial differentiation, harmful in both its human and its national-economic aspects, between work in ‘pure agriculture’ and work in artisanry and industry, keeping ‘urban’ work and ‘rural’ work separate. Our aspiration is a society that unites physical and mental work within itself…Our aspiration also entails our wish to create a cultural center in this settlement that will provide for its cultural needs and in which the means dedicated to culture, adult education and the education of children will be concentrated.” (Ein
Harod manifesto 1924)
1 Yasky Y., The Tent of Congregation (Ohel Moed) , in Grospierre N., A House for Culture An enquiry into the architecture of the Kibbutz and the Kolkhoz, NIAiU, Warsaw, 2022
This excerpt from 1924 summarizes the program of the Kibbutz and socialist idea of the rural-urban hybrid settlement in general as realized Utopia—a place that remediates society from both the capitalist city and its petit-bourgeois culture on the one hand and the cultural backwardness of the primitive village on the other. In this context, the cultural center of the settlement is the place where these ideas come together and manifest themselves in the integration of everyday structures such as the dining halls and administrative complexs as well as more transcendent cultural functions as libraries, concert halls, art galleries etc. As I wrote in my short essay for the book “A House For Culture”1 on which this exhibition is based, the place of culture, from the most mundane to the higher cultural ceremonies, in the overall urban schemes was quasi-religious one—the place where all the daily, weekly and annual rituals took place, thus giving culture a transcendent status both in the space and the itinerary of the settlement.
Ou-Topos/Eu-Topos: Back to Utopia
Nicolas Grospierre’s photography, presented in this exhibition returns his objects of interest from the realm of the realized utopia in its, mostly grim, current reality of abandonment, decay and dissolution back into the promised land of Utopia, by means of disciplinary tactics and aesthetic language.
In this large series, Grospierre uses a tactic of estrangement by means of framing his objects in such a manner that on the one hand distils their architectural “objectness” but on the other hand leaves them devoid of any geographic or social context, thus we can read them as located on a stylistic and historical context, like romantic landscape paintings of the 19th century. In doing that, Grospierre achieves the displacement of his objects from the real (Topos) to the ethereal Ou-Topos (no-place) of Utopia. The second strategy Grospierre uses is his classical artistic language. Most photographs depict the building either frontal or use one-point perspectives and symmetrical compositions, referring to renaissance representations of the citta-ideale and other divine scenery amplified by the lack of human presence in most images and the use of diptychs as a representational tactic which was widely used in religious art. By using these techniques, Grospierre achieves the notion of Eu-Topia, the good place, paradise, or maybe more accurate, paradise lost.
In this exhibition, we attempt to recreate the book “A House of Culture” in the overall layout and design.
The mounting is analogous to full bleed pages, using the same comparative diptychs and triptychs of the original. This formal adherence to the book is interfered by the kind of informal, smaller prints, that act as kind of thumbnails, a “salon de refuse” and subverts the carefully curated selection of photographs in order to create a sense of a field of other, less heroic objects that created the realized utopia of the rural socialist existence of 20th century Europe and Israel.
Dining Hall
Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, Israel
Shimshon Heller, 1970s
882 residents
294 residents
Canteen Kurtna Experimental Poultry Farm, Kurtna, Estonia Valve Pormeister / Raili Morgen (interiors), 1985
Administrative-cultural center
“Are” sovkhoz Are, Estonia
Ell Väärtnõu, 1980 419 residents
House of Culture
“Naukšēni” kolkhoz, Naukšēni, Latvia
residents
Innocent Eyes
Nicolas Grospierre looks at the Collective Farm
Owen Hatherley
Nicolas Grospierre’s work has often been about binaries, diptychs, juxtapositions—something unexpectedly rhyming with something else, something out of place slotted into a new context. I first encountered Grospierre’s photographs when living, on and off, in Warsaw, during the early 2010s— especially through the book Biblioteka, which combined a showcase of his work with a specific project on the National Library in Warsaw, which I was regularly visiting at the time. By the mid-2010s, a lot of people were doing one of the things Grospierre was doing—documenting the once incessantly condemned modern architecture of Eastern Europe—but none of them had anything like his eye. What made Grospierre unusual was, first, that his work captured some of the extreme strangeness of many of these buildings, their interruption of urban space, their sense of shock, and second, that in the process he refused to exoticise them. In the Becherian sequences he would produce of particular forms and typologies, he would put a building in Texas next to a building in Tbilisi, say, revealing the accidental and deliberate affinities between the built environment of the binary rivals of the Cold War, and internationalising an Eastern European
architecture too often regarded as some freakish outgrowth of an illegitimate system. This outlining of the ways in which apparent political antipodes can visually rather resemble each other is never explicit in Grospierre’s work—he always avoids any particular political axe-grinding. However, given that the Cold War mentality of endlessly juxtaposing a ‘Free’ world with an unfree one somewhere to the east has never really ended, his arrangements had a certain subversive edge. One could compare them with the photographic and theoretical dialogues between east and west in Susan Buck-Morss’ pivotal book Dreamworld and Catastrophe , where she revealed the affinities of Stalin’s Palace of the Soviets (1932) and RKO’s King Kong (1933). But even if you avoid politics, politics will eventually find you, particularly if you’re working with such combustible material as the 20th century built environment. On talking to Nicolas about his 2022 project A House for Culture, with its particular juxtaposition of two extremely politicised building projects—the collective farms of the USSR (the Kolkhoz, here focusing on those in the Baltic States) and in the state of Israel (the Kibbutz, developed in the British Mandate of Palestine and developed further after the state’s foundation in 1948)—it became clear he felt that the politics behind these could no longer be ignored, in the light of the sadistic, exterminationist wars being waged against Ukraine and Palestine by the Russian and Israeli governments. We sat down in September 2024 to talk about some of the problems and potentials revealed by applying his cool approach to these extremely heated spaces.
Grospierre describes A House for Culture as, formally, ‘an intensification of the underlying formal and architectural ideas’ of his two books of juxtapositions, Modern Forms and Modern Spaces, but the way in which the later project emerged is distinctly different. Although it looks systematic, Grospierre’s work has often emerged out of accident; he describes to me his work on the USA emerging out of a coast-to-coast drive, where he simply photographed the buildings that interested him. The resultant photographs are then selected, assembled, and juxtaposed into these diptychs. But by contrast, A House for Culture was ‘very carefully planned ex ante’, as a deliberate alignment of these two projects of modernised collective farming. This plan emerged, he says, from a realisation that most of the earlier books consisted, wholly
unintentionally, of public buildings—‘around 90 per cent’, on his reckoning, consisting of theatres, cinemas, canteens, concert halls and the like, all of them basically non-commercial buildings. Concentrating on the public buildings of collective farms, which were always places that were deliberately ‘devoid of commercial space’, was a way of ‘getting to the core idea—the integration between form and programme’.
It’s easy to suggest that Grospierre’s work in dissolving some of the Cold War’s binaries emerges out of his particular background, growing up with French and Polish parents. Warsaw, where he has been based for the last 25 years, is a city which has long suffered from a cultural cringe at its apparent ‘easternness’, both geographically, as a city much closer to Minsk or Smolensk than to Paris or Rome, but also in its built environment, which outside of its (reconstructed) Old Town is wholly a product of the mid-20th century, spacious, modern, imposing, unsentimental. In that context, his project has actually internationalised Poland’s ‘Socialist Modernism’ by placing it in dialogue with what was happening at the same time in the USA, Western Europe, or the Middle East, allowing the similarities and a common repertoire of modernist forms to emerge.
You can see those similarities on the outskirts of Paris, in housing estates like Sarcelles, which pioneered the very same concrete panel building techniques that Nikita Khrushchev would bring to the USSR and its satellites as a panacea for their housing crisis, meaning that suburban Paris can look greatly like suburban Moscow. When I ask if his work was influenced by growing up in a French and Polish environment, he replies that ‘one of the probable reasons for my interest in modernism is that I grew up in Paris’, which is ‘not modernist, especially the centre’, and then moved to Poland, where he found an architecture and space that was ‘not what I was accustomed to’. The decisive encounter, however, was actually a trip to Lithuania by car, where he was presented with a contrast between ‘what my eyes were used to—and then, suddenly, boom’.
The photographs that resulted were initially intended ‘not to demonstrate something, but as a personal reaction to something that was new to me’—particularly as someone with no training in architecture. An early project was just called Lithuanian Bus Stops , with diptychs of frontal and
side shots of concrete bus shelters in rural Lithuania—‘extremely simple, minimalist spaces’, most of which, as he points out, have since been demolished. Grospierre’s interest in these was in their being ‘very gratuitous gestures, in the middle of empty roads, where suddenly you’d see this shape’, a gesture ‘so free from everything—so individual and absurd’, an experience he would repeat driving through the southern states of the USA some time later to take the photographs that were eventually assembled in Modern Forms and Modern Spaces. ‘It’s wonderful’, he says, ‘to find something in the middle of nowhere that slaps you in the face’. Grospierre’s work has always showed the influence of the Dusseldorf School, and especially Bernd and Hilla Becher’s project of cataloguing and selecting of industrial architecture, during which they would have to crop and isolate a particular form from its context to reveal its particular qualities. But on the road, these bus stops were effectively pre-selected, already lone monuments standing in a countryside which was, to the untrained eye, featureless. The collective farms project would mean a much greater engagement with the rural, although a very particular modernist vision of the countryside. A House for Culture emerged out of an architectural surprise: the contrast between ‘the a priori , cliche idea that people would have of a Kolkhoz’, with ‘wheat, immense fields, perhaps very simple homes’, and for that matter of the Kibbutz, which one could picture as ‘people toiling in the desert’ and a built reality ‘which was completely different’. These Houses of Culture and canteens and public halls for the collective farmers, which were built in both typologies, consisted instead of ‘rather futuristic’, public buildings and extremely planned, controlled spaces.
That their history is heated should go without saying, and in the Soviet case, it is very widely known. Economically, the collective farms that were imposed on the USSR under Stalin’s First Five Year Plan in the early 1930s were a catastrophe, which crippled Soviet agriculture right up until the economic collapse of the late 1980s, but they are best known for a series of famines induced by the process of dispossessing and coercing the Soviet peasantry. The most famous of these hit Ukraine in 1932-1933, in which several million people starved to death while grain continued to be expropriated and exported; famines in the same period also killed millions in western Russia and,
especially, Kazakhstan. This would repeat in China at the end of the 1950s, when Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ caused a similar catastrophe in the countryside. The record is, then, one of disaster—the overwhelming majority of the deaths ascribed to state socialism in the twentieth century took place in the process of forcing farmers into collectives, something which was, as the miserable productive record shows, always more driven by ideology than practicality.
Grospierre zeroes in on an unusual example, though—collectivisation in the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. These three countries were annexed as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and were firmly made part of the USSR between 1945 and 1991. The results were, of course, violent, with thousands of people deported to Siberia, and the process of collectivisation was no more voluntary here than everywhere else. However, unlike in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, the independent Baltic States of the interwar years had built an intensive, productive capitalist agriculture, which meant it adapted to the collective system less painfully than elsewhere. By the sixties, Baltic farms tended to have a surplus, which gave them enough wealth to commission a large quantity of public buildings—housing, offices, canteens, factories, cinemas, and Grospierre’s ‘houses of culture’—usually in a bricky, Nordic architecture that drew on Scandinavian designers like Alvar Aalto or Arne Jacobsen. Some of the major buildings, built in the 1980s, would have less than a decade of productive use, as the collective system was abandoned immediately on independence, and widespread rural out-migration meant that there was no longer much use for this panoply of public provision. But for a time, these buildings really were places of some pride. I showed Grospierre a volume I had picked up, published in the mid-1980s, on Estonian Rural Architecture, which moves quickly through manor houses to show off pages and pages of attractive modernist farm buildings framed by forests. He then points out that The Architecture of Soviet Republics book series—volumes on each component republic that were ‘my introduction to Soviet architecture’—often ended with some pages on collective farm buildings. It was, nonetheless, on the Baltic that these were most elaborate.
If the Soviet examples have seldom been internationally celebrated outside the long-forgotten texts
of distant Stalinists, Israeli collective farms are a very different matter, though their roots can both be found in European Marxism of the early 20th century. Although only a small minority ever lived in Israeli compared with Soviet collective farms, they were always voluntary—no NKVD ever went through the villages here and forced them into Kibbutzes. While the Kolkhoz has usually been—understandably—demonised, the Kibbutz has always been a firm part of Israeli mythology, the places that ‘made the desert bloom’, which—until attitudes to Israel hardened on the international left—generations of enthusiasts would travel to in order to work for a few months on the land, where they could find communities collectively raising children and making decisions through direct democracy. Famously, after stepping down as leader, the Israeli Labour Party politician and the state’s effective founding father David Ben-Gurion retired to a Kibbutz, and generations of Israel’s Ashkenazi European elite have been raised on the collective farms. This sympathy from the international left has been gradually rescinded, both as a result of the sharp turn rightwards made within Israeli society from the late 1970s onwards, and more importantly, as a result of a much greater awareness—via the writings of Edward Said, Ilan Pappe or even a firmly Zionist historian like Benny Morris—that Israel’s very foundation rested on the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their land in the ‘Nakba’ of 1948.
This meant a recognition that Israel can be understood as an example—an unusual one, to be sure— of a settler colonial state, comparable with the USA, Australia or Apartheid-era South Africa.
The notion of a state of Israel as a settler colony was fundamental to the ideology of its first thinkers, like Theodor Herzl, and it is by no means coincidental that it was undertaken at first under the auspices of the British Empire, given imperial support by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Some of the Kibbutzes Grospierre documents were founded in the interwar years during the British Mandate—‘the first were really just after the First World War’— as a result of the labours of what he calls ‘pioneers, visionaries, people who believed they had a rightful claim to the land’, whether we regard that ‘as true, or as a bit maniacal’. Some were directly founded as the result of the expulsion of Palestinian villagers, and Palestinians were never invited to take part in this socialist experiment, which rested, in the 1920s and 1930s, on the exclusive use of
‘Jewish Labour’. Unlike the Kolkhoz, the Kibbutz was, Grospierre points out, ‘not initiated by the state, because there was no central state at the time, but by private initiative’. Israeli architectural historians such as Zvi Efrat or Sharon Rotbard have argued that this absence of direct state decrees is somewhat deceptive, however, with the Kibbutz emerging out of a more complex state-building nationalist project, through networks like the trade union federation the Histadrut, socialist parties like Hashomer Hatzair or Poale Zion, and the land-acquiring institutions like the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association and the Jewish National Fund—as opposed to, as in the Soviet example, a central state forcing collective farming on the population, regardless of the opinions of anyone, least of all farmers. But the Kibbutz was also regarded as a spearhead of the colonisation of Palestine, often equipped with a military ‘tower and stockade’ design to protect against a hostile population: it was an agricultural, architectural, social and military project at once.
Although ‘there was obviously no room for self-expression’ in the Kolkhoz as such, as Grospierre says, the architecture came out much more similar to the self-organised Kibbutz than anyone might have expected. So why is the architecture so very similar? To be sure, there is the factor of the similar political roots, and the connection to a common international repertoire of high modernist form, especially from the fifties to the seventies—Brutalism, Scandinavian ‘vernacular’ modernism, the International Style. Grospierre notes that because of this, you can assemble the farm buildings, like the disparate global buildings of Modern Forms and Modern Spaces , into a sequential series, an ‘automatism’, which means that ‘any shape can fit into a series, where it’ll be similar to the next one you look at’, a ‘Borgesian’ approach to form. ‘It’s really a game, being played on the level of form’, Grospierre notes. ‘Of course it’s relatively shallow’, he says, but this can then be combined with something much more historical and concrete, the study of public spaces and the public sphere. The lush interior communal spaces that were revealed abundantly in Modern Spaces. It is the function of these buildings as celebratory, communal and collective spaces that piqued Grospierre’s interest in the first place, rather than their uglier history. He jokes that as a former student of Political Science, ‘Perhaps I dropped out too
early’, being always ‘inspired by the idealism’ of these modern movements rather than fixated on the ‘consequences of what went on’. But he is still very defensive of the public idea. He mentions Eric Klinenberg’s recent book Palaces for the People, a fervent defence of shared public spaces in a neoliberal world, and the research Klinenberg cites showing that Chicago’s community centres have directly led to a sharp decline in crime and violence in the areas they serve. As a student Grospierre was fascinated by Jurgen Habermas’ 1962 work on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere—a book which charted the emergence of a specific notion of public space for free debate within the bourgeois city, with the paradigmatic case being the coffee houses of 18th century Paris or London. There, a new type of building did encourage a new liberal culture, but one which was also riven by divides of class and gender, and closely connected to the networks of Empire. As an example of the sort of alignments that can be made between Dusseldorf-style deadpan architectural photography and a project of political critique and historical recovery, we could look at Wojciech Wilczyk’s photography project There Is No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye , published as a book in 2009, a book Grospierre and I found we were both enthusiasts for—he calls it simply ‘a work of genius’. In the project, Wilczyk documented every one of the dozens of surviving Synagogues and other Jewish religious institutions in Poland, the legacy of a community that had existed in Poland for many centuries—and the surreal continued existence of these buildings in the twenty-first century as everything from warehouses to supermarkets, with their original incarnations almost always obscured and ignored. Nonetheless, the formal similarities gradually emerged as you read through the book, and you could never look at small-town or urban Poland in the same way again, seeing the possible traces of this exterminated community everywhere, through a book that uses architectural form to uncover a historical process. Looking at the images in A House for Culture more critically in the last couple of years, Grospierre realised that Wilczyk’s Innocent Eye effectively works as a ‘kind of unexpected bridge between the Kolkhoz and the Kibbutz situation’. As with the Synagogues and schools in Poland, many of these buildings are now severely dilapidated, especially in the Baltic, but also, increasingly, in Israel. They
have also emerged out of a project of erasure—of the existing rural smallholdings replaced by the Kolkhoz, and of the Palestinian villages and farms that had been on the sites of some of the Kibbutzes for centuries. A link is then formed by ‘this process of erasing people’ from their land, common to all three examples. But in each case the actual built legacy is worn, crumbling and increasingly illegible, no longer able to convey the politics and lives that were once lived there.
The reason for the buildings’ desuetude is not so much a decline of colonialism or imperialism, but the decline of socialism. The voluntary Kibbutz and the coerced Kolkhoz share a parentage in the labour movement of the early twentieth century, and so too does the typology of the House of Culture. These have their roots in the self-organised spaces of the working class movement at the turn of the century, such as Victor Horta’s famous proto-modernist Maison de Peuple in Brussels, a centre for the international socialist parties which housed theatres, canteens, meeting spaces and so forth. Its public halls would house the great debates between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Labour Zionists and anti-Zionist Jewish Bundists, between reformists and revolutionaries, trade unionists and anarcho-syndicalists—and at the same time, these houses of culture and houses of the people would provide spaces for leisure and organisation for the working class populations of the industrial towns and cities. Connected in this line are the Kulturhuset in Stockholm and the various examples of the Casa di Popolo in post-war Italy, the Working Men’s Clubs of industrial Britain and the Constructivist Workers’ Clubs of 1920s Moscow or Kharkiv. If you had told someone at the Brussels Maison de Peuple in 1910 that, in future, there would be collective farms in the rural areas of the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Sanjak of Palestine, they would have considered you mad, but it was people who had cut their teeth in these European socialist houses of culture—from Stalin to Ben-Gurion— who would make it happen. A House for Culture is, among other things, a demonstration of the law of unintended consequences. But today, this history is hardly prized either in the Baltic or in Israel. Soviet architecture is seen very often in the Baltic as an inextricable part of a loathed Russian imperialist project, which is especially the case in so abstract and coercive a project as the Soviet collective farm. The Ashkenazi
modernist elite in Israel that built the Kibbutzes is increasingly a remnant of the past in a country where there is a Mizrahi and Sephardic majority among Israeli Jews, in a country which looks towards Washington and to a global far-right. The Israeli Labour Party that was once hegemonic for decades struggles today to get just enough votes to enter the Knesset. In the Baltic States, despite an abundant pre-Soviet history of socialist organising (especially in Latvia and Estonia) national identity rests upon being anti-Russian, hence anti-Soviet, hence anti-socialist. But the Zionist project continues, and so too does the Russian imperial project that morphed into the Soviet empire and foisted a Russian political system upon the Baltic.
If Grospierre’s is not an innocent eye, then, what is it looking at here? When I ask this, he offers some doubts about the way he’d looked at the history and politics of the built environment in the past; ‘I used to consider that there was beauty in failure, because it reveals human frailty, which is moving—but this statement is of course controversial’, and this applies particularly to A House for Culture. ‘I have a certain bitterness about the project’, he admits, with the ferocious wars unleashed in 2022 upon Ukraine and in 2023 upon Gaza serving as ‘a bucket of cold water on my head’, meaning that he now feels the need to ‘stand back’ a little from some of the ‘idealism’ he’d previously admired. The additional factor that, he feels, he hadn’t previously given enough thought, is colonialism . This is a question that A House for Culture brings to the fore, documenting as it does the results of two projects of colonisation—the Soviet annexation and absorption of the Baltic States between the 1940s and the 1980s, and the ongoing Israeli expulsion and expropriation of the Palestinians since the 1940s. Much activism and historical research in the last few years has, he notes, drawn new attention to the ways in which colonial processes, ideas, institutions and ways of thinking endure into the present day, factors which he considers were until recently ‘poorly understood’. A House for Culture can, though, with a less innocent eye cast upon it, reveal certain things about colonialism, and the ways in which the emancipatory movements of modernism, liberalism and socialism were all tied up within a violent and exclusionary colonial project.
Maybe some of this anxiety is misplaced, insofar as the Russian and Israeli governments are hardly
continuing the socialist project that is reflected in these buildings. Their very dilapidation, documented in Grospierre’s photographs, reflects the fact that they’re not part of how either of these places place themselves politically or economically in the present day, or for that matter how their inheritors conduct their own architectural projects. One could look, for instance, at the recent proposals for the post-war reconstructions of Gaza City or of Mariupol as, in Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand-Monk’s phrase, ‘Evil Paradises’ of glass skyscrapers, beaches, luxury apartments, casinos and banks. Here you can see not the slightest trace of the utopian hopes that were realised—in a fashion—in these collective farms, both those imposed on the hostile peasantry of the Baltic or those created by European enthusiasts on Palestinian soil. Soviet Communism and Israeli Labour Zionism were both socialist projects in which, fatally, nationalism became far more important than socialism, to the point where anything much of liberty, equality and fraternity gradually disappeared from sight. In neither space does the socialist dream continue in even the slightest sense. But what does continue is Russian and Israeli colonialism, and their determination to extend themselves through war.
So this poses an imagined question: so what ? What does it matter if we discover that the Soviet-Russian or Israeli nationalist projects had within them a socialist, emancipatory strain which had once built great, admirable public spaces? What does this matter to a Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian whose family were deported to Siberia? What does it matter to a Ukrainian refugee whose home has been destroyed by Russian rockets? What is its significance to a Palestinian whose land has been surrounded with settlements and walls in the West Bank, or a Palestinian in Gaza whose entire family may have been wiped out and whose home has been rendered uninhabitable by a campaign of ruthless, relentless destruction? What, I asked Grospierre, do you intend people to take from all of this? What can be learned from this project? He pauses for a couple of minutes, and answers. ‘That the road to hell is paved with good intentions’.
Dining Hall
Kibbutz Sdot Yam, Israel
Ya’acov Gever, Ziva Armoni, 1969
Dining Hall
Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, Israel
Arnona Axelrod, 1985 673 residents
Nicolas Grospierre (b. 1975)
An architectural photographer and artist, he grew up in France and has lived in Poland since 1999. Before dedicating himself to photography, he studied political science and sociology in Paris and London. In his work, he uses photography as a creative tool, focusing on both documentary projects and conceptual issues. In his documentary-style works, he often explores the theme of collective memory and the hopes associated with modernist architecture—addressing it at a time when the utopias connected to this style have lost their power and significance. The conceptual side of his work is based on creating a playful interaction with the viewer, who is invited to engage through visually appealing—almost sensual—images and installations. In 2008, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale (together with Kobas Laksa) for the Polish Pavilion exhibition Hotel Polonia: The Afterlife of Buildings He was also awarded the Polityka Passport in 2012.
Photographs and exhibition concept: Nicolas Grospierre
Scientific curator:
prof. dr hab. arch. Bolesław Stelmach
Curator: Yuval Yasky
Exhibition design: Yamit Cohen, Yuval Yasky
Coordination:
Kacper Kępiński, Kacper Tomaszewski, Mateusz Włodarek
Communication: Dominik Witaszczyk, Ola Zaszewska
Visual identity: Katarzyna Nestorowicz
Exhibition production: Artpath
Production of photographs: Banda Printshop
Authors of accompanying essays: Nicolas Grospierre, Owen Hatherley, Yuval Yasky
Translations: Natalia Raczkowska
Editing and proofreading: Urszula Drabińska
Co-organiser: Estonian Museum of Architecture
The exhibition is co-financed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
The research towards and publication of the album A House for Culture were made possible through two grants by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
back cover:
Administrative-cultural center
“Põdrangu” sovkhoz, Tamsalu, Estonia
Maara Metsal / Eeva-Aet Jänes (sgrafitto), 1978
2090 residents
