Date:
Location:
Director's Seminar
SPEAKER Sofia Dyak Historian, Director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv
From imagining new housing models to finding resources to house people, postwars are rich in ideas and policies for accommodating people. The need for housing reveals the toll of destruction, while the search for home poignantly highlights the violence of broken relationships with place and with people. In her talk, Dr. Dyak will focus on the city of Lviv, a city that emerged from the Second World War with more than 90% of its buildings intact, alongside a loss of more than 90% of its prewar inhabitants, mostly Jewish and Polish. Lviv was transferred from one state to another - from the Polish state into Soviet Ukraine - as a part of postwar border remaking in Europe. The city offers a possibility to explore how engaging with the materiality and specificity of place became critical in shaping a sense of new postwar belonging while also perpetuating displacement and dispossession brought by the war. Looking at two specific projects – an architectural survey from the 1940s and an experimental architectural study of the 1950s – the talk will show how buildings, treated initially with distance as non-Soviet, became an inspirational and critical ingredient in the process of postwar place- and time- making. This specific postwar story is one of many that shaped contemporary Ukraine, a country that sits on multiple legacies touching several national stories of postwar rebuilding in the 20th century. Reengaging with these legacies may be helpful for contemporary thinking about future reconstruction after the current war.
Refreshments will be provided.
