ABSTRACT
In his writing, Gilles Deleuze suggests a function that aims to shape immanent relations that one can form with their place. It does so by imposing meaning onto these relations so that they are reinterpreted in a controlled way. Deleuze suggests that this function is the fault of an overpowering affect or affiliations to an intellectual standpoint, be it ethical or political in nature. He discusses such affiliations in The Fold and names them an “interiority”. Such interiorities have been emblematic in carrying and fulfilling historic narratives and giving definition to the significance of place on a political level.
This chapter investigates the shaping and re-shaping ideologies that came to inspire the form of the architecture therein and seeks to answer how the link between architecture and politics informs nostalgic impressions that may arise through propaganda. The Polish city of Nowa Huta was designed in 1949 in accordance with Soviet directives of design and planning, and the architects designed a utopian version of a Marxist world. The city was to be the pride of a nation that was being rebuilt after the trauma of the Second World War.
Shifting political atmospheres between 1953 and 1956 required the city development to adapt to the economic constraints of the Khrushchev era. Along with the political thaw came a wave of protests that led to the change in the political structures of the nation and central Europe. In the post-Communist time, the city came to be neglected by the regional authorities who saw it as an icon of the past struggles. As a result, the dialogues in Poland about Nowa Huta were less than flattering. This played a role in the formation of the image of the place by individuals but could not replace the immanence of relations that people formed.
