Introduction : the qualities of color and concrete -- Normal life in the former socialist city -- Socialist realism in the socialist city -- Socialist modern and the production of demanding citizens -- Socialist generic and the branding of state socialism -- Organicist modern and super-natural organicism -- Unstable landscapes of property, morality, and status -- The new family house and the new middle class -- Heterotopias of the normal in private worlds -- Epilogue
Summary
Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous - the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. This book revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. The author shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 245-280) and index
