soooo…. here’s another new blog post series because there are too many forms of inspiration that i want to discuss on the pages of this little journal. i guess it’s only obvious that apart from making things, walking amongst buildings and talking to people, i also like reading books so i’m going to share some of my recommendations and thoughts about inspiring books as well.
i’d like to warn you though that they are entirely personal and biased and every single thought i share about these books will always be heavily from the angle of my own work and what i do and make, so please don’t expect objective, academic reviews because my inspirations are so intertwined with my making. this is going to be more of a series about the thoughts that are influencing my work but let’s start with an easy and visual one - eastern blocks by zupagrafika (2019). this is an absolutely non-comprehensive little collection of photographs of eastern european housing blocks (yes, some from my city, budapest too.)
zupagrafika are an independent publisher/design studio - founded by david navarro and martyna sobecka in poznan, poland and i’m a bit of a fan since they almost single-handedly occupy the niche market for celebratory publications of brutalist architecture in the former eastern bloc and they do it well with a beautiful range behind them - i first got my hands on eastern blocks when it first got published in 2019.
as a predominantly visual work there is very little amount of words, we get a short foreword by christopher beanland from a western perspective and then we can dive right into the photographs, many taken by the design duo themselves. the chapters are divided by locations - we get to visit prefab blocks and estates in berlin, moscow, warsaw, kyiv, budapest and st petersburg. the photography is beautiful work and it’s not from a fixed angle or aesthetics, and that is the greatest benefits i think.
while i don’t completely agree with beanland’s foreword that housing blocks in eastern europe were all about the spectacle, it is true and it applied to all aspects of life, including housing, that image (that of the regime’s) enjoyed the highest priority and it came before any other practicality of real life. for this reason though brutalist architecture nowadays often appears manipulated into either unrealistic, utopian/dystopian depictions of uniformity and scales that never existed, or as exaggerated clichés and close-up metaphors of hardship and suffering. here in this book there is neither, the photographs are simply curious and the reality of the architecture seems to be there as they are - the buildings are obviously the main characters, but the people aren’t invisible. this book is about homes, we don’t get to see inside them but glimpses can be caught of the lives in them and the building’s relationship with the people can also be guessed, neglect or preservation, renovation is all on the photos. we are not to forget that these building blocks aren’t standing on their own but are intertwined with their cities places and people’s lives - there is a human scale and element in even the grandest of scales on all the photos. or perhaps it’s just how i see them because i share the authors’ curiosity about them.
they have another related title that is more connected to my work, panelki. i might reserve a more detailed review for this later but let me just explain how it relates - this book explains a little bit more context on the prefab housing but half the pages are literally a modular set of beautifully illustrated pop-out paper blocks, of which you can assemble your own little prefab house with it. they do have other architectural pop-up books but it’s the one that’s modular and it is very much like how you can create your own pattern here - it’s a bit like how i print so i enjoyed discovering this one.
because of the visible curiosity of eastern blocks though, this remains an inspiring little book after years of looking through it. not only i keep finding new details on the photos themselves, in the close-ups or the facade or the shape, but also it is incredibly well indexed for the architects - all the names are there, the search rabbit hole is ready and inviting to disappear into. there is a lot to enjoy and for those who like my block prints and want to understand more about their inspirations, i totally recommend this book.
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