‘After Utopia’ documents the crumbling, drab, utilitarian shelters built for the masses in Eastern Europe.
By: Susan Van Dongen
We tried to decorate our garden apartment, which always struck me as borrowing its aesthetic from Soviet-style community housing. We wanted to make the place cozy and attractive. There’s only so much you can do with what we called "Khruschev-yellow" walls (that we weren’t allowed to paint), bathroom fixtures and cabinetry from the days of Sputnik.
I kept comforting myself by saying that the apartment was "classic." Finally, we got to move out to a much better place we were fortunate enough to have that option.
That’s not the case for millions of people living in crumbling standardized housing units in cities like Tirana, Albania. All throughout Eastern Europe, stretching from the Balkans to Germany, the Baltic to Central Asia, hundreds of thousands of pre-fabricated concrete constructions are home to families and individuals. The standardization of building types, carried out by socialist states that controlled the economy and owned the land, continues to shape the everyday life of people in the former socialist "second world" and beyond.
Elidor Mehilli, a doctoral student in the department of history at Princeton University, traveled through Germany, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bosnia and his home country of Albania, photographing the housing units and their environs. A collection of his work, titled After Utopia, is on view at the Bernstein Gallery at the Woodrow Wilson School in Princeton through April 27.
"’After’ appears tentatively here," he writes in his artist’s statement. "The materiality of socialism continues to shape the life of millions today as it did during the Cold War."
During the latter half of the 20th century, Eastern European architects constructed many thousands of pre- fabricated concrete buildings in an effort to provide modern housing. Mr. Mehilli’s exhibition chronicles the buildings’ often drab exteriors but also takes a look at his hometown of Tirana, and Albania’s recent program to paint the structures with bold colors.
The exhibit includes a wall-size photo collage of recent urban transformations in Tirana, confronting recent changes in the physical environment of the city illegal settlements, alterations, the city-sponsored "painting of the town" with the legacy of the unattractive socialist constructions themselves.
The mayor, a painter trained in Paris, proposed to paint the aging buildings in bold colors, as a statement to break away from the grayness of the past. It was as though the people in this city in Europe’s poorest country woke up to find their balconies painted pink and orange.
"There was this explosion of color," Mr. Mehilli says. "Some people love it and others are skeptical, wondering whether apathy and corruption can be defeated by color."
The photographer has also captured the patchwork look of buildings that are undergoing home improvements. Unusual transformations are taking place in the Stalinist-era apartment buildings.
"People have tried to build extensions, just to get more room," Mr. Mehilli says. "The way they were planned, these places were very tiny. It’s technically illegal, but they need more space. So the people have intervened, adding an entire floor or closing their balconies off. The places look really strange there are all these mutations. It looks very different from the way it did."
A history major with an interest in architecture as well as photography, Mr. Mehilli was motivated to photograph the buildings and cities to feed his artistic curiosity, but also to document the conditions.
"It’s a combination of the two interests," Mr. Mehilli says. "I’ve exhibited some of the work previously, even before I started graduate work. The topic itself is what I intend to work on for my dissertation housing in socialist countries after World War II. So yes, it interests me academically.
"I’m not (focused) historically as far as this whole project goes, but am more interested in looking at their current conditions," he continues. "This is a historical analysis but I’m using photographs and artistic framing to talk about what has happened to (the structures) today."
Along with the myriad economic changes (some for the better, some for the worse), the urban landscapes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have been disintegrating since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
"(Now that) the state doesn’t own everything, private enterprises have started to come in, and people have tried to move out of the collective housing units," Mr. Mehilli says. "It’s a different political system and it has changed the shape of what the cities look like."
During Socialist rule, the need for housing was momentous, especially with the population boom of the 1950s and the 1960s and particularly in cities that had been ravaged by World War II. The state’s intention was to create as much inexpensive and standardized housing units as possible, so people could at least have shelter for a few years. The various states never foresaw that these facilities would still be around 50 years later. The issue is similar to the inexpensive housing created for the poor in American cities "projects" built with good intentions in the 1960s, but teetering on collapse now.
"They were modern back then but now they’re falling into disrepair," Mr. Mehilli says. "It’s difficult because they house tens of millions of people, so it’s a public policy issue. In Bucharest, the capital of Romania, there might be 1.5 million people living in this kind of collective housing. In Albania this housing is pretty much all there is. Most of the urban fabric of the country was constructed under socialism. They built the cities so they all look the same.
"These housing units look like monstrosities ugly and decrepit but still they are homes for millions of people," he adds. "What is an adequate standard of life?"
Under socialism, tenants couldn’t renovate and because the state owned everything, private dwellings with a personal touch were impossible to come by except, perhaps, for the highest ranking party members.
"You couldn’t make any decisions about your housing environment," Mr. Mehilli says. "Since the (socialist) system has collapsed, those who could afford to do better have added to or fixed up these units, or they’ve left altogether. But those who cannot afford to fix their places up have had to stay. So it’s turned into a social stratification issue."
Mr. Mehilli has undergraduate degrees in the history of architecture and urbanism and European studies from Cornell University. He has also studied and lived in Budapest, Berlin and London. In 2004, he had the opportunity to join the initial efforts of setting up the War Crimes Chamber in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mr. Mehilli has previously exhibited at Cornell and Brown universities, shows that included some of the works on view here.
He says his family moved around a lot, but lived for various periods in socialist-style housing.
"Some of the pictures in the exhibit are from neighborhoods in Tirana I know very well," Mr. Mehilli says. "(The neighborhoods) look gray and depressed but still, this is where people spent their childhood, went to school and had friends. It’s difficult to imagine that there are emotional attachments, but entire family lives were developed here."
After Utopia, photography by Elidor Mehilli, is on view at the Bernstein Gallery, Robertson Hall, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Washington Road, Princeton University, through April 27. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-5 p.m. For information, call (609) 258-2222. On the Web: www.princeton.edu

