There is a particularly fascinating aspect to this in the systematic project by the Ceaușescu regime in Romania to tear down the traditional parts of Bucharest, and move the residents to newly built (in the Soviet brutalist style) soulless apartment blocks. This was intentional, and you can see the consequences of this in Bucharest today. They purposefully wanted to take people out of traditional buildings and to house them in commie blocks in their quest to create a new socialist man.
Warsaw outside the very small restored section downtown is also like this, and it's pretty awful to be honest. You have to go to the small towns to see the intact traditional architecture of central Europe.
I was fortunate enough to be in Hungary in the late 1990s, when they began redoing Budapest and the smaller city that I lived in. You could see the optimism growing within the people and the beauty of the city being restored in parallel. Last time I was there, there was still a massive amount of old shitty buildings, but from my first visit until my last there was tremendous improvement.
I took a drive to Prague during that time. I noticed the typical Soviet style concrete behemoth of depressing apartment buildings as I was a few miles outside the city. Then you get to the real city center and it is just beautiful.
There is a particularly fascinating aspect to this in the systematic project by the Ceaușescu regime in Romania to tear down the traditional parts of Bucharest, and move the residents to newly built (in the Soviet brutalist style) soulless apartment blocks. This was intentional, and you can see the consequences of this in Bucharest today. They purposefully wanted to take people out of traditional buildings and to house them in commie blocks in their quest to create a new socialist man.
Warsaw outside the very small restored section downtown is also like this, and it's pretty awful to be honest. You have to go to the small towns to see the intact traditional architecture of central Europe.
I was fortunate enough to be in Hungary in the late 1990s, when they began redoing Budapest and the smaller city that I lived in. You could see the optimism growing within the people and the beauty of the city being restored in parallel. Last time I was there, there was still a massive amount of old shitty buildings, but from my first visit until my last there was tremendous improvement.
I took a drive to Prague during that time. I noticed the typical Soviet style concrete behemoth of depressing apartment buildings as I was a few miles outside the city. Then you get to the real city center and it is just beautiful.