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Idea by

Rachel Györffy

Budapest, Hungary
Rachel Györffy studied Architecture at the TU Munich and spent her Erasmus scholarship program at the Arts University Bournemouth. After working for almost ten years as an architect in Germany and Hungary on various types of projects from hospitals, research facilities and university buildings to office buildings, she is currently a Doctoral Researcher at the Doctoral School of the Moholy- Nagy University of the Arts and Design in Budapest.

Call for ideas 2021

Towards a Potemkin City


How the reconstructivist trend in architecture is a symptome in Central and Eastern Europe and what we can learn from it

Towards a Potemkin City


How the reconstructivist trend in architecture is a symptome in Central and Eastern Europe and what we can learn from it
My theoretical proposal analyses the current reconstructivist trend in architecture.
File under
Type of project
  • Systemic changes

The broader impact of my research would not only challenge what currently is being created in Central and Eastern Europe (Berlin, Budapest, Skopje), the Potemkin City, the facadist town of scenery-like, retrograde architecture of hard-to-define neo styles, established on the grounds of resentment towards late-modernist architecture and fed by the eagerness of pleasing tourism with a total lack of recognition for the results of over-tourism and dissolution of social diversity in the city but also analyze the the dichotomy of a collective longing for a past-never-happened, transfigured by the romanticizing cloud of nostalgia and the paradox of a retrograde utopia, where our future lies on the timeline already behind us. This faux-utopia is also conditioned by the loss of the horizon in the age of aesthetic capitalism, the pervasiveness of amusement in architecture and the ‘unsustainable development’ of the Neo-liberal economy resulting in a broken planet (E. Krasny, A. Fitz).



Towards a Potemkin City


How the reconstructivist trend in architecture is a symptome in Central and Eastern Europe and what we can learn from it

Towards a Potemkin City


How the reconstructivist trend in architecture is a symptome in Central and Eastern Europe and what we can learn from it
My theoretical proposal analyses the current reconstructivist trend in architecture.
File under
Type of project
  • Systemic changes

The broader impact of my research would not only challenge what currently is being created in Central and Eastern Europe (Berlin, Budapest, Skopje), the Potemkin City, the facadist town of scenery-like, retrograde architecture of hard-to-define neo styles, established on the grounds of resentment towards late-modernist architecture and fed by the eagerness of pleasing tourism with a total lack of recognition for the results of over-tourism and dissolution of social diversity in the city but also analyze the the dichotomy of a collective longing for a past-never-happened, transfigured by the romanticizing cloud of nostalgia and the paradox of a retrograde utopia, where our future lies on the timeline already behind us. This faux-utopia is also conditioned by the loss of the horizon in the age of aesthetic capitalism, the pervasiveness of amusement in architecture and the ‘unsustainable development’ of the Neo-liberal economy resulting in a broken planet (E. Krasny, A. Fitz).




Idea by

Rachel Györffy
Budapest
Hungary
Rachel Györffy studied Architecture at the TU Munich and spent her Erasmus scholarship program at the Arts University Bournemouth. After working for almost ten years as an architect in Germany and Hungary on various types of projects from hospitals, research facilities and university buildings to office buildings, she is currently a Doctoral Researcher at the Doctoral School of the Moholy- Nagy University of the Arts and Design in Budapest.