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October 2021 - September 2022
Andrei Răzvan Voinea has a BA from Faculty of History - University of Bucharest (2008), and two MA (one in British Cultural Studies, 2010) and one in History of Central and Eastern Europe (2012 - CEU). He received his Ph. D from the University of Architecture and Town Planning - Bucharest (2017) with a thesis concerning the social housing policies in Bucharest (1908-1948). In 2016-2017 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, USA and in 2019-2020 he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at New Europe College. He is managing Studio Zona, a NGO dedicated to the history of Bucharest.
Prefab socialism: a social history of Floreasca District in Bucharest (1954-1965)
My project investigates the construction of, and the daily life in the first large communist housing district in Bucharest, Floreasca, built between 1954 and 1962. Symbolic for the housing reform in Romania, this district with 2000 families stands as a metaphoric departure from socialist realism and the embracement of the new socialist modernist paradigm, after Khrushchev’s influential speech in the USSR (1956) and his decision to reform the housing policies (1957). This district can be considered the first and main example of the Romanian adaptation of the concept of “Khrushchyovka”, characterized by the construction of four-stories apartment buildings in districts all over the USSR and the socialist countries, where the “opulence was to be replaced by utilitarianism” , and the model to be followed evolved from bricks and mortar to prefab materials, produced by local factories, assembled at the construction site.
My main thesis will argue that, between the top authorities and the tenants, the construction of and the daily life in this district represented a continuous adaptation of ideology, construction materials and agency of the state functionaries while the way in which the tenants reacted to this space oscillated between the modern comfort of a hygienic house and the usage and non-usage of space, continuously adapting their needs to the given space. The tenants’ expectations and behavior were as various and complex as the social and cultural meaning behind the intentions of the reformers.