03 Pipeline Aesthetics –

Designing a Socialist City for the Technical Revolution to Come

Researcher

• Lea Marie Nienhoff

Havana of the East, Sanssouci, or a city like a cybernetic machine – rebuilding Schwedt/Oder for the needs of the East German oil production was accompanied by visions inspired by cybernetics, dreams of automation, and a leisure society of the future. The proliferation of petroleum imagery existed in parallel to imageries of Schwedt as a garden city and wildlife sanctuary – all of those encompass the visual culture of the socialist Anthropocene. My research anchors political and collective imaginaries of a Socialist Petroculture in the cityscape of Schwedt and the history of its construction.

Renowned Bauhaus architects, including Selman Selmanagić and Richard Paulick, drafted plans for the city’s redesign and extension. Prominent artists were invited to participate in shaping a new aesthetic that would showcase Schwedt as the embodiment of “the city of the future”. My research aims to complement existing urban histories of the 1960s ‘socialist utopianism’ by analyzing the “becoming-active” of the surrounding knowledge culture. Over time, residents’ discontent with the design of their new hometown grew, rendering invocations of the expected “scientific-technical revolution” empty signifiers.

Focusing on debates around aesthetics, my research demonstrates that the designs realized in Schwedt and the collective imaginaries attached to them were a process of negotiation. Despite architects’ and planners’ preoccupation with ‘programming’ socialist values into space, the designing of Schwedt entailed a struggle over creating a meaningful environment.