Brick is warmer than concrete Aesthetic anxiety and the making of architecture in Eastern European cities

As numerous projects of beautifying cities make it clear, the appearance of built environments is gaining more and more relevance. How cities look concerns not only architects and inhabitants, but state officials, investors, and international organizations, all interested in making urban space as aesthetically pleasing as possible. While effects of urban beautifications have been well documented—they increase property values, crystallize a city’s ‘brand,’ and drive the displacement of marginalized populations— why ‘beauty’ is so powerful and efficient in asserting particular political projects remains underexplored. Bridging insights from cultural sociology, geography, and science and technology studies, this dissertation explains how material aesthetics of architecture come to be invested with cultural power. The study is built around two case studies, Wrocław in Poland and Klaipėda in Lithuania, and it reveals how ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ of architecture were understood in both cities in the period from 1945 until today, and how these understandings are practiced nowadays when architectural professionals resolve dilemmas concerning designing, reconstructing, and maintaining buildings of various historical periods. Drawing upon archival materials, go-alongs, and more than one hundred interviews with architects, planners, state officials, and activists in both cities, the dissertation offers a comprehensive analysis of how notions of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ architecture can turn into critical terrains where meanings of the past, history, the nation, and the state acquire strong emotional resonances for individuals and are experienced as personally relevant to them.