Towards a Potemkin City: Motifs and Consequences of Reconstructivism in Central- and Eastern Europe

This paper investigates the current reconstructivist trend in Central- and Eastern Europe with the comparison of two case-studies of examples in the post-socialist cities of Berlin and Budapest.
According to the central hypothesis, the reconstructivist trend in architecture, manifesting itself in the apparent widespread resentment of society towards late modernist architecture, is in fact a mere psychological projection of unresolved collective traumas of the past. I argue, that the aesthetic judgement of late modernist architecture (it being ‘ugly’) is in fact a projection of undisputed and unresolved collective traumas deeply rooted in the collective memory of society The projection is taking form as facadist, scenery-like architecture, the so called Potemkin City. This collective nostalgia towards a never-existing past, connected with the anxiety caused by permanent over-exhaustion of global
resources and the unsustainable development, can only imagine the future as a re-establishing of the past. The process is strongly interwoven with the effects of the tourism-industry on the city, when the entity of the city only functions as an Instagram background, resulting in the loss of porosity in the city.