Not many know that Accra, the capital of Ghana, is home to architecture designed by Eastern Europeans. In this episode, Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET) talks to Prof. Łukasz Stanek about his award-winning book, in which he examines the role Eastern European experts - architects and engineers - played in supporting newly postcolonial states in their efforts to bring about a social transformation through urbanization. How can architecture contribute to, bring about, and document major changes in the global Cold War dynamic? What lessons can we learn from taking a close look at the entanglements between postcolonialism and socialism?

 

Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Manchester, UK. Professor Stanek is the author of "Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory" (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and "Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War" (Princeton University Press, 2020), which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the SAH GB and the RIBA President’s Award for History & Theory Research.