The work of Edmund Goldzamt

The lecture and online meeting with Aliaksandr Shuba, an architecture historian, researcher of the modern architecture theory in Central and Eastern Europe and especially of the work of Edmund Godlzmt, a holder of the Thesaurus Polonaie Fellowship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

The lecture and meeting will be held in English and will be moderated by Dr Michał Wiśniewski.
Edmund Goldzamt (1921-1990), a Polish architect and urban planner, is recognised today mainly because of the lecture delivered in 1949, which was the cornerstone of the socialist realist theory in Polish architecture. The papers and activity of Edmund Goldzamt influenced deeply such projects as the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw or the Nowa Huta district in Krakow. His book entitled The Architecture of the City Centres and the Problems of Heritage might be found among the most important texts presenting the architectural discourse in the Soviet Union and Poland during the Stalin era. Published in 1956 it was hotfoot diminished by the early Thaw era criticism. Later on, he focused on the history and theory of modernism becoming a pioneer of the research of the William Morris oeuvre and of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Since 1976 he was a permanent member of the triennial international conference entitled the Bauhaus Kolloquium, which encourage regular research in the architecture history of the Weimar Republic.

Aliaksandr Shuba, a researcher under the urbanHIST project that is associated with Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Germany, and Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, and who is originally from Minsk, Belarus. At present he works on the study on the European academic history with a focus on works of researchers from the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, which include the contribution of Edmund Goldzamt and his colleagues toward the Soviet historiography of urban planning.