The optimum aesthetic

The pas de deux of ideology with a capital "I" produced by party and state officials and ideology as the constellation of narratives that the Czech architectural profession relied on to propel its daily activities was a peculiar Second World dance, unlike anything that the postwar First World architects experienced. Proposing that the Second World specificity of postwar Czech architecture is located in its continual disciplinary struggle to describe and approximate its own ideological role within the larger logic of the building of socialism in Czechoslovakia, this dissertation reconstructs the postwar Czech project of optimizing architecture. The project of constructing utopia through optimizing its architecture was completely prefigured by the Second World's central myth--class struggle coming to an end in socialism--and was anticipated in the mid 1940s and reformulated in the 1950s and 1960s within the same underlying ideological framework. This dissertation examines three different instances of the Czech postwar discourse that correspond to each of these decades and were directly involved in articulating what was at stake in architecture under socialism. The work begins with th