Humanity Rearranged: The Polish and Czechoslovak Pavilions at Expo 58

This article explores the ways in which ʻcinematicʼ exhibition techniques exploited by Czechoslovak and Polish designers in schemes for the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958 can be understood as part of a new political project to produce active citizens after the trauma of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Its originality lies in extending a discussion on the work of celebrated figures like Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames by scholars like Marc Treib in Space Calculated in Seconds (1996) and Beatrix Colomina in Domesticity at War (2007) to the context of Eastern Europe. It examines, for the first time, the historic coincidence of multimedia architectural and exhibition design practices on both sides of the East-West divide. Based on research in the archives of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art and on press reports from both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain, this 8,000 word article brings hitherto unresearched architecture and design practices to an international readership. Crowley takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing contemporaneous theories of space developed by architects and theories of the image developed by film makers in Poland and Hungary to bear on exhibition design. Crowley was invited to present this research at a symposium at the Central European University in Budapest in 2010. Developed from this paper, this article appears in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published by University of Chicago Press. In recent years, this refereed journal has become a central forum for the discussion of modernist design

Paris or Moscow?: Warsaw Architects and the Image of the Modern City in the 1950s

This article sets out to explore the ways in which Polish architects and writers on architects imagined the future during the early Cold War period. During the Stalin years, Soviet cities were presented by communist ideologues as the future face of the progressive urbanism. By contrast, during the destalinising Thaw after 1956, Paris and other Western cities were understood as centres of architectural invention. Crowley’s essay is based on reports and photographs gathered by young architects to Paris and Moscow before and after the dramatic events of 1956. The article also explores how the knowledge that they gathered in both settings was used in the production of new buildings in the course of the 1950s. This article was commissioned as part of international research project called 'Imagining the West' which was sponsored by the Norwegian Academy of Science. Scholars from various fields and national contexts were asked to explore the image of 'the West' from the perspective of Eastern Europe during the C20th. Adopting a post-colonial perspective, the project was an attempt to reverse the conventional viewing position of much scholarship. The article was first published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History in 2008. It was then reproduced in a book edited by György Péteri called Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), pp. 105-130. A review of Peteri's volume from The Russian Review (autumn 2011) described it as a study in ‘both trans-national and trans-systemic history rendered with insight and subtlety that make for an important contribution to scholarship’

Ontario History at 100 Years

Through Ontario History, the Ontario Historical Society provides Canada with its second oldest continuous historical publication. In 1899 the Society began to print Papers and Records. This was only two years after George Wrong of the History Department at the University of Toronto began the Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada. Since 1920 the Canadian Historical Review, a publication of the University of Toronto Press, had served as a successor to that earlier national journal