ICOMOS ISC20C — Working Group „SocHeritage“
Conserving the Heritage of Socialist Realism and Socialist Modernism
Working Group Meeting, Saturday 5 September 2015
Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Altes Stadthaus, Klosterstraße 47, Berlin
Participants
Fourteen experts took part, among them the Presidents of ICOMOS Germany and ICOMOS Poland, the Vice-President and the Secretary General of ICOMOS Germany, and representatives from Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Romania.
- Prof. Dr. Jörg Haspel — State curator and director of Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, President of ICOMOS Germany, member of ISC20C
- Dr. Boguslaw Szmygin — President of ICOMOS Poland, member of the World Heritage Panel Poland
- Dr. Christoph Machat — Vice-President of ICOMOS Germany, member of the ICOMOS Board, editor of the Heritage at Risk series
- Prof. Dr. Sigrid Brandt — University of Salzburg, Secretary General of ICOMOS Germany
- Dr. Sandra Uskokovic — University of Dubrovnik, ICOMOS Croatia, member of ISC20C
- Anna Jagiellak — heritage authority of the City of Warsaw
- Dora Ivanova — architect, ICOMOS Bulgaria / Germany
- Dumitru Rusu — architect, ICOMOS Romania, member of ISC20C
- Martin Strakos — ICOMOS Czech Republic, National Heritage Board
- Oxana Gourinovitch — ICOMOS Belarus
- Thomas Flierl — Chairman of the Hermann Henselmann Foundation
- Dr. Anke Zalivako — ICOMOS Germany and ISC20C
- Juliane Stamm — art historian, Landesdenkmalamt Berlin
- Dr. Ramona Dornbusch — World Heritage Coordinator, Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, ICOMOS Germany
What the meeting agreed
- Criteria of assessment. Socialist Realism and Socialist Modernism are to be assessed on the recognition of their historic value, artistic significance, and urban value — urban planning, typology of arrangements, composition, handling of proportion, scale and symbols.
- Period covered. Socialist Realism of the 1940s and 1950s, and Socialist Modernism of the 1960s to the 1980s, irrespective of differing academic approaches.
- Multinational nominations. For a serial initiative, each country would put forward one of its most representative examples. Preparation was to begin with socialist model towns — Nowa Huta, New Ostrava, and possibly Eisenhüttenstadt, Dimitrovgrad and Dunaujvaros — with the Krakow authorities asked to take the lead.
- Heritage at Risk. A special issue of the ICOMOS Heritage at Risk series on threatened socialist heritage was proposed as a tool for raising public awareness in post-socialist countries.
- A common platform. The SocHeritage website was to carry the new sections on Socialist Realism and on SocHeritage at Risk, and to serve as the shared platform for communication and cooperation within the working group.
Sites at risk presented
Case studies of modernist sites under threat were presented from Bulgaria and the Republic of Moldova: the Buzludzha Memorial of 1981, and, in Chișinău, the Romanița communal housing tower, the National Hotel (former Inturist), the Cosmos Hotel of 1986 and the State Circus of 1981. The following year, listing procedures were initiated for all four buildings in Chișinău.
The meeting followed the ISC20C SocHeritage round table held in Sofia in August 2015 — see the Sofia protocol.
Minutes signed by Ramona Dornbusch, Jörg Haspel and Boguslaw Szmygin. Berlin, September 2015.