Spaces for Recreation

topics

Publishers

Architecture

ISBN: 9783868590685
English edition
Jovis Verlag
Softcover with flaps, 352 pages
14,8 x 21 cm
colour/black & white
April 2011
€30,19 (excl. VAT)

Spaces for Recreation

Isabella Hollauf

Utopian models of society have not been rated so highly since the late 1970s/early 1980s. However, social pilot projects have disappeared with them, projects that aimed to make culture and recreation more widely available. Expansively laid out parks and swimming pools were the expression of a desire for participation in public life and prosperity for everyone. Today, only a few of these locations and facilities are still intact; most of them have fallen into decay.

Isabella Hollauf starts her work with the disappearance of past social utopias. Her interest is directed not only towards post-communist countries, but also towards those with strong socialist tendencies for many decades, such as Austria or Sweden. In a photographic search for evidence, she retraces the manifest changes in values, revealing former utopian pretensions and the often dismal reality of today. The book shows projects dating from 2001 to 2007.