From Berlin, to Warsaw and Moscow, and on to Beijing. The Citymorphosis photobook is a story of the architectural transformations of cities of the former Eastern bloc.
A documentation of the transformation of the communist-era landscape into contemporary cities in the era of global capitalism. And additionally, a presentation of the similarities of those transformations.



Even though these cities are culturally diverse, they have undergone similar transformations as a result of barbaric urban rebuilding after two world wars. Their planning and design was formatively influenced by the concept of the New Man and Le Corbusier’s modernistic ideas, and by the economics of the Stalinist era and real socialism. Prefabricated apartment buildings dominated the urban landscape by the 1970s and 1980s, and city centres had architecture meant to exemplify the power of the communist party and “spirit” of communist rule.

The political transformations in Eastern bloc countries that followed brought a radical shift in economic direction and a reorientation of urban development to the model of global capitalism. Metropolises became the engines of economic growth. The change of geographic space was accompanied by a change of symbolic space. Communist-era architecture lost its privileged status to skyscrapers, the glass monuments to capitalism, and the best locations were occupied by corporations.

These photographs, taken in Berlin, Warsaw, Silesia, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Beijing, Chongqing, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Wenchang, deliberately avoid the eye-catching landmarks, symbols, signs and human faces. Their focus is on the universal nature of the metamorphosis of urban space and on unification in the transformation process - regardless of location (be it Europe or Asia) or political system (whether democratic or authoritarian). Unification that is an outcome of the subordination of the planning of urban space to the logic of growth and profit.
Although the images come from separate, distant places, they are as if from one megacity.