ABSTRACT
This chapter provides distinctive case studies of the ambiguous legacy of socialist modernism, proposing examples of both positive and negative actions, and revealing a wide range of attitudes towards their use and non-use value. The cases for our analysis come from different post-communist countries: Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania (formerly part of the USSR) and two countries that emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia – Slovenia and Macedonia. It provides a geographically diverse distribution. We present such cases as the railway station in Katowice, Poland, through Bulgaria (the Buzludzha Monument), Lithuania as a small peripheral republic of the USSR (Palace of Concerts and Sports in Vilnius), to Northern Macedonia (Central Post Office in Skopje) and Slovenia (Republic Square in Ljubljana) – countries that, since the 1990s, have built their national identity basically from scratch and had to redefine their relationship to the Yugoslav legacy of soc-modernism architecture.. These examples reveal the plurality of the local circumstances and the value change trajectories of the architecture studied and demonstrate the interactions between the legacy of soc-modernist architecture and community and territorial development. The chapter affirms the changing attitude towards soc-modernist architecture, however, unconcerned by the tensions around specific sites in specific locations.
