Lukewarm Modernity: Housing Estates and Boredom in Late Socialist Hungary

Abstract

The present article seeks to attend to the political, social and cultural conditions in which boredom operates as a shared affective condition in late-socialist Hungary. It does so by introducing the term “lukewarm modernity” to highlight the ambivalent and idiosyncratic character of Hungarian late socialism under the premiership of János Kádár. If lukewarm water is conceived of as a metaphor for the state’s exercise of soft power and the loosening of ideological control over everyday life, boredom is symptomatic of the way in which it is experienced and processed collectively. In particular, I examine the cohesive and disruptive ways in which boredom surfaces in the relationship between the state and the people, as well as between the architectural and the corporeal. To explore this latter aspect, I use late-socialist Hungarian architecture and urban culture as a case study. I focus on prefabricated housing estates, an architectural phenomenon that provided a quick and slick solution to the lingering housing shortage since the mid-1960s. Promulgated as emblems of socialist modernity, they were often criticised by architects and laypeople alike as bleak and monotonous in appearance, necessitating alternative solutions in design and urban planning in subsequent waves of housing estate construction. While their Western counterparts faced similar problems already in the 1950s, which, by the 1960s, paved the way for postmodern architecture under the banner of the slogan “less is a bore,” I demonstrate that the kind of boredom at work in Hungary was, at least to a large extent, moulded in the crucible of the regime’s lukewarm operation. In the final section of the article, I analyse Béla Tarr’s 1982 film The Prefab People [Panelkapcsolat] through the triadic lens of boredom, architecture and lukewarm modernity.