Lecture by David Crowley
WARSAW UNDER CONSTRUCTION 1

Whilst it is clear that Moscow and Washington went to great lengths to divide the world in the 1950s and 1960s: it is equally clear that its two halves increasingly came to look like each other.

Moscow's Kalinin Prospect resembled Park Avenue in New York, whilst the first plastic car produced by Chevrolet was somehow the prototype of the Trabant, the P70. How can this apparent convergence be explained? Was it simply a matter of mimicry and technology transfer or can we look to deeper existential anxieties shaping the Cold War double? In this talk David Crowley, curator of 'Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70' at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2008), will put the utopian architecture, glossy products and b-movie films of the Cold War years under analysis.