The exhibition Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths presents many ignored and inconvenient contingencies of postmodernist architectural practice. Traces of these external forces are often left in forgotten documents, the salvage of ordinary processes, and assembling them together disturbs the smooth maintenance of the myths of architectural autonomy. Looking beyond North America, the series Meanwhile, in… considers the role of changed contexts in shaping postmodernisms elsewhere, by assembling case studies from other countries, with other cultural concerns and other contingencies.

Thousands of Catholic churches were built in Poland during its transformation from a communist to capitalist state, roughly between the Solidarity protests of the 1980s and Polish entry to the European Union in 2004. This period coincides with the accelerating dissemination of postmodernist ideas and imagery in the Eastern Bloc, and in a nominally atheist state, this official program of religious reconstruction intersected with a rise in popular enthusiasm for the Catholic Church, producing a unique interface for the absorption and interpretation of international architectural discourse.

Kuba Snopek is a Polish architect, researcher, and the Education Program Curator at the Kharkiv School of Architecture and is the author of Belyayevo Forever (2015). The lecture will be based on a research project “Architecture of the VII Day” produced with Izabela Cichońska and Karolina Popera.