This article accompanies Łukasz Stanek’s Contemporary European History article Buildings for Dollars and Oil: East German and Romanian Construction Companies in Cold War Iraq.

Part of the special issue Eastern European–Middle Eastern Relations: Continuities and Changes from the Time of Empires to the Cold War

Cold War historians have rediscovered architecture. Moving beyond accounts of self-representations of competing ‘blocs’, with the Stalinallee and the Hansaviertel in divided Berlin as paradigmatic examples, historians have begun to study architecture and the built environment as products of mobile expert knowledges, as sectors of national economies and international trade and as places and media of social differentiation and cohesion, shaped and reshaped by practices of everyday life.

In this way, architectural drawings have become candidates to the status of historical sources, beyond the realm of architectural historians. As the latter know very well, the first challenge for the study of drawings is their seemingly transcultural legibility. It obscures the specificity of professional practices and their deep entanglements with national political, economic and legal regimes, in spite of the internationalism of twentieth-century architecture and urban planning. A case in point is the untranslatability of some of the basic professional terms: British town planning was not exactly German Städtebau nor Soviet gradostroitel’stvo, and it was not equivalent to American urban design and even less to French urbanisme.

Conceptual routines may pose problems of their own. Drawings which I studied for the article ‘Buildings for Dollars and Oil’ were neither mere abstractions imposed on the society as ‘seen by the state’ nor individualistic projections of a self-proclaimed architect-genius. Rather, documentations of housing projects offered by state-socialist Romanian design institutes to governmental clients in North Africa and the Middle East appeared as tools and records of negotiations among unequal parties.

Drawings of housing estates commissioned by Algerian, Libyan, Syrian and Iraqi governments reveal conflicting interests of various state bureaucracies and their differing priorities. When considered together with their accompanying minutes of meetings, building specifications and construction regulations, they testify to disagreements around budgets, standards, building technologies and layouts which often reflect deeper dilemmas of political economy of development and cultural anxieties. Should the state support local construction industries or, rather, accelerate investments by contracting foreign companies? Should emphasis be put on industrialised construction technologies or on labour-intensive ones that would absorb the surplus labour of rural migrants? How should we negotiate disagreements around gender politics, reflected in decisions about the domestic interior and often framed by differing claims to ‘Arab customs’ or ‘Islamic traditions’?

Drawings and their series document responses to these dilemmas in confrontation with the priorities of Romanian design institutes, contractors, producers of construction materials and representatives of party and state bureaucracies. By drawing and redrawing lines, architects were negotiating expectations about profit margins, engineering feasibility, supply chains and diplomatic visibility. The proposed plans, sections, details and perspectives needed to convince clients in Algiers, Tripoli, Damascus and Baghdad and decision makers in Bucharest, but also, hopefully, secure professional recognition among peers.

In contrast to the unambiguous presence of a building, it is not always easy to distinguish where one project documentation ends and when another begins. Layouts often recycled previous ones, singular designs were turned into type projects and appropriations of buildings by their users were sometimes recorded by post-occupancy studies which might have led to extensions and renovations. The dispersion of these drawings across various archives in and of itself testifies to their various uses. Beyond their role as instructions for contractors, technical blueprints and perspectives circulated as marketing materials of designers, construction companies and suppliers, as part of state propaganda, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, as backdrops for photographic portraits of ordinary inhabitants.

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Image Caption: ‘Housing Units with Ground Floor and Three Upper Floors. Project for Libya.’ Source: Romproiect (Romania), no date. Arhivele Naţionale (Bucharest), f. Romproiect, 7288. Image provided by the author.