This article explores the ways in which ʻcinematicʼ exhibition techniques exploited by Czechoslovak and Polish designers in schemes for the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958 can be understood as part of a new political project to produce active citizens after the trauma of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Its originality lies in extending a discussion on the work of celebrated figures like Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames by scholars like Marc Treib in Space Calculated in Seconds (1996) and Beatrix Colomina in Domesticity at War (2007) to the context of Eastern Europe. It examines, for the first time, the historic coincidence of multimedia architectural and exhibition design practices on both sides of the East-West divide.

Based on research in the archives of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art and on press reports from both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain, this 8,000 word article brings hitherto unresearched architecture and design practices to an international readership. Crowley takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing contemporaneous theories of space developed by architects and theories of the image developed by film makers in Poland and Hungary to bear on exhibition design.

Crowley was invited to present this research at a symposium at the Central European University in Budapest in 2010. Developed from this paper, this article appears in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published by University of Chicago Press. In recent years, this refereed journal has become a central forum for the discussion of modernist design.