Crowley's essay explores the ways in which architectural experiments in the People's Republic of Poland provided images of the future. These architectural 'images' - mostly completed buildings - are explored in terms of then current ideological precepts about the role of leisure in what was called 'fully-fledged communism', i.e. the glorious future promised by Marxist-Leninist states.

Crowley's research for this article takes the form of interviews with architects and building studies.

Crowley's essay appears in a themed double issue of The Journal of Architecture with the title, 'Behind the Iron Curtain: architecture in the former communist bloc, between isolation and fascination'. The theme issue contains a number of papers first presented at a joint meeting of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA,Paris) and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH, Chicago) in Paris in 2005. Crowley presented it in Paris and at the 'Different Modernisms, Different Avant-gardes' conference KUMU, Tallinn, Estonia in 
September, 2007 and at the 'Freiheit/Freizeit: Fluchtwege aus dem Alltag in der Architektur Ost- und Westeuropas 1960–1980' conference, ETH Zürich, in November 2007. A version of the paper was also published in Estonian in Eesti Kunstimuuseumi Toimedised: Erinevad Modernismid, Erinevad Avangardid (Tallinn, 2009) pp. 234-64.