Architectural Drawings Of The Russian Avant Garde

Distributed by St. Martin's, Auth: Open University, History with translated excerpts of documents.

An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.

With the recent revolutionary changes in the country, the atmosphere of openness and opportunity has led to further developments in areas previously seen either as subversive or as having use only as state-supported propaganda. An exciting new and independent design community has been born.

* For the first time ever, Russian avant-garde architect Boris Velikovsky's work is honored in a beautifully designed book* Unpublished technical plans and photos show Velikovsky's importance in modern architecture* An in-depth study of Russian architecture in the 20th centuryWith his residential buildings, office blocks, schools and factories, Boris Velikovsky (1878-1937) made a definitive contribution to Russian avant-garde architecture. His early constructions, such as the Gribov House in Moscow, are still very much bound to Russian Neoclassism, yet since the Revolution of 1917, he began designing in the style of Constructivist architecture. One example is his Gostorg Management Building, distinguished by glass facades, the functional division of space and use of state-of-the-art materials. Furthermore, in the garden city of Druzhba, for instance, Velikovsky intensively engaged with new ideas in town planning. With mostly hitherto unpublished technical plans as well as numerous historical and new color photographs of Boris Velikowsky's most famous projects, this book offers a chance to appreciate Russian avant-garde architecture.

This fascinating book charts the dazzling trajectory of Russian avant-garde architecture during the brief but intense period of design and construction that took place from c. 1922 to 1935. Fired by the radical new language of Constructivist artists, such architects as Konstantin Melnikov, Moisei Ginzburg, and the Vesnin brothers produced designs whose innovative style embodied the energy and optimism of the new Soviet Socialist state. Streamlined, flat-roofed, and white-walled, their extraordinarily novel buildings must have seemed like alien forms. Architectural photographer Richard Pare has spent the last 15 years documenting the remains and ruins of these structures. Here, his spectacular photographs are juxtaposed with vintage images, ephemera, and drawings and paintings by artists such as Malevich, Tatlin, Popova, and Lissitzky.