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.

Conventional readings of the history of Soviet art and architecture show modernist utopian aspirations as all but prohibited by 1932 under Stalin's totalitarianism. Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes challenges that view. Radically redefining the historiography of the period, it reveals how the relationship between the Party and practicing architects was much more complex and contradictory than previously believed, and shows, in contrast to the conventional scholarly narrative, how the architectural avant-garde was able to persist at a time when it is widely considered to have been driven underground. In doing so, this book provides an essential perspective on how to analyse, evaluate, and “re-imagine” the history of modernist expression in its cultural context. It offers a new understanding of ways in which 20th century social revolutions and their totalitarian sequels inflected the discourse of both modernity and modernism. The book relies on close analyses of archival documents and architectural works. Many of the documents have been rarely – if ever – discussed in English before, while the architectural projects include iconic works such as the Palace of Soviets and the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris 1937 World Exposition, as well as remarkable works that until now have been neglected by architectural historians inside and outside Russia. In a fascinating final chapter, it also reveals for the first time the details of Frank Lloyd Wright's triumphant welcome at the First Congress of Soviet Architects in Moscow in 1937, at the height of Stalin's Terror.

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.