“Architecture is a social manifestation and is thus indissolubly linked with the structure of society at a given point of time. Once separated from the society of its age, it becomes an empty sham and a toy for the infatuated followers of vulgar fashion.” Hannes Meyer, 1933 Continue reading
What has remained largely unexamined in the study of avant-garde architecture and urbanism in the USSR is the activity of a large number of foreign technicians who went to work after 1928. Continue reading
An appraisal of the Mel’nikov house in light of the architect’s other work, as well as comparable structures from the time. Continue reading
“The outcome of the competition for the Palace of the Soviets has filled all radical architects in the West with indignation and disbelief.” Hans Schmidt, 1932. Continue reading
“Georgy Krutikov in 1928 envisaged a ‘Flying City Apartment Building’ moored to dirigibles when at anchor.” Continue reading
“Atop the building, the test track is like a king’s crown, and just as a crown symbolizes some essential and dominating idea, so here the car and its speed are celebrated in a form that presides over the work of the factory below.” Continue reading
Hi-resolution scans of plans, sketches, and photographs from JJP Oud’s pioneering Spangen municipal housing project (1920-1923), along with a translation of his seminal 1918 essay “The Monumental Townscape.” Continue reading
The socialist revolution calls for terrifying windowless towers, desolated lots and plazas, massive concrete slabs thrown into the earth. Continue reading
Seeing as I recently published a post on Suetin’s ceramic Suprematism, and since Murphy mentions the “desperately tragic face-off between Albert Speer and Boris Iofan (Paris 1937)” — that is, between architectural Nazism and architectural Stalinism — I thought it might be fitting to post the above, bizarre image of Nikolai Suetin’s model for the proposed setup of the Soviet Pavilion that year. Truly strange stuff. Continue reading
“An architecture of the future will be concretely and practically possible only when the future has arrived, that is to say, after a total social revolution, a systemic transformation of this mode of production into something else.” — Fredric Jameson, on Manfredo Tafuri Continue reading