- Architecture in Russia before, during and after Stalin In London for “The Center Cannot Hold” conference, we had the opportunity to meet Vladimir Paperny, author of Architecture in the Age of Stalin, and to revive in a conversation with him our interest on the Russian avant-garde and the fate of modernist urbanism under and after Stalin. Here you find some of his answers regarding: the […]
- Narkomfin narratives We are honoured to reblog here the essay by Vladimir Paperny originally published in the book O’NFM_6: Narkomfin, edited by Danilo Udovicki-Selb, published by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag Tübingen, 2015, given the kind permission of author, editor and publisher. Apart from being flattered by our film Dom Novogo Byta quoted in it as a source, the piece […]
- Jean-Louis Cohen / Modernism and periphery November 2010, working on a spot for Moskonstruct we shortly interviewed via Skype the architecture historian Jean Louis Cohen, one of the major experts of modernism and the curator of the recent exhibition of Le Corbusier at MOMA. Few questions about Narkomfin are published in the incoming Dom Novogo Byta DVD. We plan an extensive interview […]
- From Disurbanisation to Hyperurbanisation “Following the Marxist theory of cancelling the difference between city and countryside, de-urbanization called for the abolition of cities in favor of “field urbanism” an evenly distributed industry intermingled of agriculture and residential areas. First imagined by Soviet Constructivist avant-garde in the 1920s, de-urbanization was the red, communist version of Ebenezer’s Howard Garden City.” (Mihai […]
- From center to periphery The main focus of our project, clearly expressed by the title, is in the relation between periphery and centrality as produced by modernist principles. Adopting a wide scope, this means also investigating the relationship among political, economical, cultural forms of marginalization and the spatial organisation of society. Started as an almost random exploration of modernist […]
- Sotsgorod Sotsgorod, Problems of Building Socialist Cities is Nikolai Milyutin‘s most well known theoretical contribution. Milyutin was a convinced supporter of the radical reform of everyday life and the refusal of bourgeois values, which in his mind still gave form to the majority of post-revolutionary architecture. He advocated the collectivisation and industrialisation of human settlement, with an eye on […]
- Disurbanism At the end of the 1920s, the attention of constructivist architects, in particular those of OSA, increasingly shifted toward a radical critique of the city itself, focusing on visions designed to overcome urban concentration, and introducing concepts of diffuse urbanisation, linear and green cities, ultimately theorising the concept of disurbanism. This term was basically the result […]
- On the preservation of Modernist Heritage Since our involvement as invited artists with the Moskonstruct campaign, and later with RKM, where we took care of the communication and graphic design of the EU funded cooperation project, we have found ourselves involved in the issue of preserving the heritage of modernist architecture. Our project and blog have also become a sounding board for campaigns and petitions. This […]
- On the Preservation of Konstantin Melnikov’s Works and Heritage We recently received this petition for the preservation of Melnikov’s works and we are happy to republish it. We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the death of the architect Konstantin Melnikov,and the importance and value of his built works and the projects he drew has not stopped growing over all these years. Melnikov’s visionary […]
- SA_1929 Standardisation has been one of the main themes of the architectural debate in the post revolutionary context on Soviet Russia, strongly influenced by the contemporary international debate. Constructivists, and in particular the OSA group and the Sovrmennaja Arkhitektura magazine, identified in the issue of creating modular standardised components which could be industrially produced a key […]