- Moscow’s Avant-garde Architecture ‘Change life!’ ‘Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from the Soviet constructivists of 1920-30, and from their failure, is that new social relationships call for new space, and vice versa. Hernri Lefebvre, The Production of Space The Russian avant.garde of the 1920’s to […]
- Ugolok Diadi Lenina In the same room of the dining table should be a corner set aside for the children: an Ugolok Diadi Lenina (Uncle’s Lenin Little Corner) where children can be instilled with love and respect for lenin. Here also should hang a picture of Lenin, and images of the old pre-Revolutionary byt of children suffering under […]
- Social Condenser ”…the principal objective of constructivism… is the definition of the Social Condenser of the age…” OSA Group (Union of Contemporary Architects) conference in 1928 Moisei Ginzburg It published the journal SA (Sovremmennaia Arkhitektura or ‘Contemporary Architecture’). Da Kopp, Città e Rivoluzione,
- BYT Byt encompasses all the following English terms “daily life”, “domesticity”, “lifestyle”, “style of life”. With the revolution and the problem of constructing a new socialist society, the word byt assumed an increasingly political significance. (…) With the end of the civil war, the following period of capitalist economic recovery known as New Economic Policy (NEP), and […]
- Alamar – La Habana It is the first step, a sort of number zero: “Doble Forza” is a pilot already realised with low budget and technical standard. Alamar, is a new city built in the 1970s in the outskirts of La Habana, mostly with rudimental prefabricated technologies inherited by the soviets; it has been put in place through self-costruction […]
- Alamar diario Disorientamento. Il paesaggio è spiazzante, le tipiche edificazioni ripetitive della periferia sono stemperate in una atmosfera rurale caraibica. Gli spazi vuoti e normalmente irrisolti, qui diventano giardini, orti, estensioni di lamiera. Alla serialità delle architetture risponde la personalizzazione attraverso il lavorio quotidiano degli abitanti. Le inferriate alle finestre di ferro battuto o di tondino da […]
- La Habana INT/EXT March 2006. Invited to attend to the Novena Bienal de La Habana, we spent five weeks in Cuba in spring 2006, preparing a live media performance to be presented in the context of the international art event. That provided the opportunity to explore a different incarnation of the late modernist periphery, which is a […]