Moscow Monumental

Moscow Monumental
Author: Katherine Zubovich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2023-01-31
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0691202729

"An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper"--

Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes

Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes
Author: Danilo Udovicki-Selb
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2020-05-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1474299857

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.

The Landscape of Stalinism

The Landscape of Stalinism
Author: Evgeny Dobrenko
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2011-11-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0295801174

This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet �culture.� In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future -- all under the fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin. From backgrounds in history, art history, literary studies, and philosophy, the contributors show how Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and �sold� as an ideological product. They explore the ways in which producers of various art forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls �a cartography of power� -- an organization of the entire country into �a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness,� with Moscow at the center. The theme of center versus periphery figures prominently in many of the essays, and the periphery is shown often to be paradoxically central. Examining representations of space in objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers� magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination. Not all features of Soviet space were entirely novel, and several of the essayists assert continuities with the prerevolutionary past. One example is the importance of the mother image in mass songs of the Stalin period; another is the "boundless longing" inspired in the Russian character by the burden of living amid vast empty spaces. But whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.

The Total Art of Stalinism

The Total Art of Stalinism
Author: Boris Groys
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1844678091

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.

Soviet Design

Soviet Design
Author: Kristina Krasnyanskaya
Publisher: Scheidegger & Spiess
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Constructivism (Art)
ISBN: 9783858818461

Offers a comprehensive survey of Soviet interior design from constructivism and the revolutionary avant-garde to late modernism. The book demonstrate that, while often discredited as monotonous, the work of designers, architects, and manufacturers behind the Iron Curtain, in fact, comprises a remarkable variety of original styles

Russia

Russia
Author: Richard Anderson
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2015-11-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1780235542

This book offers a comprehensive account of Russia’s architectural production from the late nineteenth century to the present, explaining how its architecture was both shaped by and came to embody Russia’s rapid cultural, economic, and social revolutions over the past century. Richard Anderson looks at Russia’s complex relationship to global architectural culture, exploring the country’s central presence in the Rationalism and Constructivism movements of the 1920s, as well as its role as a key protagonist during the Cold War. Looking deeply at Soviet Russia, he brings the relationship between architecture and socialism into focus through detailed case studies that situate buildings and architectural concepts within the socialist milieu of Soviet society. He tracks the way Russian architectural institutions departed from the course of modernism being developed in capitalist countries, and he reappraises the architecture of the Stalin era and the final decades of the USSR. Finally, he traces the influence of Soviet conventions on contemporary Russian architecture—which is now a more heterogeneous mix of approaches and styles— and how it made a lasting and little-known impact on territories extending from the Middle East, to Central Asia, and into China. A bold new assessment of Russia’s architectural legacy and contemporary contributions, this book is a fascinating exploration of a tumultuous place—and the creativity that has come from it.

Landmarks of Soviet Architecture, 1917-1991

Landmarks of Soviet Architecture, 1917-1991
Author: Aleksandr Vasilʹevich Ri︠a︡bushin
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1992
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

"Soviet architecture was born and shaped from the outset by dispute..."--from the introductory essay. This catalog documents the architectural output of a country besieged with powerful and conflicting political pressures and aspirations. Text and photos combine to record the architectural heritage of the Communist regime. Translated from the Russian. Lacks an index. 9.5x11" Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Lost Vanguard

The Lost Vanguard
Author: Richard Pare
Publisher:
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2007
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781580931854

"This book includes seventy-three structures, starting with the Shabolovka Radio Tower in Moscow and concluding with the Lenin Mausoleum. In between are buildings from all over Moscow (where the greatest concentration of modernist buildings still remains), St. Petersburg, Ivanovo, Ekaterinburg, Kiev, Kharkov, Zaporozhe, Nizhi Novgorod, Sochi, and Baku. The buildings range from grand projects such as Gasprom in Kharkov to a modest bus shelter in Sochi, a rare survivor by an unknown architect." "In an essay, architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen surveys the history of the period, providing a context for the emergence of this startling new architecture in parallel to contemporary experiments in Europe."--BOOK JACKET.