Download or read book Soviet Design written by Kristina Krasnyanskaya and published by Scheidegger & Spiess. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Total Art of Stalinism written by Boris Groys and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant garde written by Catherine Cooke and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Architectures of Russian Identity 1500 to the Present written by James Cracraft and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the royal pew of Ivan the Terrible, to Catherine the Great's use of landscape, to the struggles between the Orthodox Church and preservationists in post-Soviet Yaroslavl—across five centuries of Russian history, Russian leaders have used architecture to project unity, identity, and power. Church architecture has inspired national cohesion and justified political control while representing the claims of religion in brick, wood, and stone. The architectural vocabulary of the Soviet state celebrated industrialization, mechanization, and communal life. Buildings and landscapes have expressed utopian urges as well as lofty spiritual goals. Country houses and memorials have encoded their own messages. In Architectures of Russian Identity, James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland gather a group of authors from a wide variety of backgrounds—including history and architectural history, linguistics, literary studies, geography, and political science—to survey the political and symbolic meanings of many different kinds of structures. Fourteen heavily illustrated chapters demonstrate the remarkable fertility of the theme of architecture, broadly defined, for a range of fields dealing with Russia and its surrounding territories. The authors engage key terms in contemporary historiography—identity, nationality, visual culture—and assess the applications of each in Russian contexts.

Download or read book Moscow Monumental written by Katherine Zubovich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper"--

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures written by Aga Skrodzka and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at monuments, murals, computer games, recycling campaigns, children's books, and other visual artifacts, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures reassesses communism's historical and cultural legacy.

Download or read book Soviet Architectural Avant Gardes written by Danilo Udovicki-Selb and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Landscapes of Communism written by Owen Hatherley and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When communism took power in Eastern Europe it remade cities in its own image, transforming everyday life and creating sweeping boulevards and vast, epic housing estates in an emphatic declaration of a noncapitalist idea. The regimes that built them are now dead and long gone, but from Warsaw to Berlin, Moscow to postrevolutionary Kiev, the buildings remain, often populated by people whose lives were scattered by the collapse of communism. Landscapes of Communism is a journey of historical discovery, plunging us into the lost world of socialist architecture. Owen Hatherley, a brilliant, witty, young urban critic shows how power was wielded in these societies by tracing the sharp, sudden zigzags of official communist architectural style: the superstitious despotic rococo of high Stalinism, with its jingoistic memorials, palaces, and secret policemen’s castles; East Germany’s obsession with prefabricated concrete panels; and the metro systems of Moscow and Prague, a spectacular vindication of public space that went further than any avant-garde ever dared. Throughout his journeys across the former Soviet empire, Hatherley asks what, if anything, can be reclaimed from the ruins of Communism—what residue can inform our contemporary ideas of urban life?

Download or read book The Stalin Years written by Evan Mawdsley and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-06 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at the entire Stalin era, this book contains chapters on ideology, politics, economic development, social change, nationalities, culture and external relations, and the Great Terror. An updated bibliography including a wealth of recent English-language work on the rule of Stalin is included.

Download or read book Stalin written by Simon Sebag Montefiore and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This widely acclaimed biography of a Soviet dictator and his entourage during the terrifying decades of his supreme power transforms our understanding of the Marxist leader and Russian tsar. • From the bestselling author of The Romanovs. “The first intimate portrait of a man who had more lives on his conscience than Hitler.... Disturbing and perplexing.” —The New York Times Book Review Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals the fear and betrayal, privilege and debauchery, family life and murderous cruelty of this secret world. Written with bracing narrative verve, this feat of scholarly research has become a classic of modern history writing. Showing how Stalin's triumphs and crimes were the product of his fanatical Marxism and his gifted but flawed character, this is an intimate portrait of a man as complicated and human as he was brutal and chilling.

Download or read book Stalin s Architect written by Deyan Sudjic and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Boris Iofan—designer of the iconic but unbuilt Palace of the Soviets—whose buildings came to define the language of Soviet architecture. What would an architect do for the chance to build the tallest building in the world? What would he sacrifice to stay alive in the midst of Stalin’s murderous purges? This is the first major publication on the remarkable life and career of Boris Iofan (1891–1976), state architect to Joseph Stalin. Iofan’s story is an insight into the troubled relationship of all successful architects with power. A gifted designer and a committed Communist, Iofan became the Soviet Union’s most celebrated architect after Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor, persuaded him to return to Moscow from Rome with his aristocratic wife, Olga Sasso-Ruffo. Iofan was at the heart of political life in the Soviet Union and his work is key to understanding its official culture. When Stalin’s henchmen crushed the architectural avant-garde, it was Iofan who created the new national style, from the grand projects he realized—including the House on the Embankment, a megastructure of 505 homes for the Soviet elite—to even more ambitious unbuilt projects, in particular the Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist dream whose image was reproduced throughout the Soviet Union. His career took him to New York and Paris, and to the destroyed city of Stalingrad. He was a friend of Frank Lloyd Wright; a rival of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Erich Mendelsohn; and an enemy of Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, whose Nazi pavilion faced Iofan’s Soviet one at the Paris Expo in 1937. He kept silent when Stalin executed his friends, including Rykov; he also sacrificed his own talent by following the dictator’s instructions to the letter in creating the regime’s landmarks. Generously illustrated, with a wide range of previously unpublished material, this book is an exploration of architecture as an instrument of statecraft. It is an insight into the key moments of 20th-century politics and culture from a unique perspective, and the personal story of a remarkable individual who witnessed many of the most dramatic turning points of modern history.

Download or read book Architecture of Great Expositions 1937 1959 written by Rika Devos and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-11-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and 1959. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The famous standoffs between the Stalinist Russia and the Nazi Germany in Paris 1937, or the juxtaposition of the USSR and USA pavilions in Brussels 1958, are examples of very explicit shows of force. The book also discusses some less known - and more subtle - messages, revealed through an examination of several additional pavilions in both Paris and Brussels; of a series of expositions in Moscow; of the Universal Exhibition in Rome that was planned to open in 1942; and of London’s South Bank Exposition of 1951: all of them related, in one way or another, to either an anticipation of the global war or to its horrific aftermaths. A brief discussion of three pre-World War II American expositions that are reviewed in the Epilogue supports this point. It indicates a significant difference in the attitude of American exposition commissioners, who were less attuned to the looming war than their European counterparts. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture’s involvement with national representation. Whether in the service of Fascist Italy or of Imperial Japan, of Republican Spain or of the post-war Franquista regime, of the French Popular Front or of socialist Yugoslavia, of the arising FRG or of capitalist USA, of Stalinist Russia or of post-colonial Britain, exposition architecture during the period in question was driven by a deep faith in its ability to represent ideology. The book argues that this widespread confidence in architecture’s ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.

Download or read book Architecture of Great Expositions 1937 1959 written by Rika Devos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and 1959. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The famous standoffs between the Stalinist Russia and the Nazi Germany in Paris 1937, or the juxtaposition of the USSR and USA pavilions in Brussels 1958, are examples of very explicit shows of force. The book also discusses some less known - and more subtle - messages, revealed through an examination of several additional pavilions in both Paris and Brussels; of a series of expositions in Moscow; of the Universal Exhibition in Rome that was planned to open in 1942; and of London’s South Bank Exposition of 1951: all of them related, in one way or another, to either an anticipation of the global war or to its horrific aftermaths. A brief discussion of three pre-World War II American expositions that are reviewed in the Epilogue supports this point. It indicates a significant difference in the attitude of American exposition commissioners, who were less attuned to the looming war than their European counterparts. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture’s involvement with national representation. Whether in the service of Fascist Italy or of Imperial Japan, of Republican Spain or of the post-war Franquista regime, of the French Popular Front or of socialist Yugoslavia, of the arising FRG or of capitalist USA, of Stalinist Russia or of post-colonial Britain, exposition architecture during the period in question was driven by a deep faith in its ability to represent ideology. The book argues that this widespread confidence in architecture’s ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.

Download or read book Architecture in the Age of Stalin written by Vladimir Paperny and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paperny examines the evolution of architecture in Russia during the Stalinist period. Defining two conflicting trends--Culture One and Culture Two--that have alternately prevailed in Russian culture, the author argues that the shift away from the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s was not entirely the result of Stalin's will. Rather, he demonstrates how the aesthetic choices of Stalin and his architects were conditioned by the prevailing cultural mechanisms of the 1930s and 40s. Combining academic precision with engaging narrative, Paperny leads the reader through the remarkable trajectory of architectural and cultural transformation that marked a pivotal moment of Russia's history.

Download or read book Modernism and the making of the Soviet New Man written by Tijana Vujosevic and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creation of Soviet culture in the 1920s and the 1930s was the most radical of modernist projects, both in aesthetic and in political terms. Modernism and the Making of the New Man explores the architecture of this period as the nexus between aesthetics and politics. The design of the material environment, according to the author, was the social effort that most clearly articulated the dynamic of the socialist project as a negotiation between utopia and reality, the will for progress and the will for tyranny. It was a comprehensive effort that brought together professional architects and statisticians, theatre directors, managers, housewives, pilots, construction workers... What they had in common was the enthusiasm for defining the “new man”, the ideal citizen of the radiant future, and the settings in which he or she lives.

Download or read book The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture written by Gevork Hartoonian and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the visibility of modernization in architecture produced in different capitalist regions across the world and provides readers with a historico-theoretical and historico-geographical discussion. Focusing on a particular building type, an influential architect’s work, as well as relevant texts and documents, each chapter addresses the many facets of "delay" which are central to the problematization of capitalism’s progressive dissemination of technological and aesthetic regimes of modernism. This collection underlines the centrality of temporality for a critical understanding of colonialism, modernism, and capitalism. The book is primarily concerned with the historical timeline, the tangential point when a nation enters modernization processes. In exploring modernism in diverse regions such as East Asia, Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Iran, each chapter addresses the historiographic and architectonic unfolding of modernization beyond the western hemisphere. The exploration of these diverse case-studies will be of interest to students of architecture and researchers working on the collision of temporalities and the subject's critical importance for different country’s built-environments.

Download or read book Building Stalinism written by Cynthia A. Ruder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today the 80-mile-long Moscow Canal is a source of leisure for Muscovites, a conduit for tourists and provides the city with more than 60% of its potable water. Yet the past looms heavy over these quotidian activities: the canal was built by Gulag inmates at the height of Stalinism and thousands died in the process. In this wide-ranging book, Cynthia Ruder argues that the construction of the canal physically manifests Stalinist ideology and that the vertical, horizontal, underwater, ideological, artistic and metaphorical spaces created by it resonate with the desire of the state to dominate all space within and outside the Soviet Union. Ruder draws on theoretical constructs from cultural geography and spatial studies to interpret and contextualise a variety of structural and cultural products dedicated to, and in praise of, this signature Stalinist construction project. Approached through an extensive range of archival sources, personal interviews and contemporary documentary materials these include a diverse body of artefacts - from waterways, structures, paintings, sculptures, literary and documentary works, and the Gulag itself. Building Stalinism concludes by analysing current efforts to reclaim the legacy of the canal as a memorial space that ensures that those who suffered and died building it are remembered. This is essential reading for all scholars working on the all-pervasive nature of Stalinism and its complex afterlife in Russia today.