Download or read book Stalin s Architect written by Deyan Sudjic and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2022-04-28 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a history of architecture, politics and power. Boris Iofan (18911976) made his mark as Stalins architect, both in the grand projects he achieved, such as the House on the Embankment, a megastructure of 505 homes for the Soviet elite, and through his unbuilt designs, in particular the Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist dream whose iconic image was reproduced throughout the Soviet Union. Iofans life and designs offer a unique perspective into the politics of twentieth-century architecture and the history of the Soviet Union.
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 Soviet Modernism Brutalism Post modernism written by Alex Bykov and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fall of the Soviet Empire written by Anne de Tinguy and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was the Soviet system's failure inevitable from its inception? These essays consider the role of ideology, the failure of the economic system, and the failure of a messianic ambition.
Download or read book Strong Towns written by Charles L. Marohn, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.
Download or read book Building a new New World written by Jean-Louis Cohen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.
Download or read book Soviet Asia written by Roberto Conte and published by Fuel Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fantastic collection of Soviet Asian architecture, many photographed here for the first time Soviet Asia explores the Soviet modernist architecture of Central Asia. Italian photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego crossed the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, documenting buildings constructed from the 1950s until the fall of the USSR. The resulting images showcase the majestic, largely unknown, modernist buildings of the region. Museums, housing complexes, universities, circuses, ritual palaces - all were constructed using a composite aesthetic. Influenced by Persian and Islamic architecture, pattern and mosaic motifs articulated a connection with Central Asia. Grey concrete slabs were juxtaposed with colourful tiling and rectilinear shapes broken by ornate curved forms: the brutal designs normally associated with Soviet-era architecture were reconstructed with Eastern characteristics. Many of the buildings shown in Soviet Asia are recorded here for the first time, making this book an important document, as despite the recent revival of interest in Brutalist and Modernist architecture, a number of them remain under threat of demolition. The publication includes two contextual essays, one by Alessandro De Magistris (architect and History of Architecture professor, University of Milan, contributor to the book Vertical Moscow) and the other by Marco Buttino (Modern and Urban History professor, University of Turin, specializing in the history of social change in the USSR).
Download or read book Moscow A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955 1991 written by Anna Bronovitskaya and published by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moscow: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955-1991 provides descriptions of almost 100 buildings from the most underrated period of Soviet architecture. This is the first guide to bring together the architecture made during the three decades between Khrushchev and Gorbachev, from the naive modernism of the "thaw" of the late 1950s through postmodernism. Buildings include the Palace of Youth, the Rossiya cinema, the Pioneer Palace, the Ostankino TV Tower, the TASS headquarters, the "golden brains" of the Academy of Sciences and less well-known structures such as the House of New Life and the Lenin Komsomol Automobile Plant Museum. The authors situate Moscow's postwar architecture within the historical and political context of the Soviet Union, while also referencing developments in international architecture of the period.
Download or read book Industrialized Building in the Soviet Union written by James Roscoe Wright and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Housing Estates in the Baltic Countries written by Daniel Baldwin Hess and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book focuses on the formation and later socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in the Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It also explores claims that a distinctly “westward-looking orientation” in their design produced housing estates that were superior in design to those produced elsewhere in the Soviet Union (between 1944 and 1991, Estonia was a member republic of the USSR). The first two parts of the book provide contextual material to help readers understand the vision behind housing estates in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These sections present the background of housing estates in the Baltic Republics as well as challenges and debates concerning their formation, evolution, and present condition and importance. Subsequent parts of the book consist of: demographic analyses of the socioeconomic characteristics and ethnicity of housing estate residents (past and present) in the three Baltic capital cities, case studies of people and places related to housing estates in the Baltic countries, and chapters exploring relevant special topics and themes. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and advocates interested in understanding the past, present, and future importance of housing estates in the Baltic countries.
Download or read book The House of Government written by Yuri Slezkine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 1123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Download or read book Felix Novikov written by Vladimir Belogolovsky and published by Dom Pub. This book was released on 2013 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was prominent architect and publicist Felix Novikov (b. 1927) who first coined the term Soviet modernism, which refers to the third, concluding period (1955-85) of Soviet architecture. The value of Novikov’s creative path lies in the fact that it spans the years both before and after Soviet modernism. Today, the architect continues to be a prolific writer, critic, and initiator of many inspired ideas that materialize into publications, exhibitions, and conferences. He is the key surviving source for the fullest and most accurate understanding of Soviet architecture after World War II. His principal built works are the Palace of Pioneers in Moscow (1962) and the Science Center of Microelectronics (1969) and Moscow Institute of Electronics (1971) in Zelenograd. His numerous books include Formula of Architecture (1984) and Architects and Architecture (2002).
Download or read book Soviet Bus Stops written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photographer Christopher Herwig has covered more than 30,000 km by car, bike, bus and taxi in 13 former Soviet countries discovering and documenting these unexpected treasures of modern art. From the shores of the Black Sea to the endless Kazakh steppe, these bus stops show the range of public art from the Soviet era and give a rare glimpse into the creative minds of the time. These books represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of Soviet bus stop design ever assembled from: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Abkhazia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. With a foreword by writer, critic and television presenter Jonathan Meades. --Volume 1.
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 Soviet Cities Labour Life and Leisure written by Arseniy Kotov and published by Fuel. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet dream of modernist architecture for all, portrayed on the brink of its erasure In recent years Russian cities have visibly changed. The architectural heritage of the Soviet period has not been fully acknowledged. As a result many unique modernist buildings have been destroyed or changed beyond recognition. Russian photographer Arseniy Kotov intends to document these buildings and their surroundings before they are lost forever. He likes to take pictures in winter, during the "blue hour," which occurs immediately after sunset or just before sunrise. At this time, the warm yellow colors inside apartment-block windows contrast with the twilight gloom outside. To Kotov, this atmosphere reflects the Soviet period of his imagination. His impression of this time is unashamedly idealistic: he envisages a great civilization, built on a fair society, which hopes to explore nature and conquer space. From the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the desert steppes of Kazakhstan to the grim monolithic high-rise dormitory blocks of inner-city Volgograd, Kotov captures the essence of the post-Soviet world. "The USSR no longer exists and in these photographs we can see what remains--the most outstanding buildings and constructions, where Soviet people lived and how Soviet cities once looked: no decoration, no bright colors and no luxury, only bare concrete and powerful forms." This superbly designed volume is the latest in Fuel's revelatory and inspiring series on Soviet-era architecture.
Download or read book Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia written by Francisco Martinez and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-07-06 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens to legacies that do not find any continuation? In Estonia, a new generation that does not remember the socialist era and is open to global influences has grown up. As a result, the impact of the Soviet memory in people’s conventional values is losing its effective power, opening new opportunities for repair and revaluation of the past. Francisco Martinez brings together a number of sites of interest to explore the vanquishing of the Soviet legacy in Estonia: the railway bazaar in Tallinn where concepts such as ‘market’ and ‘employment’ take on distinctly different meanings from their Western use; Linnahall, a grandiose venue, whose Soviet heritage now poses diffi cult questions of how to present the building’s history; Tallinn’s cityscape, where the social, spatial and temporal co-evolution of the city can be viewed and debated; Narva, a city that marks the border between the Russian Federation, NATO and the European Union, and represents a place of continual negotiation of belonging; and the new Estonian National Museum in Raadi, an area on the outskirts of Tartu, that has been turned into a memory field. The anthropological study of all these places shows that national identity and historical representations can be constructed in relation to waste and disrepair too, also demonstrating how we can understand generational change in a material sense. Praise for Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia 'By adopting the tropes of ‘repair’ and ‘waste’, this book innovatively manages to link various material registers from architecture, intergenerational relations, affect and museums with ways of making the past present. Through a rigorous yet transdisciplinary method, Martínez brings together different scales and contexts that would often be segregated out. In this respect, the ethnography unfolds a deep and nuanced analysis, providing a useful comparative and insightful account of the processes of repair and waste making in all their material, social and ontological dimensions.' Victor Buchli, Professor of Material Culture at UCL 'This book comprises an endearingly transdisciplinary ethnography of postsocialist material culture and social change in Estonia. Martínez creatively draws on a number of critical and cultural theorists, together with additional research on memory and political studies scholarship and the classics of anthropology. Grappling concurrently with time and space, the book offers a delightfully thick description of the material effects generated by the accelerated post-Soviet transformation in Estonia, inquiring into the generational specificities in experiencing and relating to the postsocialist condition through the conceptual anchors of wasted legacies and repair. This book defies disciplinary boundaries and shows how an attention to material relations and affective infrastructures might reinvigorate political theory.' Maria Mälksoo, Senior Lecturer, Brussels School of International Studies at the University of Kent
Download or read book Holidays in Soviet Sanatoriums written by Maryam Omidi and published by Fuel Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating photographic study of the previously overlooked Soviet Sanatoriums and their treatments - stunning eastern bloc architecture meets crude-oil baths and radon water douches. Visiting a Soviet sanatorium is like stepping back in time. Originally conceived in the 1920s, they afforded workers a place to holiday, courtesy of a state-funded voucher system. At their peak they were visited by millions of citizens across the USSR every year. A combination of medical institution and spa, the era's sanatoriums are among the most innovative buildings of their time. Although aesthetically diverse, Soviet utopian values permeated every aspect: western holidays were perceived as decadent. By contrast, sanatorium breaks were intended to edify and strengthen visitors - health professionals carefully monitored guests throughout their stay, so they could return to work with renewed vigour. Certain sanatoriums became known for their specialist treatments, such as crude oil baths, radon water douches and stints in underground salt caves. While today some sanatoriums are in critical states of decline, many are still fully operational and continue to offer their Soviet-era treatments to visitors. Using specially commissioned photographs by leading photographers of the post-Soviet territories, and texts by sanatorium expert Maryam Omidi, this book documents over forty-five sanatoriums and their unconventional treatments. From Armenia to Uzbekistan, it represents the most comprehensive survey to date of this fascinating and previously overlooked Soviet institution.