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 Generously illustrated, with a wide range of previously unpublished material, this book is an exploration of architecture as an instrument of statecraft.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 Stalin s Architect written by Vladimir Sedov and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boris Iofan (1891 - 1976) was considered Josef Stalin's 'court architect' due to his closeness to the dictator, whose design ideas he translated into reality. His name is associated with projects such as the House on the Embankment, the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair and the Palace of the Soviets, which was never realised. In the period from 1932 to 1947, he was one of the most important, if not the most important architect of the Soviet Union. This biography, a detailed study of Iofan's creative development, is based on previously unpublished documents. It also contains never-before-published visual material, including original drawings and sketches by the architect and his collaborators: most of this comes from Iofan's archive, which is now in the collection of the Museum für Architekturzeichnung in Berlin.
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 Work Flows written by Maya Vinokour and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work Flows investigates the emergence of "flow" as a crucial metaphor within Russian labor culture since 1870. Maya Vinokour frames concern with fluid channeling as immanent to vertical power structures—whether that verticality derives from the state, as in Stalin's Soviet Union and present-day Russia, or from the proliferation of corporate monopolies, as in the contemporary Anglo-American West. Originating in pre-revolutionary bio-utopianism, the Russian rhetoric of liquids and flow reached an apotheosis during Stalin's First Five-Year Plan and re-emerged in post-Soviet "managed democracy" and Western neoliberalism. The literary, philosophical, and official texts that Work Flows examines give voice to the Stalinist ambition of reforging not merely individual bodies, but space and time themselves. By mobilizing the understudied thematic of fluidity, Vinokour offers insight into the nexus of philosophy, literature, and science that underpinned Stalinism and remains influential today. Work Flows demonstrates that Stalinism is not a historical phenomenon restricted to the period 1922-1953, but a symptom of modernity as it emerged in the twentieth century. Stalinism's legacy extends far beyond the bounds of the former Soviet Union, emerging in seemingly disparate settings like post-Soviet Russia and Silicon Valley.
Download or read book Alexey Shchusev written by Dmitrij Chmelnizki and published by . This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexey Shchusev (1873-1949) was one of the most celebrated architects of the Soviet Union, famous for Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow. Not only a gifted designer of many prominent buildings, his career was quite unique and closely intertwined with the turbulent course of Russian and Soviet history. He was one of the very few architects who managed to rise to the top of the architectural hierarchy under the tsars and then to repeat this success under Soviet rule. Already before the Revolution of 1917, Shchusev was an acclaimed Revivalist architect, wellknown for his church designs and Moscow's Kazan Station. In the 1920s, he became a renowned Constructivist. Following the official renunciation of Avant-Garde architecture ordered by Stalin, Shchusev swiftly became an advocate of Socialist Classicism, designing many projects in the dictator's favoured Empire Style in order to satisfy the Stalinist state's needs for monumental representation. Combining a scholarly study of Shchusev's career with stunning photographs this book traces the development of this artistically and politically gifted architect through the architectural and historical changes in the first half of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Stalinist Architecture written by Alexei Tarkhanov and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of contemporary paintings, plans and drawings of Stalinist architecture. The architectural competitions of the era were tools in the propagandistic mass culture which served as a form of control and this book uses these to chart developments and changes in architectural style.
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 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 Architecture in the Age of Stalin written by Vladimir Paperny and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-24 with total page 400 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 Architecture of the Stalin Era written by Alexei Tarkhanov and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 1992 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Soviet Architectural Avant gardes written by Danilo Udovički-Selb and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 232 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 Sandfuture written by Justin Beal and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.
Download or read book Richard Riemerschmid s Extraordinary Living Things written by Freyja Hartzell and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Richard Riemerschmid’s designs of everyday—but “extraordinary”—objects recalibrate our understanding of modernism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German artist Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) was known as a symbolist painter and, by the advent of World War I, had become an important modern architect. This, however, the first English-language book on Riemerschmid, celebrates his understudied legacy as a designer of everyday objects—furniture, tableware, clothing—that were imbued with an extraordinary sense of vitality and even personality. Freyja Hartzell makes a case for the importance of Riemerschmid's designed objects in the development of modern design—and for the power of everyday things to change the way we live our lives, understand history, and design our future. Hartzell offers for the first time an interpretive history of Riemerschmid's design practice embedded in a fresh examination of modernism told by the objects themselves. Hartzell explores Riemerschmid's early drawings, paintings, and prints; his interiors and housewares, which represent a modernist shift from exclusive image to accessible object; his designs for women's clothing; his immensely popular wooden furniture; his serially produced ceramics and their appeal to German nationalism of the period; and his complex and compelling pattern designs for textiles and wallpapers, the only part of his creative practice that spanned his entire career. Riemerschmid, Hartzell writes, was at his most inventive, playful, and free when designing things for everyday use. His uniquely designed forms allow us to recognize the utilitarian object not just as a tool but as an individual being—a thing with a soul.
Download or read book Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe During the Stalin Era written by Anders Åman and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1992 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1978, Anders Åman has been researching, photographing, and documenting the architectural style known as Socialist Realism. In the midst of the current statue toppling, this book records in over 200 illustrations the government-planned buildings, cities, parks, and monuments from the Stalinist postwar period in Eastern Europe, providing a valuable record and analysis of the relation between architecture and the state in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and former East Germany. Very little has been written on architecture and politics during the Cold War period for any country, and next to nothing is known about the architecture, or about state policies reflected in the architecture, of Eastern Europe. Åman not only illuminates these issues but also reveals the influence they had on the course of architectural history in the West. Following an overview of the Stalinist era and the ideological spread of Socialist Realism, Åman investigates several buildings in detail monumental structures such as the Palace of Culture in Warsaw and Stalinallee in East Berlin - and the socialist cities of Stalinstadt, Nowa Huta, Szt & a ́linv & a ́ros, and Dimitrovgrad. Sketching the lives of eight selected architects, he illuminates how their profession was affected by Socialist Realism. Åman also takes up such political works of art as the influential Polish painting "Pass me a brick!" and the Stalin monuments in Budapest and Prague, noting that even as history is being obliterated, Socialist Realism remains a key to understanding pictorial art and the built environment in Eastern Europe. He concludes with a discussion of how architecture is related to political ideologies. Anders Åman is Professor of the History and Theory of Art at Ume & a ́ University, Sweden. An Architectural History Foundation Book
Download or read book The Architects written by Stefan Heym and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A novel of political intrigue and personal betrayal, The Architects takes readers inside the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s, shortly after Khruchchev's so-called secret speech denouncing Stalin brought about the release of many victims of Stalinist brutality. Among them is Daniel Wollin, a Communist who fled Hitler for Moscow and now returns to Germany after years of Soviet imprisonment. A brilliant architect, Daniel is taken in by his former colleague, Arnold Sundstrom, who was in exile in Moscow as well - but somehow fared better. Arnold's young wife, Julia, finds in Daniel the key that will unlock the dark secret of her husband's success and of her own parent's deaths in Russia. A story of suspense, romance, and drama, The Architects is also a window on a harrowing period of history that its author experienced firsthand. Although written in English, it was first published in German in 2000; this is the first publication in its original language." --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Inside the Stalin Archives written by Jonathan Brent and published by Atlas and Company. This book was released on 2010-02-22 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many people, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. Here, Brent asks - why didn't this happen? To answer such a question, he draws on 15 years of unprecedented access to high level Soviet archives. He shows readers a Russia where, in 1992, women sold used toothbrushes on the street to survive, yet now the shops are filled with luxury goods. Brent encounters Stalin's spectre through these changes and takes readers deep inside his archives.
Download or read book Blueprints and Blood written by Hugh D. Hudson and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bibliografie: p. 247-254 Met reg. The author shows how stalinist forces within the architectural community destroyed an avant- garde movement of urban planners and architects.
