Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes: Architecture and Stalin’s Revolution from Above, 1928-1938

Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes challenges conventional readings of the history of Soviet art and architecture, in which utopian modernism was practically prohibited by 1932 under Stalin’s totalitarianism. Radically redefining the historiography of the period, it reveals how the relationship between the Party and practicing architects was much more complex than previously believed, and shows, in contrast to the conventional narratives, how the architectural avant-garde was able to persist at a time when it was widely considered to have been driven underground. In doing so, this book provides an essential new perspective on how to analyze, evaluate, and reimagine the global history of modernist expression, and offers a new understanding of the ways in which 20th-century social revolutions and their totalitarian sequels inflected the discourse of both modernity and modernism.

Exploring iconic Soviet architecture including the Palace of Soviets and the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris 1937 World Exposition, and revealing many remarkable works that until now have been neglected by architectural historians inside and outside Russia, Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes provides a revealing new account of the ‘hidden’ modernism which persisted through Stalinism. In a fascinating final chapter, it also reveals for the first time the details of Frank Lloyd Wright’s triumphant welcome in Moscow in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Terror.