Leonidov's Proposed "Ministry of Heavy Industry" (1934)
I should like to thank the following architecture-related websites and point to some of their best articles:
- dpr-barcelona: I would like to thank Ethel Baraona not only for her enthusiastic promotion of my site on Twitter and so on, but for her friendship. After I posted some links to a few of the journals I’d uploaded, she immediately e-mailed me personally expressing her thanks. That said, she and her co-contributor have produced some excellent content of their own, in articles both in English and in Spanish. To point to just a couple of them: “Ivan Leonidov and the Russian Utopias” and “Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms | Iakov Chernikhov.”
- Critical Grounds: Thanks to the author of this blog for pointing his students to the English-language modernist architectural archive I created. And if you have the time, please read the following excellent articles: “In the Name of Being: Critical Regionalist Landscape Urbanism, a Critique,” his reference to another critique of environmentalism in “Ross Adams on the ‘eco-city’,” and finally his own “Parallel Lines: formal expression as publicity in the architecture of Hadid’s Central Building for BMW Leipzig.”
- sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy: As always, the Bolshevist and “interdistrictite” Owen Hatherley must make the list. Not only for his incredibly helpful promotion of my own blog, but for his numerous good articles. Some of his older articles from his previous blog are more immediately related to what I’ve been working on: “No Rococo Palace for Buster Keaton: Americanism (and Technology, Advertising, Socialism) in Weimar Architecture,” “The Functionalist Deviation Politics of building, aesthetics of anti-architecture,” and especially “A Pod of One’s Own — Architecture or Revolution: the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne, 1928-33.”
- Kosmograd: There’s too much good, cosmopolitan material at this site, which is mostly dedicated to early Bolshevik architecture and the Soviet space program. He has linked to my site on several occasions, for which I am very thankful. Interesting articles on this site include “Communal House of the Textile Institute,” the hilarious “Eco-town of Tomorrow and Its Planning,” and his interesting piece on “Decaying Orbiters.”
I like the links.
Are these publications a community of art historians, who study architecture? Architects?
These are all individual scholars and bloggers who focus primarily on architecture and urbanism. In my estimation, they are some of the best on the net.
Speaking of architectural history and criticism, I am finally getting around to writing that piece on early Bolshevik avant-garde architecture. I think it’s going to be in three parts: an introduction that provides the Marxist theoretical framework of my interpretation, a first part which describes the various modernist architectural movements in Russia and internationally, and finally a second part which traces their convergence in Moscow in the early 1930s as part of the massive planning projects of the Soviet Union. A brief epilogue might be appended explaining the ultimate collapse of the modernist dream in Russia following the Stalinist betrayal, and the effective degeneration of modernist architecture in general for the rest of the century. From that point on the avant-garde lost its vision of global social transformation and instead settled for private and corporate commissions that embraced the modernist chic, as architects succumbed to opportunism and fame.
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Alan Woods will like it. I believe he went to school in Russia. He is married to a Spanish woman, and lived for years in Spain, fighting Franco.
At Marxist.com, look up Alan’s articles on the arts.
Interesting is that World Socialist Website people, are almost all history majors.
Oops I meant art majors.
Architectural design values make up an important part of what influences an architect and designer when they make their design decisions. However, architects and designers are not always influenced by the same values and intentions. Value and intentions differ between different architectural movements. It also differs between different schools of architecture and schools of design as well as among individual architects and designers.