Pioneers of Soviet Modernism: Architecture and Urban Planning

Soviet architecture has experienced a change of landmarks twice. This happened for the first time in the early 1930s, when the wave of avant-garde searches was directed into the mainstream of traditionalist shaping. The second time was in the mid-1950s, when, in turn, the idealization of the historical past was violently exposed. Architectural creativity lost its place among the great arts, but at the same time it lost its strict ideological control. Domestic architecture got a chance to find itself in a global context. The Soviet architects were faced with the problem of creating a new language of socialist architecture. A quantum leap was made at the turn of the 1960s.

The term "architectural modernism" is already firmly entrenched in publications on the history of Russian architecture. Along with the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, it includes architectural buildings of a huge time span, from the mid-1950s to the end of the twentieth century. This phenomenon in Russian art history is still underestimated and insufficiently studied, despite the fact that true architectural masterpieces were born within its framework. 

The research book is dedicated to the formation of a new architectural style - modernism, its realized and obviously utopian projects. It took place through the creation of iconic competitive projects: the USSR pavilion at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958 - the first post-war performance of the Soviet Union in the international arena, the pavilions of the All-Union Construction Exhibition in Ostankino in 1956, which was not built, but amazed contemporaries with its high-tech and advanced time architecture, etc. The work was prepared on the basis of materials from the collection of the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture and private archives of architects. Projects and constructions of architects A.T. Polyansky, I.A.Pokrovsky, F.A.Novikov, G.G. Vegman, K. S. Melnikov, M. V. Posokhin, A. A. Mndoyants and others are shown as in author's graphics, and on the material of historical photography.