Leningrad: arkhitektura sovetskogo modernizma 1955–1991. Spavochnik-putevoditel (Leningrad: handbook and guide to the architecture of Soviet modernism 1955–1991), 9785990561274
Moscow: Garazh / Muzei arkhitektury im. A.V. Shchuseva, 2021. Pb. In a detailed introduction the authors elaborate on the strange course of modernism in Russian-Soviet architecture. After a fertile beginning in the late tsarist and early Soviet period, it was denounced by Stalin in the early thirties, when an official neoclassicism became the requisite style for state commissions (i.e., almost all commissions). For the rest of the thirties, forties, and early fifties neoclassical public buildings and ensembles predominated. After Stalin's death in 1953 Khrushchev as part of his denunciation of the cult of personality decried architects for preferring grandiose projects and ignoring housing, of which there was a gross shortage. Modernist styles that Stalin had suppressed came back into favor. Drawing on technologies and styles from Western Europe, America, and the Russian avant-garde, designers, builders, and engineers brought about modernism's second birth. The authors structure the book using entries on specific buildings and also broach general questions about design and urban planning and the difficulty of building contemporary structures in Leningrad, where eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings predominate. In Leningrad architects were under the influence of the city's architectural heritage and sought to design not individual works but whole ensembles, which then seemed backward-looking but now strike us a fresh aspect of modernism in the Soviet Union. Bibliography, and index.. 343 p., 25 cm, approx. 400 b/w and color illus., Rus. Item #4185
ISBN: 9785990561274
Price: $71.00