Description
Idealistic visions of the Soviet capital that were never realised.
Published at the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda, Revolution portrays Moscow as it was envisioned by a bold generation of architects in the 1920s and early 1930s. Through evocative imagery and a wealth of rarely seen material, this book provides a window into an idealistic fantasy of the Soviet capital that was never realised and has since been largely forgotten.
Focusing on six unbuilt architectural landmarks, Imagine Moscow explores how these projects reflected changes in everyday life and society following the revolution, during one of the most fascinating periods of the twentieth century. Large-scale architectural plans, models and drawings are placed alongside propaganda posters, textiles and porcelain, contextualising the transformation of a city reborn as the new capital of the USSR and the international centre of socialism.
Trained as an architect and historian, Jean-Louis Cohen has been Chair for the History of Architecture at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts since 1994. Since 2014, he has been a guest professor at the Collège de France. His forty books include Architecture in Uniform (2011), The Future of Architecture Since 1889 (2012), and Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes (2013). He has curated numerous exhibitions, including Scenes of the World to Come at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (1995), Interférences / Interferenzen - Architecture, Allemagne, France at the Musées de Strasbourg (2013), and L'Aventure Le Corbusier at the Centre Pompidou (1987).
Deyan Sudjic is Director of the Design Museum. His career has spanned journalism, teaching and writing. He was the editor of Domus magazine from 2000 to 2004, and founding editor of Blueprint magazine. He has published many books on design and architecture, including The Edifice Complex (2005), The Language of Things (2008), Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture (2010), Shiro Kuramata (2013) and B is for Bauhaus (2015). His most recent book, Ettore Sottsass and the Poetry of Things, was published by Phaidon in September 2015.
Richard Anderson is Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. He specializes in the history of modern and contemporary architecture in North America, Europe and Eurasia. His essays have appeared in AA Files, Grey Room, Log and Future Anterior, among other journals and edited volumes. He is editor and principal translator of Ludwig Hilberseimer's Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays (2012) and the author of Russia: Modern Architectures in History (2015), a cultural history of Russian architecture from 1861 to the present. His current research explores the global effects of the Soviet architectural system.
Eszter Steierhoffer is Curator at the Design Museum in London. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art in Critical and Historical Studies and her research interests include the history of modern and contemporary architecture exhibitions. She has organized numerous exhibitions and symposia with architectural foci, including Corner, Block, Neighbourhood, Cities. Álvaro Siza in Berlin and The Hague (2015); Zoo-topia. On zoo architecture as taxonomies of national representation (2012); and Anatomy of a Street (2010).
