e-flux Architecture Lectures
Free admission
March 5, 2024, 7pm
172 Classon Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
This lecture will examine the interrelated development of regional planning, architecture, and geography in the interwar Soviet Union. It will focus on the transition from evolutionist human geography, which viewed architecture as society’s adaptational mechanism, to economic geography, which instead turned to such questions as location of industrial production and the distribution of the workforce. Unlike its Western analogs, Soviet economic geography, which emerged at the moment of forced industrialization, was not analytical but projective: guided by Nikolay Baransky, it aspired to not only analyze but to design economic connections. Urban and regional planning responded to this transition. As the lecture will argue, the now-well-known debate about the socialist settlement, which ignited in 1929–30, was inspired by this transition, as architects struggled to reconcile the familiar ways of typification with the new economic demands. Situating this debate in its intellectual context, the lecture will examine the entanglement between extractive industrialism, centralized planning, geographic knowledge, and architecture at this moment, focusing on such concepts as the regional plan, the combine, the linear city and the settlement type, developed by Mikhail Okhitovich, Moisei Ginzburg, Ivan Leonidov, and others. A short-lived episode in geography, Baransky’s approach proved to have long-lasting effects for architecture and urbanism, informing later, Cold-War urban planning in the Soviet Union and beyond.
“Modernism on the Frontier: Architecture and Regional Planning in the Interwar Soviet Union” is presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a monthly series inviting researchers and practitioners to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.