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The Mel’nikov house [Дом Мельникова]: A retrospective evaluation
An embarrassing admission: I’ve never been too keen on the Mel’nikov house. This may seem odd coming from someone who just signed a petition calling for the preservation of Mel’nikov’s works and...
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Mies’ Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (1926)
Honestly, I was at first put off by the raw severity of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the Spartakusbund and martyrs of the failed November 1918...
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The speculative constructivism of Iakov Chernikhov’s early architectural...
with an article on Chernikhov by Erikh Gollerbakh (1930) . Image: Iakov Charnikhov, Composition 16 (1929) . We begin with the hero of our story: Iakov Chernikhov leading an arts class in Leningrad,...
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Corbu’s corpus
Ross Wolfe and Sammy Medina . Image: Book cover to MoMA’s Le Corbusier exhibit, edited by Cohen and Bergdoll (2013) . First published by the University of Bristol’s Antipode: A Radical Journal of...
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Anatole Kopp (1915-1990): the Engaged Architect and the Concept of Modern...
by Anat Falbel University of Campinas, Brazil anatfalbel@uol.com.br The bulk of the biographical data amassed below comes from an essay by a Brazilian professor, Anat Falbel, so much so that it has...
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On Anatole Kopp
Representing Soviet modernism . Image: Cover to the English translation of Anatole Kopp’s Town and Revolution (1967) As promised, this post will briefly consider the main theoretical contentions and...
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The Soviet pavilion at the 1925 Paris International Exposition
For those ardent enthusiasts of Soviet avant-garde architecture from the 1920s, whom I suspect account for a great deal of this blog’s readership, my retrospective evaluation of Konstantin Mel’nikov’s...
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On Claude Schnaidt
The writings of the French-German Marxist and architectural historian Claude Schnaidt (1931-2007) are hardly known at all in the English-speaking world. His only major essay to appear in translation...
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Trellick Tower: The fall and rise of a modern monument
Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi . Image: Ernö Goldfinger’s monumental Trelleck Tower in London (built 1972) . Drawing by San Rocco / Salottobuono Published in San Rocco Magazine № 5 — Fall 2012...
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Architecture in revolutionary times
Parallels after Emil Kaufmann . Image: Clever visual paraphrase of Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (1933). Von Boulée bis Le Corbusier? Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine (1922) inscribed in...
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Instrumentality, “habitability,” and the city
A critique of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau . Image: Detail from Seher Shah’s Object Relic: Unité d’Habitation(2012) . Architecture is a tool for oppression and control. Architecture is a tool...
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Modernity for penguins — modernity for all!
Berthold Lubetkin’s famous Penguin Pool, London (1934) . Image: A penguin pauses midway down the ramp of Lubetkin’s pool (1934) Aviary, London zoological garden Reyner Banham From The Architectural...
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Soviet architecture: Notes on its development, 1917-1932
by Berthold Lubetkin, 1956 . Image: Lubetkin’s trade pavilion for the USSR, Bordeaux 1926 Note: The following brief essay by Berthold Lubetkin, a constructivist architect and comrade of El Lissitzky...
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PROUN
The “way station” between painting and architecture . Image: El Lissitzky, PROUN 1-C (1919) From “Theses on the PROUN: From painting to architecture” (1920) Not world-illusion but world-reality . 1. We...
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Divagation on “activism” in aesthetics and politics
From a forthcoming review . Image: Cover to Lajos Kassák’s Ma: Aktivista folyóirat (1924) Excerpted and partially excised from a generally much more favorable review of Ben Davis’ Art and Class, a very...
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The antinomy of art and politics
A critique of art as cultural resistance . Image: Gustave Courbet, Self-Portrait: Man Smoking a Pipe (c. 1848-1849) Introduction . This article first appeared in September 2011, the same month that...
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Criticism after utopian politics
by Zoltan “Pac” Pobric . Image: Charles Baudelaire photographed in 1855 Following up on yesterday’s “advice to critics,” I thought it would be appropriate to include a reflection on the state of...
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“Safe” spaces
Making the world “safe” for continued capitalism . Image: Still of Jodie Foster and a young Kristen Stewart from Panic Room (2002) Introduction . Left Unity, making the world “safe” for the...
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Antiurban political economists in Scotland after Smith
James Anderson on town and country . Image: Painter William Wylde’s Manchester, from Kersal Moor (1852) A couple days ago I somehow found myself reading Adam Anderson, Dugald Stewart, Arthur Young, and...
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Dialectics and historical reality
Dialectics is not some sort of thought-trick or rhetorical sleight-of-hand, let alone the so-called “epistemological magic-key to revolutionary tactics or theory.” Of course, I don’t doubt that more...
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