Archinect has an interesting piece up titled Delirious Moscow, In Search of Lost Vanguards, drawing connections between Soviet architectural modernism, avant-garde constructivism, utopianism, and that societies fluctuating ideas concerning space exploration. Quote: “One could look at the remnants of the avant-garde projects that litter the former USSR as the detritus left by the Martians: the incomprehensible, incommensurable ruins of a strictly temporary visitation by creatures not like ourselves.” It touches on the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic which inspired the Tarkovsky film Stalker, Tatlin’s Third International Tower, and Shukhov Tower among many other things. Great stuff (via enthusiasm).

10.17. filed under: art. design. history. ideas.


ULL-AA! Doesn’t it seem that the Soviet experiment was somehow a foredoomed endeavor that the human superorganism needed to try anyway? You look at this and you think “Still, they were on to something, weren’t they? Something bold and true that capitalist consumer society doesn’t quite grasp?” After all, the individualist extreme of fascism does keep popping up to remind us that we haven’t solved the problems Marx tried to fix. Marcus Wolf, the head East German spy, expresses that sort of view in his autobio; the dream failed, he admits, that dream of equality and rationalism that the West openly scorned; but perhaps one day the dream would be attempted again, and done in a way that could work. For all its excesses and dysfunction, communism was an answer to the insanity of feudalism.

posted on 10.18 at 12:54 AM.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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