Topics in Modern Architecture: Socialist Construction

"Socialist construction," in the early USSR, was an idea that brought architecture, infrastructure, and media to bear on cultivating belonging within an ethnically, ecologically, and historically complex territory ("one-sixth of the world"). This seminar takes the term as an opening onto the architecture of global socialism more broadly, with particular focus on the links between architecture, landscape, multinationalism, and internal colonization. We revisit familiar architectural movements like Constructivism, but we focus on gathering a broad geographic and temporal range of encounters between design and socialist politics.