Archinect - News

Platform takes a closer look into one of 20th century's boldest architectural experiments

2021-09-27T14:34:00-04:00

What we think of today as “Red Vienna” was, in many respects, a highly fragile, contingent, and audacious effort; it is little short of a minor miracle that so much decommodified housing was built at a time when reactionary Catholicism and fascist politics were ascendant on the national scale in Austria.

Penned by Joseph Heathcott for Platform, the article takes a closer look into one of the boldest architectural experiments of the twentieth century that can still be seen in Vienna today. Between 1923 and 1934, the socialist-controlled municipal government constructed over four hundred Hofs (housing courts) providing some 60,000 units of decent, affordable homes to one in eight residents of the city.

Manfredo Tafuri argues that "Red Vienna" emerged out of the historical moment when the Austrian working class asserted its place in a nation fractured by the dissolution of the ancient regime. In his view, however, the municipal experiment in mass housing did not so much envision a new world as it did reconfigure bits of the extant city to include working-class residents. For Tafuri, this approach resulted in supposedly isolated and detached working-class neighborhoods, amounting to a failure of international revolutionary principle. But for Eve Blau, Tafuri misses the distinctly urban ...

The New Yorker interviews Mike Davis "In the Age of Catastrophe"

2020-04-26T13:26:00-04:00

Eleven years ago, Bill Moyers brought me on his show and presented me as the last socialist in America. Now there are millions of young people who prefer socialism to capitalism.” -Mike Davis

Dana Goodyear of New Yorker had a conversation with Mike Davis on the occasion of his upcoming new book "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties."

The article, particularly summing up Davis' own "being there" through the social and political upheavals of Southern California, starting from the sixties onward and speculating on the possibility of the more uprisings in LA's case.

A Russian avant-garde designer apartment has been listed on Airbnb

2018-12-27T16:02:00-05:00

Two Moscow-based architectural heritage activists have renovated a Soviet avant-garde apartment and are now renting it on Airbnb. In the property listing, Alexander Dudnev and Konstantin Gudkov describe the apartment as a “time machine” to the Stalin era: “Located in a historical constructivist building, carefully restored and fully equipped with authentic and reconstructed furniture, lights and tableware, it will transfer you to 1930s utopia.”

We have done stories about beautifully designed rentals in the past, but given its rarity, this recent listing for an immaculately-preserved Moscow apartment from the 1930's stands on its own. It is likely that many of its patrons will miss plenty of its subtle modernist details, but they will be a delight to the few that yearn to experience the last remaining vestiges of Russian avant-garde design. Though many apartment buildings of this design movement still remain across Moscow, only a very small percentage have been taken care of in the way architectural heritage activists Alexander Dudnev and Konstantin Gudkov have treated this listing.

Dining Room. Photo: Sergei Kasyuk

How emerging designers find inspiration in socialist-era brutalist architecture

2018-09-19T09:00:00-04:00

Bold and unforgiving, the Brutalist landmarks and modernist housing estates which sprang up across Europe in the wake of the Second World War still dominate cities in the former Eastern bloc. [...] The Calvert Journal talked to designers and creatives across the New East who are now reclaiming socialist-era Brutalism as a driving force behind their work, changing mindsets, updating old designs for the modern age and making their own statements on gentrification, nostalgia and innovation.

The Brutalism-inspired design products by (mostly Eastern) European creatives Calvert Journal talked to range from stylish Russian flower vases to nostalgic Slovak pre-fab panelák furniture, German post-war housing cuckoo clocks, a Modernist Belgrade Map, and Polish miniature tower block building kits and Polaroid photo projects.

"Cuckoo Block" series by Guido Zimmermann, Germany.

"Brutal East" by Zupagrafika, Poland.

Find more design creations here.

You can now play Tetris with Soviet-style housing blocks

2018-04-18T14:13:00-04:00

If you've been around the 'architecture-can-be-fun-too'-focused internet for a while, you may remember Sergej Hein's semi-viral gem of a video, Berlin Block Tetris, which was exactly that: an animated version of the video game classic using building blocks that resembled socialist-era residential high-rises.

Lithuanian designer Lukas Valiauga has now taken the idea to the next, interactive, level and created the mobile app Tower Block Game.

Tower Block Game by Lukas Valiauga

"This game is a playful tribute to a not so playful reality of monotonous and bleak cityscapes built out of same prefabricated concrete blocks," the app description explains. "Very specific for Eastern-Europe but evident everywhere else, too. These relic tower blocks usually mark failed social programmes and neighbourhoods planned as clumsy as some failed building block game… On that note, build and demolish one for yourself!"

Tower Block Game is available for Android from the Google Play store.

Not much of a gam...

Is the architecture in 'Blade Runner 2049' really Brutalist?

2017-12-05T14:32:00-05:00

This fall Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 2049 was released as the long awaited sequel to the original 1982 film, and has since sparked much conversation around the film's architecture. There is no denying that Blade Runner 2049's construction was considerably influenced by Brutalist forms, but is the architecture really Brutalism?

Cinematographer Roger Deakins looked to London's Brutalist architecture to create his film, and director Denis Villeneuve said he wanted the "Brutalist feel" with severe concrete design.

'Blade Runner 2049' trailer still.

While serving as inspiration to the filmmakers, Brutalism's core philosophy does not align with Blade Runner 2049 and its architecture. The extremely capitalist society and unpopulated scenes found within the film contradict the original socialist intentions of Brutalist architects whose focus was on material rawness and honesty in order to create the ideal form of dwelling.

'Blade Runner 2049' trailer still.

Read the full essay by Alice Sw...

Lessons from North Korean urbanism

2014-01-08T15:43:00-05:00

They conceive of urban space as space owned by the public, not space for real estate development.

Much of the North Korean news that reaches the United States reads like tabloid hearsay, as glimpses of a totalitarian dictatorship rife with human rights violations are peeked through Dennis Rodman and military showboating. NK News, an independent and private news source based in Washington, D.C., is unique to both online journalism and treatment of its subject, in its rigorous and impressively connected focus on North Korean life and policy. Written from sources both in and out of the DPRK, NK News will most certainly get you to think differently about North Korea.

In part one of his interview with Dongwoo Yim, founder of the firm PRAUD and author of Pyongyang, and Pyongyang After, NK News' Academic / Research Director Gianluca Spezza takes a step back from current politics to ask Yim about the past and future of capital city Pyongyang's urban development. If Korea were to reunify, how would Pyongyang posture itself against Seoul, South Korea's megapolis capital?

Most of Nor...

The Buildings of Socialism | 'Soviet Modernism 1955-1991: Unknown Histories' at the Architekturzentrum Wien

2012-11-15T19:31:00-05:00

Led by Architekturzentrum Wien director Dietmar Steiner, the curators traveled around the former Soviet Union over a three-year period in search of their often elusive and quickly decaying subjects. Focusing on the former republics—from Estonia to Belarus, Armenia to Uzbekistan—they interviewed the still-living actors of the time and foraged in bookshops for archive material. They eventually uncovered major Soviet typologies...