The main basis of his fame isn't built work but imaginary projects and sculptures and installations that might be called architectural art. An artist was what he wanted to be as a child, and when he graduated as an architect during the Brezhnev era he wasn't interested in working for "one of the big state institutions" which were the only likely sources of employment. So he started dreaming up "paper architecture", imaginary projects, in collaboration with the artist Ilya Utkin. — guardian.co.uk

At the beginning of his career, Alexander Brodsky is part of the “paper-architecture“ movement even though at that point, at the beginning of the eighties, there is no movement in the true sense yet. The notion “paper-architecture” rather expresses a typical limitation to architectural creativity in the Soviet Union of the time: Young architects who would refuse to fit in with the established architecture system would have no means to carry out their projects... — castyourart.com