Soviet Modernism:
The City of Tomorrow

The City of Tomorrow presents the evolution of Soviet modernist architectural heritage from its genesis in the 1920s and its revival from the late 1950s through to the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as this patrimony’s patchwork survival in the former republics of the Soviet empire today. Sometimes as decaying ruin, other times as an adaptive re-use project, this legacy — with its own masters, local dialects, and unsung masterpieces — tells a story that was afflicted by inner contradictions and idiosyncrasy, much as it developed within a seemingly homogenized space. “The City of Tomorrow” explores this landscape and its expansive reshaping at the hands of an architectural culture that sought to build a fundamentally different idea of society than the neoliberal order many Soviet successor states face today.

Yerevan
Conflicting Modernities

Minsk
Minsk as a symbiosis of the standardized and individual

Moscow
Play Tretyakov

Exhibition ⇉

Ruben Arevshatian and Georg Schöllhammer
Soviet Modernism – a parallel history of architecture and urbanism that is an issue of current debate

In recent years, the subject of Soviet modernist architecture has become a topic of enormous international interest in professional circles and for the general public. This growing interest is informed by several factors: chief among them is the global discovery of a new, vastly rich strata of modernist architectural heritage that was detached from the Western historical master narrative as a result of the Cold War. After losing a great number of masterpiece buildings from the Soviet period, post-Soviet societies started to realize not only the significance of those buildings as architectural and historical monuments, but also began to acknowledge these structures as important socio-cultural components of their collective identities.

Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony

A social experiment conducted in 1921-1927 in the territory of present-day Kemerovo

First West-Siberian Agricultural and Industry Exhibition

A site for implementing the boldest architectural fantasies

Khudprom College Omsk

The industrial arts college founded under Narkompros 

All buildings of the month ⇉

The Goethe-Institut in Novosibirsk is launching a series of podcasts about architectural modernism in Siberia. In a series of talks with experts, the Novosibirsk artist and curator Anton Karmanov discusses the key phenomena and periods of architectural modernism in Siberia. In his talks with experts, he seeks an answer to the question of what ‘Siberian modernism’ and ‘the Novosibirsk architectural school’ are. Do they exist, and, if so, what characterizes them?

Podcast #5
Andrey Chernov Speaks About Novosibirsk Paper Architecture and the Freedom of Creation

The final podcast is devoted to Novosibirsk paper architecture. We will talk with the representative of the first-generation “paper architects” Andrey Chernov. 

All episodes of this pocast ⇉

Zum 130. Geburtstag des weltweit bekannten Malers El Lissitzky veröffentlicht das Goethe-Institut Nowosibirsk ein Longread des Nowosibirsker Kunstkritikers Sergej Samoilenko. In diesem verflechten sich das Schicksal von El Lissitzky als hervorragendem Vertreter der russischen Avantgarde und dessen Familie mit seiner Kunst und den Nowosibirsker Underground-Ausstellungen in Akademgorodok während der Tauwetter-Periode zu einer Filmserie, deren Figuren sich auf unvorstellbare Abenteuer einlassen und auf unglaubliche Proben um der Kunst willen gestellt werden.

In the framework of ‘The City of Tomorrow’ exhibition, Goethe-Institut in Novosibirsk presents a short ballet film titled ‘Stal-Gorod’ (‘Steel-City’). Through the prism of dance, music, and cinema, the modern artists reconsider and interpret the architectural legacy of Soviet modernism.