Suchergebnisse

Throughout the 1920s and into the years of Stalinism, progressive architects in the Soviet Union sought to construct new forms of housing and settlement that would offer the best of modern technology and whose design would include provisioning of services that would allow all citizens, especially women, to partake in creative work. Schools, dining facilities, laundries, parks, cinemas, clubs and housing in a choice of styles formed the core of these architectural dreams. In the tradition of the Populists, modernist architects initially saw themselves as teachers but some came to appreciate the necessity of listening and began to learn from worker assessments of housing and urban design. This communication formed the basis for bridging, at least in housing, the cultural gap between revolutionary elites and common people. Inherent in the modernist movement in architecture, as reflected most eloquently in the work of the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA), was a greater democratization of political and social life.

Buried within the bowels of Russia's Ural Mountains, some sixteen hundred kilometers east of Moscow, lay huge deposits of the invaluable raw material iron. If exploitedon a large scale, they would provide the Russian state with one of the chief ingredients of an early industrial economy. A prospering iron industry, in its turn, would expand immeasurably Russia's hitherto-limited war-making capacity—no small consideration in the early eighteenth century, an age in which war-making was still deemed the major function of the ambitious ruler. Appropriately, no Russian was more alert to the potential of Ural iron than Peter I, whose reign of some thirty-five years (1689–1725) would be distinguished by only one year completely free of war.