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Soviet Union's Impact On American Architecture

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Architecture should not be separated from political and social life of human-beings. On the contrary, “throughout the history, architects have always been involved to some extent to politics, and have a nearly always sought positions of power and influence’’. Communist ideology in the Soviet Union had a huge impact on architectural development of many modern nations: Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Azerbaijan. The amount of affected countries makes the topic of my analysis relevant and worth-discussing. My essay will be structured in a following way. I argue that communist ideology had an enormous impact on architecture …show more content…

However, ideological competition with the United States of America, has forced Stalin to partly betray his pragmatic access of urban planning. Stalin’s wanted to respond to the American skyscrapers and ordered to build seven, unusually progressive tall buildings - Stalin’s Sisters. It is claimed that after the Second World War Stalin said that the USSR has won the big war, foreigners are going to come to Moscow, but what will they look at if there is still no tall buildings? We have a moral responsibility to build ones. In accordance with the statistics of Russian architectural historian Sergey Gorin, the resources used for the construction of those buildings (cost per meter) was much larger than the resources employed for the construction of buildings throughout the big country. It shows that for Joseph Stalin, it was important to show that his political ideology is also capable of constructing tall buildings (which was an innovative feature of 20th century). In other words, his aim was to show that a country did not have to adopt liberal ideology to build such …show more content…

He made a decree about eliminating all excessed luxury in urban planning. Furthermore, he established many programs, which were based on several factors: rapid industrialisation, the improvement of the average quality of buildings and the reduction of the money spend on construction. On November 1945 he famously pushed a new initiative “On eliminating the excesses in design and construction” It was the beginning of a complete restructuring of the Soviet architecture and building branch, which was a transition to the wide industrialisation, standardization and unification that were needed for the quicker country satisfaction of housing and public institutions. By this time Stalinist architecture has reached it’s crisis. A huge change of Soviet urban planning paradigm made a conversion to a higher quality structuring of residential areas. The appearance of new design and engineering methods has accelerated the tendency of replication the same decorations. However, this tendency has not only made the appearance of facades much worse, but also made the work on the construction of building increased(?) in price that was appraised in a negative way, because of the planning transition to a massive housing development. The realization of this program made a large-scale simplification of projects, the declining of their aesthetics and the actual contraction of space for the

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