By Dr Danilo Udovicki-Selb

Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes challenges conventional readings of the history of Soviet art and architecture, in which utopian modernism was practically prohibited by 1932 under Stalin's totalitarianism. Radically redefining the historiography of the period, it reveals how the relationship between the Party and practicing architects was much more complex than previously believed, and shows, in contrast to the conventional narratives, how the architectural avant-garde was able to persist at a time when it was widely considered to have been driven underground. In doing so, this book provides an essential new perspective on how to analyze, evaluate, and "reimagine" the global history of modernist expression, and offers a new understanding of the ways in which 20th-century social revolutions and their totalitarian sequels inflected the discourse of both modernity and modernism.