Architecture and Counter-revolution: The Ideology of the Historiography of the Soviet "Avant-garde"

The thesis produces a history of the Western historiography of Soviet architecture, looking at its trends and the evolution of its narratives. It focuses on the development of historiographical categories and their transformations, as an exercise of what Reinhart Koselleck calls conceptual history, framed as a Marxist critique of ideology. While the Soviet “avant-garde” has seen growing popularity since the 1960s in the West, it has been systematically presented as precedent to politically charged present practices and discourses. This thesis frames this link to the present as a “historiographical link”, an ideological projection of meanings the Western historiography of Soviet architecture produces over its own geo-political reality. “The avant-garde” as a meta-category is itself constructed in this context as a means of legitimation of Western presents, where the relationship between history, design and politics is articulated through the category of what Tafuri calls “the project”, in a process that depoliticises the very idea of the politicisation of architecture itself.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

phd

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

The Open University

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Ruivo Pereira, Ricardo

Language dc:language

en