2017 – the centenary of the Russian revolution gives rise to large museum institutions to show the public a bold, spectacular and conceptual Russian avant-garde. London Design Museum has ceremoniously entered the new building and is set to confirm its status with blockbuster projects. Among the mainspring exhibitions – “Imagine Moscow: architecture, propaganda, revolution”, dedicated to the ideal image of the capital of the new state. The exposition contains projects of Soviet designers and architects of the 1920-1930s, plans, and drawings of buildings that were never implemented. The concept is based on six projects made before 1932, each of which is associated with the main ideas of the October Revolution – collectivization, urbanization, aviation, communal life, and recreation of workers.
The spiral living cell of the rationalist architect Nikolai Ladovsky (1920); El Lissitzky’s Iron Cloud – a complex of eight skyscrapers (1924); the project of the Lenin Institute on the Lenin Hills by Ivan Leonidov – a planetarium ball and a parallelepiped-library (1927); “Health Factories” by architect Nikolai Sokolov (1928); projects of the building of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, the commissariat of heavy industry, which was supposed to be erected on Red Square (1934–1936, projects by the Vesnin brothers, Ivan Leonidov and Konstantin Melnikov), as well as the project of the Mausoleum, completed in 1924 by Alexei Shchusev. The curator of the exhibition, Etzter Steyerhoffer, feels well the goals of the Russian avant-garde artists: in their search for the future, the architects sought to rethink the old idea of the city, to present it with new symbols, new monuments, and new institutions.
Exhibitions Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda, Revolution was held from March 15 to June 4, 2017.
