Soviet Critical Design

Soviet Critical Design PDF Author: Tom Cubbin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350021989
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Soviet Critical Design is the first book to explore the socialist design practice of 'artistic projecteering', which was developed by the USSR's Senezh Experimental Studio in the 1960s. Tom Cubbin examines the studio as a site for the development of the design discipline in the optimistic environment of the 1960s Soviet Thaw. He also explores how designers adapted to the fast-changing Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s, considering their approach to critical projects highlighting the Soviet state's treatment of citizens, urban heritage and public spaces. Drawing on previously unpublished visual material from private archives and also extensive interviews, this book presents a new history of the late socialist period in the USSR, which gives insight into the creative strategies of designers who engaged their practice as a contribution to broader discussions on alternative models for socialist existence. Cubbin shows how artistic projecteering must be read as a utopian activity which privileged the political and ideological over the functional.

Soviet Critical Design

Soviet Critical Design PDF Author: Tom Cubbin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350021970
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Soviet Critical Design is the first monograph to explore the socialist design practice of 'artistic projecteering', which was developed by the USSR's Senezh Experimental Studio in the 1960s. Tom Cubbin first examines the studio as a site for the development of the design discipline in the optimistic environment of the Soviet Thaw of the 1960s. He then explores how designers adapted to new realities of the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 80s. Over two decades, designers at the studio worked on critical projects that highlighted how the Soviet state's treatment of citizens, urban heritage and the environment was manifest in daily life. Drawing on previously unpublished visual material from private archives and also extensive interviews, this book presents a new history of the late socialist period in the USSR, which gives insight into the creative strategies of designers who engaged their practice as a contribution to broader discussions on alternative models for socialist existence. Overall, it argues that artistic projecteering must be read as a utopian activity which privileged the political and ideological over the functional.

Soviet Critical Design

Soviet Critical Design PDF Author: Tom Cubbin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350021997
Category : ARCHITECTURE
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Soviet Critical Design is the first monograph to explore the socialist design practice of 'artistic projecteering', which was developed by the USSR's Senezh Experimental Studio in the 1960s. Tom Cubbin first examines the studio as a site for the development of the design discipline in the optimistic environment of the Soviet Thaw of the 1960s. He then explores how designers adapted to new realities of the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 80s. Over two decades, designers at the studio worked on critical projects that highlighted how the Soviet state's treatment of citizens, urban heritage and the environment was manifest in daily life. Drawing on previously unpublished visual material from private archives and also extensive interviews, this book presents a new history of the late socialist period in the USSR, which gives insight into the creative strategies of designers who engaged their practice as a contribution to broader discussions on alternative models for socialist existence. Overall, it argues that artistic projecteering must be read as a utopian activity which privileged the political and ideological over the functional.

Spatial Revolution

Spatial Revolution PDF Author: Christina E. Crawford
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501759213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states—and capitalist welfare states—for decades to follow. Thanks to generous funding from Emory University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed

The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed PDF Author: Linda J. Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674828001
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book is the first critical assessment of the likelihood and implications of such a contract. Linda Cook pursues the idea from Brezhnev's day to our own, and considers the constraining effect it may have had on Gorbachev's attempts to liberalize the Soviet economy.

Stenberg Brothers

Stenberg Brothers PDF Author: Christopher Mount
Publisher: ABRAMS
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
The exhibition Stenberg Brothers: Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design, organized by Christopher Mount, Assistant Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, is the first critical survey of the work of these two seminal figures in the history of twentieth-century graphic design.

A Soviet Journey

A Soviet Journey PDF Author: Alex La Guma
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498536034
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism—a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey—the first since 1978—restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma’s text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.

Comradely Objects

Comradely Objects PDF Author: Yulia Karpova
Publisher: Studies in Design and Material Culture
ISBN: 9781526139870
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book offers a new perspective on the history of Soviet design. It argues that the 'comradely objects' of Russian productivism were not just shabby copies of western commodities - they were agents of progressive social relations with a discernible inheritance from the 1920s avant-garde.

Iconography of Power

Iconography of Power PDF Author: Victoria E. Bonnell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520924062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Masters at visual propaganda, the Bolsheviks produced thousands of vivid and compelling posters after they seized power in October 1917. Intended for a semi-literate population that was accustomed to the rich visual legacy of the Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church, political posters came to occupy a central place in the regime's effort to imprint itself on the hearts and minds of the people and to remold them into the new Soviet women and men. In this first sociological study of Soviet political posters, Victoria Bonnell analyzes the shifts that took place in the images, messages, styles, and functions of political art from 1917 to 1953. Everyone who lived in Russia after the October revolution had some familiarity with stock images of the male worker, the great communist leaders, the collective farm woman, the capitalist, and others. These were the new icons' standardized images that depicted Bolshevik heroes and their adversaries in accordance with a fixed pattern. Like other "invented traditions" of the modern age, iconographic images in propaganda art were relentlessly repeated, bringing together Bolshevik ideology and traditional mythologies of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Symbols and emblems featured in Soviet posters of the Civil War and the 1920s gave visual meaning to the Bolshevik worldview dominated by the concept of class. Beginning in the 1930s, visual propaganda became more prescriptive, providing models for the appearance, demeanor, and conduct of the new social types, both positive and negative. Political art also conveyed important messages about the sacred center of the regime which evolved during the 1930s from the celebration of the heroic proletariat to the deification of Stalin. Treating propaganda images as part of a particular visual language, Bonnell shows how people "read" them—relying on their habits of seeing and interpreting folk, religious, commercial, and political art (both before and after 1917) as well as the fine art traditions of Russia and the West. Drawing on monumental sculpture and holiday displays as well as posters, the study traces the way Soviet propaganda art shaped the mentality of the Russian people (the legacy is present even today) and was itself shaped by popular attitudes and assumptions. Iconography of Power includes posters dating from the final decades of the old regime to the death of Stalin, located by the author in Russian, American, and English libraries and archives. One hundred exceptionally striking posters are reproduced in the book, many of them never before published. Bonnell places these posters in a historical context and provides a provocative account of the evolution of the visual discourse on power in Soviet Russia.

International Design Organizations

International Design Organizations PDF Author: Jeremy Aynsley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350112534
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This innovative volume brings together international design scholars to address the history and present-day status of national and international design organizations, working across design disciplines and located in countries including Argentina, Turkey, Estonia, Switzerland, Italy, China and the USA. In the second half of the 20th century, many non-governmental organizations were created to address urgent cultural, economic and welfare issues. Design organizations set out to create an international consensus for the future direction of design. This included enhancing communication between professionals, educators and practitioners, raising standards for design, and creating communities of designers across linguistic, national and political borders. Shared needs and agendas were identified and categories of design constantly defined and re-defined, often with overt cultural and political intents. Drawing on an impressive range of original research, archival sources and oral testimony, this volume questions the aims and achievements of national and international design organizations in light of their subsequent histories and their global remits. The Cold War period is central to the book, while many chapters draw on post-colonial perspectives to interpret how transnational networks and negotiations took place at events and congresses, and through publication.

Soviet Bus Stops

Soviet Bus Stops PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780993191107
Category : Architectural photography
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Photographer Christopher Herwig has covered more than 30,000 km by car, bike, bus and taxi in 13 former Soviet countries discovering and documenting these unexpected treasures of modern art. From the shores of the Black Sea to the endless Kazakh steppe, these bus stops show the range of public art from the Soviet era and give a rare glimpse into the creative minds of the time. These books represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of Soviet bus stop design ever assembled from: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Abkhazia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. With a foreword by writer, critic and television presenter Jonathan Meades. --Volume 1.