History found to be 'Depressing'

Constructivism, designated 'utopian' by everyone from Zhadanov to the V&A, is generally more famous for not constructing stuff. To find out that this is nonsense is a fairly difficult task, as the surviving buildings tend to be in places that haven't done enormously well out of the last 15 years.



Viz- search google for Serafimov & Kravets' Gosprom complex in Kharkov, a vast Constuctivist fantasia of interlocking blocks and Fritz Lang walkways- begun in 1925, thus predating all the canonical modernist buildings, and recognised by Reyner Banham as along with Gropius' bauhaus, the most significant building of the 20s- and you'll find it mentioned as one of Kharkov's attractions in innumerable 'Russian Brides' websites, pictures of submissive looking Ukranian women lining the jpegs of the concrete construction.