Constructive Criticism
A curious question that has come up while planning my first book (touch wood), is whether or not one can, or should, devote a large section to the architecture of a country one hasn't actually visited. So as well as a heartfelt plea to all universities with spare money in the former Soviet Union, this is a round up of a couple of recently discovered substitutes. First, a video of the astonishing Gosprom complex in Kharkov from the local news, which apparently also had underneath it the remains of Woolly Mammoths. It is also the subject of the extremely peculiar postcard above. Further, there's the question of whether or not google translator is enough...although it helps with stuff like this page on the 'factory kitchen', one of the most admirable and authentically utopian Constructivist ideas: as pointed out in Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, a communal kitchen is part of any utopia worth bothering with.
posted by owen hatherley at 8:56 pm
3 Comments:
Perhaps you could find a conference in Moscow say then try the British Academy or other funding bodies?
I hear from a friend John, who went out a couple of years ago, that there is a thriving left cultural scene.
Yeah, I keep vaguely searching in that direction, and could probably get it funded by Birkbeck easily enough...I know from sitemeter though that I have a few Russian readers, so hence targeted pleading. I've put myself on the list for a trip organised by this lot to investigate a few avant-garde ruins, but that's not for a while.
I haven't come across anything left cultural that is Moscow-based, but this in Leningrad is rather encouraging.
Surely, if classical scholars can write about Greek plays that exist only in the twisted fragments of obscure church fathers, you can write about architecture you have experienced through pictures - Joseph Cornell, after all, experienced modern art mainly through illustrations in magazines, and it didn't do him any harm.
More pressingly, should you slyly describe a building or two that doesn't exist at all - Tatlin's tomb of Plekhanov, for example? Mixing in your book examples of the architecture that could have been could apply the old modernist shock method to the reader's expectations.
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