Toward a Third Monumentality: The Soviet Reception of Mexican Architectural Modernism

This talk brings into dialogue two contexts that have tended to remain on the fringe of architectural historiography, namely Mexico and the Soviet "peripheries," or the non-Russian republics of the vast communist empire.

After revealing striking analogies and parallelism — at the level of form, technique and undergirding discourse — between the new understandings of "monumentality" that emerged in postwar Mexico on the one hand and in the margins of the late Soviet Union on the other, it will hypothesize a network of knowledge exchange from which the so-called "First World" was deliberately excluded, one that sustained and nurtured an affective material culture expressive of postcolonial sentiments, desires and aspirations.

Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (OWNER)

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