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

Da Hyung Jeong
Michael Brinley, History

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’ (monumentalidad, monumental’nost’) 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. The close copies of Mexican designs produced in Soviet Central Asia
are, as will be argued, to be read as contrarian texts betraying a yearning for a critical regionalist
alternative both to Western modernism, dismissed as irreconcilable with socialist culture, and socalled
Soviet modernism, which was really a form of Russian cultural imperialism in disguise.

Special funding for this session is provided by the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and the Program in Latin American Studies.
The Fall 2024 Mellon Forum on the Urban Environment is kindly sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and African Studies, Anthropology, Art & Archaeology, Brazil Lab, Center for Collaborative History, Chadha Global India Center, Effron Center for American Studies, English, French & Italian, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Humanities Council, PIIRS, Program in Latin American Studies, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the School of Architecture.

Mellon Forum events are free and open to the public. Lunch is provided while supplies last.

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

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