"The History that is Made in the Streets": Architecture and Images of Public Space in Revolutionary Russia

This thesis studies the Soviet remaking of the Russian imperialist city. It presents a revisionist history of Russian revolutionary architecture as well as reconsiders the writing of architectural history between material form and representation, culture and politics. In place of a master narrative, it posits individual objects and narratives related to particular cultural or material products, questioning general problematics on the basis of case studies. The thesis opens up the mechanisms through which architecture took part in the revolution and the shaping of Soviet society in Moscow and St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad, ca. 1905–1932. It posits urban public space as the site where these mechanisms become uniquely visible. Public space was where the revolution and its foundational forces, the strike and demonstration, unfolded, so this thesis asks, what was the role of architecture as a frame for that space and the bodies in it. By doing so it examines the roles architecture has in shaping urban space and the public within it. This thesis positions architecture as a practice thoroughly interlinked with other fields of culture as well as the political and economic base of society. It shows how through material manifestations in actual space and their representation, architecture mediates between these fields and in between them and the public. The arguments of this thesis build on previous scholarship on the study of the urban texts of the two cities and their role in Russian culture, on histories of Soviet architecture, and on close readings of a broad base of visual, textual and material primary evidence. The thesis studies specific aesthetic principles and material practices through which the new architectural visions unfolded, and asks how these principles and practices may have been conceived or rethought, or how they lingered and harked back in their political and cultural milieu and in relation to the socio-economic foundations of society. Thus, it employs a formal analysis of architecture in order to lay bare the layers and relations between the fields of culture and society. The first two chapters focus on the way public space and architecture were perceived through images and texts. They analyse how the representations of space themselves were important in translating the myths of the cities into the revolution as well as opens up their relation to the actual city and its design. They show how the perception and culture of St. Petersburg lingered on in the creation and perception of Socialist Leningrad, and how the aesthetic ideals that arise from the city affected its new revolutionary architecture. An analysis of representations of Moscow shows how its perception of the city as a protean and heterogenous entity was formal prerequisite for montages and other new images of the city. With both cities, the thesis lays out their particular perceptions as an essential context for architecture as well as the revolution. Chapters three and four analyse the ways in which the central public spaces of the city were claimed and reconfigured through monumental practices varying from performances and temporary edifices, to monuments and projects of infrastructure and greenery. They show how the mythical force of the people and its power to demonstrate was articulated in the space of the city (chapter three) and how the myth of the leader entered next to it in the form of monuments to Lenin mediated to the public through pedestals (chapter four). In chapter five it moves from claiming the centre to rebuilding periphery and shows how the entire city became an important vehicle for building and communicating the new social and economic hierarchies of the Soviet state as the reconstruction of their suburbs reoriented the cities to their fringes. Closely analysing specific housing estates and the way their spaces were designed, it shows how their architecture is closely related to the same hierarchies as well as the specific shapes and texts of the two cities as they are laid out in the first two chapters.