Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture
Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture
Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. In Building a new New World, Jean-Louis Cohen traces the concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the nineteenth century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the twentieth century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, when the Cold War induced a strategic competition.
Tracing the many journeys of Russian writers, politicians, and planners through the American territory, foregrounding the constant streams of cultural and technological transfer from the U.S.A. to Russia, and revealing the parallel fascination among Russian and American intellectuals with the ongoing pursuit of land occupation and development within their respective borders, this study of Amerikanizm in the architecture and urban design of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.
Author: Jean-Louis Cohen
Graphic design: Huber/Sterzinger
Published in French as Construire un nouveau Nouveau Monde: L’amerikanizm dans l’architecture russe
Co-published in English with Yale University Press and in French with Éditions de la Villette
Softcover, 544 pages
Related exhibition: Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture
Related publications: Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War, Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893–1960
Audio introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen in English
Audio introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen in French
