Architecture of the Off-Modern

topics

Publishers

Architecture

ISBN: 9781568987781
English edition
Princeton Architectural Press
Hardcover, 80 pages
14 x 21,6 cm
colour/black & white
August 2008
€19,00 (excl. VAT)

Architecture of the Off-Modern

Svetlana Boym

Series: FORuM Projects Publication

Svetlana Boym’s Architecture of the Off-Modern is an imaginative tour through the history and afterlife of Vladimir Tatlin’s legendary but unbuilt Monument to the Third International of 1920. Generally considered to be the defining expression of architectural constructivism, the structure was envisioned as a towering symbol of modernity and a twisting, turning memorial and media center for the Bolshevik Revolution that would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. Boym traces the vicissitudes of Tatlin’s tower from its reception in the 1920s to its privileged recall in “the reservoir of unofficial utopian dreams” of the Soviet era. Boym offers an alternative history of modernism, postulating the “architecture of adventure” as a poetic model for “third route” thinking about technology, history and aesthetic culture.