– Soviet Organisation of Contemporary Architects Resolution, 1928

In the centenary year of the Russian revolution, this panel discussion is devoted to the idea of the "social condenser" – the most powerful architectural and urban concept produced in response to the earth-shattering events of 1917. Panel members – contributors to a special issue of The Journal of Architecture launching in autumn 2017, edited by Jane Rendell and Michal Murawski – will discuss the significance of the social condenser, and its many permutations and afterlives in architectural theory and practice, not only in the post-October Soviet Union, but also in the Stalin-era Eastern Bloc, in the Paris of 1968, in Rem Koolhaas' late-capitalist New York and in Putin-era Moscow.

This panel discussion will approach the social condenser as a concept born of the Russian Revolution and Soviet avant-garde, un-anchored from the domain of Soviet modernism's 'innocent' years. By subjecting this electrifying idea to a systematic, wide-ranging re-examination, we'll re-charge the social condenser as a vector for radical architectural and urban thought and practice in the 21st century.

Their presentations will be followed by short responses from two outside critics: philosopher Nina Power and curator Eszter Steierhoffer.

Roundtable members:

Victor Buchli is Professor of Material Culture in the Material Culture Group within the Department of Anthropology at University College London (UCL). Victor works on architecture, domesticity, the archaeology of the recent past, critical understandings of materiality and new materials and new technologies. His latest book An Archaeology of the Immaterial (Routledge 2015) examines questions surrounding immateriality particularly the significance of material cultures that paradoxically attempt to deny their own physicality. In addition, his An Anthropology of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2013) examines the materiality of built forms from an anthropological perspective. His previous books include An Archaeology of Socialism (Berg 1999) - an ethno-historical study of the Narkomfin constructivist housing block in Moscow.

Owen Hatherley is the author of four books on British architecture, politics and pop culture as well as Across the Plaza, an e-book on public squares in post-communist Europe. He wrote his PhD thesis on Americanism in the Weimar Republic and the USSR. He lives in Woolwich.

Jane Rendell (BA, DipArch, MSc, PhD) is an academic and writer. She trained and practiced as an architectural designer, before studying for her MSc and PhD in feminist architectural history. Her interdisciplinary work, through which she has developed concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’, crosses architecture, art, feminism, history and psychoanalysis. Her books include Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure(2002), and co-edited collections like Pattern (2007), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995). Her new book The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: Spaces of Transition has just been published in 2017. She is Professor of Architecture and Art at the Bartlett, UCL.

Respondents:

Nina Power is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The University of Roehampton and Tutor on the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme at The Royal College of Art. She has a wide range of interests, including philosophy, film, art, feminism and politics. She is the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0, 2009) and Das kollektive politische Subjekt – Aufsätze zur kritischen Philosophie (Laika, 2015), a collection of her philosophical writings (translated into German). She is currently working on two book-length projects — one on the topic of work and the other on the history of the collective political subject. She is also working on a number of more experimental collaborations with artists and writers.

Eszter Steierhoffer is Curator at the Design Museum in London. Previously she worked as Curator of Contemporary Architecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. She holds PhD from the Royal College of Art in Critical and Historical Studies, her research interest includes the history of modern and contemporary exhibitions of architecture. She has organised a number of exhibitions and symposia with architectural foci, including Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda, Revolution (2017); Corner, Block, Neighbourhood, Cities. Álvaro Siza in Berlin and The Hague (2015); Zoo-topia. On zoo architecture as taxonomies of national representation (2012); and Anatomy of a Street (2010).

Organised in partnership with the European University at St Petersburg.

Booking terms & conditions

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Image: Alexander Deyneka, "Prevratim Moskvu v obraztsoviy sotsialisticheskiy gorod proletarskogo gosudartva" (Transform Moscow into an exemplary socialist city of the prolaterian state). IZOGIZ, 1931.