BUILDING A REVOLUTION

Our trip to Russia was an amazing reminder that historically architects still believed that they could use architecture to change society. Part of why they failed was the extent to which they enforced an imposing ideology on the residents. Communal housing tried to fight capitalism with the architecture of the rooms. The size of the rooms was meant to discourage people from bourgeois consumerism. The worker's clubs were intended to spur political discussion. It was an architecture that was intended to create a certain dialogue that could potentially lead to a revolution. Our study of Russian social experiments such as the socialist city Sotsgorod take these social changes to the urban scale. They were trying to develop cities that were completely based on the needs of the worker in effort to celebrate their efforts. The whole city was dependent on their job and specific industry. It was intended to create a live-work dynamic that was ideal for the workers.

It's interesting because it reminds me of something Lucas pointed out in our summer semester. He said that the reason public housing stands out so much in New York is because of the homogeneity. It is heterogeneity that allows blending. It is this reason that I think is part of the reason why projects like this failed. They were too uni-focused. It is also something that I notice in society today. Our jobs have become more and more specialized, and we have lost any semblance of being self-sufficient. I believe it is this self-sufficiency that was was cities and towns were initially built upon. They are built on that exchange between different specializations, and with the advent of the internet, that is what has driven globalization. It is this need for industrial and vocational diversity that was missing from the social experiments of Sotsgorod.