The Absence of Idle Elements

Soviet modernist architecture was born in 1918 after the Bolshevik October revolution. Massive increases in urbanisation led to new approaches to community living. The avant-garde constructivist movement promoted concepts that dictated that structure and function should determine building form. Functionalism and the machine rather than aesthetics were seen as the driving force. However this period came to a swift end in the early 1930’s when Stalin’s demands that architecture promote prosperity and pride required a return to scale, decoration and neo classicism. A stylist volte-face that has been repeated many time across the world over the last century.

David Sterry captured some of those early constructivist structures along with later developments that rejected the constructivist dogma and those that owe their form to those early modernist icons.