Christina E. Crawford: Soviet Industrial Architecture - lecture at Gallery VI PER

Galerie VI invites you to a lecture by Christina E. Crawford as part of the lecture series History, Theory and Criticism in Architecture.

The lecture will provide historical context for the current destruction of industrial architecture in eastern Ukraine by Russia, focusing on Kharkiv during the period when it served as the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1919–1934). It will examine how, during the 1920s and 1930s – during Stalin's first five-year plan for industrialization – Soviet authorities invested significant resources in capital projects in Kharkiv and the Donbas, a region rich in natural resources like iron ore, coal, and grain. The sudden decision to build a tractor factory on the outskirts of Kharkiv prompted Ukrainian architects to standardize the design not only of the factory but also of its residential sector intensively. New Kharkiv, the so-called socialist city designed by Ukrainian architects for the workers of the tractor factory, utilized standardized housing, social service buildings, and even replicable urban blocks to ensure rapid construction. Innovations in industrial architecture developed with the help of American technical consultants in New Kharkiv were then increasingly utilized by a more centralized Soviet planning regime for the rapid construction of other industrial enterprises in the region and for the colonization of remote areas across the Euro-Asian continent. This lecture acknowledges the success of the method of design standardization as a system while also questioning the ethics of comprehensive planning on a broader scale.

Christina E. Crawford is an architectural and urban history scholar, a trained architect, and an associate professor of art history at Emory University. Her research focuses on socialist space and social housing in a transnational context. She is the author of the book Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (2022), which received the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, and co-editor of the book Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917–1945 (2023). She has served as the president of the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture, a visiting lecturer in urban history at the Kharkiv School of Architecture, a vice-consul at the American consulate in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a Fulbright scholar in Ukraine.

The lecture is organized in collaboration with the Research Center for Industrial Heritage at the Czech Technical University in Prague.