Irina Seits

Södertörn University | sh · School of Culture and Education, Dep. of Aesthetics

During the party after my doctoral thesis defence in December 2018, my then supervisor and now admired friend Sven-Olov Wallenstein took the floor to give the customary speech in honor of his newly minted doctorand. I humbly prepared to hear a few words of praise for both me and my research with (finally!) a glass in my hands. And yet the first (an...

Abstract The modernist concept of life-building as an architectural method for improving the conditions of everyday life originated in Europe during the 1920s. This book explores three modes of functionalism by way of a comparative analysis of both the theoretical discourses and architectural practices associated with functionalism in Russia, Germa...

Walter Benjamin spent the fall and winter of 1926-1927 in Moscow. His experience and observations were recorded in “Moscow Diary” and essay “Moscow” (1927). In the present paper, the author refers to the latter text, in which Benjamin reflected on the space of Soviet capital that was undergoing severe transition. Without even mentioning Avant-garde...

Abstract The article provides a closer reading of Walter Benjamin’s essays Experience and Poverty and Moscow, by juxtaposing the records of his visit to Russia in 1926–1927 with the author’s reflections on the nature of the transformations in the urban space of an early Soviet city. By using the dystopian image of Mickey Mouse as the desired inhabi...

Abstract The Russian Constructivism of the 1920s is traditionally reviewed in opposition to principles of classical architecture. Disharmony and disproportions are its identifying features. But were loud manifestations of Avant-Guard ideologists a real opposition to basics of classical architecture or rejection of stencils of the XIXth century ecle...