Andres Kurg
Estonian Academy of Arts, Institute of Art History, Faculty Member
- Architecture, Art History, Architectural History, Art Theory, Modern Art, The Everyday (Architecture), and 13 moreDesign History and Theory, Cultural Theory, Soviet Visual Culture, Cultural Studies, Technology & Culture, Urban Culture, Soviet Union (History), Cold War and Culture, Critical and Cultural Theory, History, Culture in the Soviet Union, Russian & Soviet Art, and Pier Vittorio Aureliedit
- My research explores architectural and art practices in the Soviet Union from the late 1960s to 1980s in relation to ... moreMy research explores architectural and art practices in the Soviet Union from the late 1960s to 1980s in relation to technological transformations and changes in everyday life and values. I have co-edited and authored A User's Guide to Tallinn (2002) and Environment, Projects, Concepts: Architects of the Tallinn School 1972-1985 (2008). I have also co-curated Our Metamorphic Futures: Design, Technical Aesthetics and Experimental Architecture in the Soviet Union 1960-1980 at the Vilnius National Gallery of Art and Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design (2011-2012), and Centrifugal Tendencies: Tallinn, Moscow, Novosibirsk at the Museum for Architectural Drawing, Berlin (2017).edit
These Field Notes map the impact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had on research in architectural history. We asked scholars already involved with Eastern Europe and Russia how the conflict has affected their approach to the... more
These Field Notes map the impact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had on research in architectural history. We asked scholars already involved with Eastern Europe and Russia how the conflict has affected their approach to the region and to their work. In five responses to this question, these authors identify the need to dismantle conceptual and geopolitical frameworks that have been inherited from the late Soviet period, critically re-read the historiography of Russian avantgarde and constructivist architecture, and confront the question of postcolonial critique in Eastern Europe from a viewpoint in the Global South. Taken together, these notes from the field offer both immediate reactions from scholars to the terrible war in Ukraine and reflections on possible paths for architectural history writing in the aftermath of this shock.
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This article studies artistic practices that emerged in Tallinn during the early 1970s from discourses and institutions associated with the course of Soviet modernisation and industrialisation: technological aesthetics and design,... more
This article studies artistic practices that emerged in Tallinn during the early 1970s from discourses and institutions associated with the course of Soviet modernisation and industrialisation: technological aesthetics and design, cybernetics and information theory. The article examines the role of graduates from the newly-opened department of industrial art in Tallinn who were also active participants in the artistic life of the period: Ando Keskküla, Sirje Runge and – closely associated with them – the architects Leonhard Lapin and Vilen Künnapu. The article considers how information theories from the 1960s contributed to the transformation of Soviet design discourse and how this was further appropriated by alternative art practices. It also discusses how this exchange with new theories and disciplines led to a redefinition of both the art object and human subjectivity. Finally, the article argues that this perspective enables the practices of these designers and artists to be vie...
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This article looks at discussions of communist urban planning in relation to both the Marxist theory of ideology and communication theory in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, and the ways in which these discussions were continued in the... more
This article looks at discussions of communist urban planning in relation to both the Marxist theory of ideology and communication theory in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, and the ways in which these discussions were continued in the so-called paper architecture of the 1980s. The central keyword in these discussions is the Russian term obshchenie, referring simultaneously to intercommunication, conversation, and communality. Central to investigations of informal life practices in the late Soviet context, obshchenie has been described as a means of creating a distance from the official world, a way to reach distinct interiority and a sense of authenticity that has generally been associated with the domestic and the private sphere. I will juxtapose this anthropological viewpoint of obshchenie with the way this term was used in the 1960s in the works on the future communist city by the NER group in Moscow. Finally, I will bring this trajectory together with discussions through the paper architecture of the 1980s and ask if we could view these works as sites of struggle over the meaning of obshchenie on the eve of Perestroika.
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This special issue brings together five articles focusing on architecture and urban planning in the Soviet Union (and in one case, its export to Afghanistan) from the 1960s to the 1980s, in the period of so-called late socialism.... more
This special issue brings together five articles focusing on architecture and urban planning in the Soviet Union (and in one case, its export to Afghanistan) from the 1960s to the 1980s, in the period of so-called late socialism. Discussing topics that range from cybernetics in town planning, development cooperation in urbanism, to mechanisms of assigning pan-Soviet architectural awards, and the post-industrial models of life represented in the works of the Moscow architecture group NER, it traces the changes in the institutional and discursive structures of the architectural profession during the decades that were politically marked by the shift from Khrushchev’s optimism in rebuilding the communist society to Leonid Brezhnev’s Realpolitik. If this changing political superstructure is not always directly addressed in the papers, it forms a backdrop to many of the discussions in Soviet architecture that in turn allows us to rethink the prevailing assumptions about these years. In contrast to many recent histories of the late or developed socialism that take account of the era primarily through the shifts in values and emotional states in everyday life — cynicism, apathy, withdrawal — this issue turns to the changes in socialist institutions, and in the discourses of science and technology, that left their imprint on architectural and planning practices. In this way, it feeds into a new reading of the late Soviet period as a time of ongoing social experimentation.
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These Field Notes, on the topic of Architecture and the Environment, elucidate how problems raised in the environmental humanities have informed architectural history, and in turn, what architectural history has to contribute to this... more
These Field Notes, on the topic of Architecture and the Environment, elucidate how problems raised in the environmental humanities have informed architectural history, and in turn, what architectural history has to contribute to this emerging field. The short essays explore specific ‘positions’ in the overarching debate, identifying a radical return to critical theory and the embrace of the fundamentally transdisciplinary nature of environmental humanities and architectural history. While the positions advocate for a serious investigation of architects’ texts and ideas on environmental issues, the collection also champions a broader engagement with Anthropocene questions and proposes to adopt the environment as an intellectual perspective from which to look upon the world.
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Book chapter from: Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Carson Chan, David Tasman (ed-s.) Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox?. New Haven: Yale School of Architecture, 2015, pp. 119-129
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Translation of catalogue article in Russian from: Anna Romanova, Galina Metelichenko (Ed-s.), о.с.т.р.о.в.а. Юрия Соболева / The Islands of Yuri Sobolev. Moscow: The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2014.
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Catalogue article from: о.с.т.р.о.в.а. Юрия Соболева, Анна Романова, Галина Метеличенко (ред.), Москва: Музей современного искусства, 2014
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Article from: Tom Avermaete, Anne Massey (ed-s), Hotel Lobbies and Lounges: The Architecture of Professional Hospitality. London: Routledge 2013, pp.178-185
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This article discusses the Soviet-Estonian home decoration magazine Kunst ja Kodu (Art and Home). It focuses on the transformation of the magazine’s content in the 1970s, under the direction of a newly appointed editor, who had a... more
This article discusses the Soviet-Estonian home decoration magazine Kunst ja Kodu (Art and Home). It focuses on the transformation of the magazine’s content in the 1970s, under the direction of a newly appointed editor, who had a background in art and design professions and used the magazine as a platform for communicating alternative accounts of the environment and for presenting new ideas for a changed practice of art. The home during the late-Soviet period has often been characterized retrospectively as having been a self-enclosed, private sanctuary from repressive state institutions. However, in the context of Soviet domestic life, what emerged from the pages of Kunst ja Kodu was the home as a ground for critical dialogue with the outside—a space where the border between private and public was permeated by, among other things, consumer items, popular culture, and information networks. I argue that the processes that transformed the home and enabled the permeation of its bordersin the 1960s also continued in the 1970s, albeit in another form. Following the period of the Thaw, in which rational values and positivist argument represented a prevailing culture of expertise, there was a shift towards individuality in the home and criticism of the prevailing hierarchical relationship between high-art and mass culture.
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This article looks at Jüri Okas’s works on the environment, particularly his series Reconstructions (1974–1978) and the exhibition of that series in Tallinn Art Hall in 1976. Okas’s position is considered first by comparison with Leonhard... more
This article looks at Jüri Okas’s works on the environment, particularly his series Reconstructions (1974–1978) and the exhibition of that series in Tallinn Art Hall in 1976. Okas’s position is considered first by comparison with Leonhard Lapin’s work on the urban environment. Next, I consider discussions concerning the signification of the city and show that instead of a fixed relationship between places and their meanings, Okas presents the viewer with unstable relationships, deconstructing the urban signifieds. I argue that the reception of Okas’s images during the 1980s was influenced by their having been read formally, and find that the references of the images were incompatible with the prevailing forms and symbols which were at that time involved in efforts to construct a coherent national identity. Replacing the referential reading with a formal one allowed to insert the works into the discourse of withdrawal and resistance. I then interpret Okas’s perception of the environment via notions of entropy and noise – concepts applied in information theory, popular throughout the decade. In contrast to the idea of escape, which is often thought to characterise the works of so-called ‘unofficial’ or ‘non-conformist’ artists, Okas’s interest in the entropic or noisy environment presents a paradigmatic shift in which noise prompted recognition of a different kind of complexity including now that what had previously been cast out and excluded.
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This article studies artistic practices that emerged in Tallinn during the early 1970s from discourses and institutions associated with the course of Soviet modernisation and industrialisation: technological aesthetics and design,... more
This article studies artistic practices that emerged in Tallinn during the early 1970s from discourses and institutions associated with the course of Soviet modernisation and industrialisation: technological aesthetics and design, cybernetics and information theory. The article examines the role of graduates from the newly-opened department of industrial art in Tallinn who were also active participants in the artistic life of the period: Ando Keskküla, Sirje Runge and – closely associated with them – the architects Leonhard Lapin and Vilen Künnapu. The article considers how information theories from the 1960s contributed to the transformation of Soviet design discourse and how this was further appropriated by alternative art practices. It also discusses how this exchange with new theories and disciplines led to a redefinition of both the art object and human subjectivity. Finally, the article argues that this perspective enables the practices of these designers and artists to be viewed in the context of global processes associated with the demise of the disciplinary regime.
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In May, 1978, the laconically entitled 'Architectural Exhibition 78', displaying the work of 14 architects/artists/designers, opened in the foyer of the Academy of Sciences library in Tallinn. Although officially the space... more
In May, 1978, the laconically entitled 'Architectural Exhibition 78', displaying the work of 14 architects/artists/designers, opened in the foyer of the Academy of Sciences library in Tallinn. Although officially the space for the exhibition was organised by the Youth Section ...
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This article discusses the home interior of two Estonian artists, that of Mare and Tõnis Vint, viewing it on the background of discourses that associate Soviet unofficial art with the allegedly autonomous private sphere. The Vints’ home,... more
This article discusses the home interior of two Estonian artists, that of Mare and Tõnis Vint, viewing it on the background of discourses that associate Soviet unofficial art with the allegedly autonomous private sphere. The Vints’ home, located in a 1960s prefabricated housing area in Tallinn, became from the late 1960s a well-known gathering place for Tallinn’s artists and intellectuals, an alternative site for the exchange of information and discussion of artworks. The apartment’s interior decoration reflected the Vints’ interest in Aestheticism and Art Nouveau and was supposed to embody an idea of art and life belonging together, forming a total work of art. The article discusses the fascination with Art Nouveau and interest in nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk as a projection of issues relating to Soviet Estonia during the second half of the twentieth century. It further examines the ways the autonomous artistic sphere was permeated by public interests and values as well as how interiors were tied to a wider environment, including now also communication systems and channels of mass media.
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Built in 1980, the Linnahall Concert Hall in Tallinn, Estonia, is a fairly recent but nonetheless controversial Soviet monument. Having been highly praised on its completion for its bold architectural solution, within a decade its close... more
Built in 1980, the Linnahall Concert Hall in Tallinn, Estonia, is a fairly recent but nonetheless controversial Soviet monument. Having been highly praised on its completion for its bold architectural solution, within a decade its close associations with the previous regime meant that it had fallen into disrepute. Developers, who realised the economic potential of the site, were quick to seize on its controversial history and called for its destruction. Andres Kurg looks at the changing role of the Linnahall in Tallinn over time and asks what the future might now hold for it. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Without the predominance of a single presiding tradition of modern architecture in Estonia, the way has been clear for a younger generation of architects to make their mark. Andres Kurg describes the work of 3+1 architects, who launched... more
Without the predominance of a single presiding tradition of modern architecture in Estonia, the way has been clear for a younger generation of architects to make their mark. Andres Kurg describes the work of 3+1 architects, who launched their career in the mid-1990s with an Estonian Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania. Through their trend-setting domestic work, they have proved able to appeal to a new wealthy client base, while also developing their own interests in programme and architecture's relationship to the physical landscape. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Interview with Raul Meel
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These Field Notes, on the topic of Architecture and the Environment, elucidate how problems raised in the environmental humanities have informed architectural history, and in turn, what architectural history has to contribute to this... more
These Field Notes, on the topic of Architecture and the Environment, elucidate how problems raised in the environmental humanities have informed architectural history, and in turn, what architectural history has to contribute to this emerging field. The short essays explore specific ‘positions’ in the overarching debate, identifying a radical return to critical theory and the embrace of the fundamentally transdisciplinary nature of environmental humanities and architectural history. While the positions advocate for a serious investigation of architects’ texts and ideas on environmental issues, the collection also champions a broader engagement with Anthropocene questions and proposes to adopt the environment as an intellectual perspective from which to look upon the world.
Research Interests:
If postmodernism is indeed “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” why did typical postmodernist themes like ornament, color, history and identity find their application in the architecture of the communist-socialist Second World? How do... more
If postmodernism is indeed “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” why did typical postmodernist themes like ornament, color, history and identity find their application in the architecture of the communist-socialist Second World? How do we explain the retreat into paper architecture and theoretical discussion in societies still nominally devoted to socialist modernisation?
Exploring the intersection of two areas of growing scholarly interest-postmodernism and the architecture of the socialist and former-communist world-this edited collection stakes out new ground as the first work to chart the various transformations of second world architecture in the 1970s and 80s. Thirteen essays together explore the question of whether or not architectural postmodernism had a specific second world variant.
The collection ultimately aims to demonstrate both the unique nature of second world architectural phenomena, and also to assess connections with western postmodernism. The work comprises thirteen truly diverse case studies, covering not only the vast geographical scope of the former socialist world, but also a wealth of aesthetic, discursive and practical phenomena, interpreting architecture in the broader socio-political context of the last decades of the Cold War. The result should provide a greatly expanded map of recent architectural history, which redefines postmodernist architecture in a more theoretically comprehensive and global way.
Table of Contents
Introduction, Vladimir Kulic
Part I: Discourses
Chapter 1. The Retro Problem: Modernism and Postmodernism in the USSR, Richard Anderson
Chapter 2. Humanization of Living Environment and the Late Socialist Theory of Architecture, Maroš Krivý
Chapter 3. The Discontents of Socialist Modernity and the Return of the Ornament: The Tulip Debate and the Rise of Organic Architecture in Postwar Hungary, Virág Molnár
Chapter 4. An Architect's Library: Printed Matter and PO-MO Ideas in 1980s Belgrade, Ljiljana Blagojevic
Part II: Practices
Chapter 5. Bogdan Bogdanovic's Surrealist Postmodernism, Vladimir Kulic
Chapter 6. One Size Fits All: Appropriating Postmodernism in the Architecture of Late Socialist Poland, Lidia Klein and Alicja Gzowska
Chapter 7. Werewolves on Cattle Street: Estonian Collective Farms and Postmodern Architecture, Andres Kurg
Chapter 8. Incomplete Postmodernism: The Rise and Fall of Utopia in Cuba, Fredo Rivera
Chapter 9. Anti-Architectures of Self-Incurred Immaturity, Alla Vronskaya
Part III: Exchanges
Chapter 10. Cultural Feedback Loops of Late Socialism: Appropriation and Transformation of Postmodern tropes for Uran and Crystal in Ceská Lípa, Ana Miljacki
Chapter 11. Mobilities of Architecture in the Late Cold War: From Socialist Poland to Kuwait, and Back, Lukasz Stanek
Chapter 12.East-East Architectural Transfers and the Afterlife of Socialist Postmodernism in Japan, Max Hirsh
Chapter 13. Defining Reform: Postmodern Architecture in Post-Mao China, 1980-1989, Cole Roskam
Postscript
A Postmodernist International? Reinhold Martin
Exploring the intersection of two areas of growing scholarly interest-postmodernism and the architecture of the socialist and former-communist world-this edited collection stakes out new ground as the first work to chart the various transformations of second world architecture in the 1970s and 80s. Thirteen essays together explore the question of whether or not architectural postmodernism had a specific second world variant.
The collection ultimately aims to demonstrate both the unique nature of second world architectural phenomena, and also to assess connections with western postmodernism. The work comprises thirteen truly diverse case studies, covering not only the vast geographical scope of the former socialist world, but also a wealth of aesthetic, discursive and practical phenomena, interpreting architecture in the broader socio-political context of the last decades of the Cold War. The result should provide a greatly expanded map of recent architectural history, which redefines postmodernist architecture in a more theoretically comprehensive and global way.
Table of Contents
Introduction, Vladimir Kulic
Part I: Discourses
Chapter 1. The Retro Problem: Modernism and Postmodernism in the USSR, Richard Anderson
Chapter 2. Humanization of Living Environment and the Late Socialist Theory of Architecture, Maroš Krivý
Chapter 3. The Discontents of Socialist Modernity and the Return of the Ornament: The Tulip Debate and the Rise of Organic Architecture in Postwar Hungary, Virág Molnár
Chapter 4. An Architect's Library: Printed Matter and PO-MO Ideas in 1980s Belgrade, Ljiljana Blagojevic
Part II: Practices
Chapter 5. Bogdan Bogdanovic's Surrealist Postmodernism, Vladimir Kulic
Chapter 6. One Size Fits All: Appropriating Postmodernism in the Architecture of Late Socialist Poland, Lidia Klein and Alicja Gzowska
Chapter 7. Werewolves on Cattle Street: Estonian Collective Farms and Postmodern Architecture, Andres Kurg
Chapter 8. Incomplete Postmodernism: The Rise and Fall of Utopia in Cuba, Fredo Rivera
Chapter 9. Anti-Architectures of Self-Incurred Immaturity, Alla Vronskaya
Part III: Exchanges
Chapter 10. Cultural Feedback Loops of Late Socialism: Appropriation and Transformation of Postmodern tropes for Uran and Crystal in Ceská Lípa, Ana Miljacki
Chapter 11. Mobilities of Architecture in the Late Cold War: From Socialist Poland to Kuwait, and Back, Lukasz Stanek
Chapter 12.East-East Architectural Transfers and the Afterlife of Socialist Postmodernism in Japan, Max Hirsh
Chapter 13. Defining Reform: Postmodern Architecture in Post-Mao China, 1980-1989, Cole Roskam
Postscript
A Postmodernist International? Reinhold Martin
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Forecast and Fantasy stages a meeting point for scientific predictions and futuristic fantasies that were manifested in architecture and art from the 1960s to the 1980s. The works gathered here emerged from the new technological reality... more
Forecast and Fantasy stages a meeting point for scientific predictions and futuristic fantasies that were manifested in architecture and art from the 1960s to the 1980s. The works gathered here emerged from the new technological reality that followed the Second World War, and took it along unexpected paths: foreseeing the replacement of work with games and collective pleasures in computerised societies, turning away from the overarching machine logic and replacing it with myths and romantic ideas of the human being, or looking for traces of other civilizations from space, instead of conquering it. Focusing on Eastern European conceptual architecture and drawing it together with selected parallels from the West, the book presents a new reading of the 'postmodern turn'. It also recontextualises phenomena such as 'paper architecture', constructivist aesthetics and geometric abstractionism.