Architecture of the Off-Modern (FORuM Project Publications) - Softcover

Boym, Svetlana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1568987781 ISBN 13: 9781568987781

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008

Synopsis

Svetlana Boym’s "Architecture of the Off-Modern" is an imaginative tour through the history and afterlife of Vladimir Tatlin's legendary but unbuilt Monument to the Third International of 1920. Generally considered to be the defining expression of architectural constructivism, the structure was envisioned as a towering symbol of modernity and a twisting, turning memorial and media center for the Bolshevik Revolution that would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. Boym traces the vicissitudes of Tatlin’s Tower from its reception in the 1920s to its privileged recall in "the reservoir of unofficial utopian dreams" of the Soviet-era. Boym offers an alternative history of modernism, postulating the "architecture of adventure" as a poetic model for "third route" thinking about technology, history, and aesthetic culture.

About this title

About the Author

Svetlana Boym is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her interests include twentieth-century Russian literature (poetry, essay, autobiographical fiction), film and contemporary art, cultural studies, comparative literature, the literature of exile, literary theory, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, and East European expatriate writing. She is also a media artist and curator. Among the major themes of her work are memory and nostalgia, political and artistic freedom. Her publications include The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), and Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (1991).

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1568987781
• ISBN 13: 9781568987781
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80