ABSTRACT
Ten years after the 1917 revolution, there were several clearly identifiable theories of a consciously ‘revolutionary’ and ‘socialist’ architecture being practised, taught and debated in the Soviet Union. Some were purely modernist; others sought some synthesis of modernity with classicism. As soon as these various approaches start to be formulated with any rigour and launched into the public domain, we can evaluate them as more or less subtle professional responses to certain dimensions of Bolshevik ideology.1 However, preceding that stage and underpinning it was a process of personal adjustment and collective refocussing whereby a relatively conservative capitalist profession faced up to a new context and started mentally defining its tasks or writing a new narrative for its practice.
