ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with temporary Soviet architecture—exposition pavilions and set design for films during the interwar period. It shows the lens of the concept of life-building, which can be traced to Russian writers and philosophers of the nineteenth century. The chief designer of the Sochi Olympics, Russian-American architect and stage designer George Tsypin was invited to create an amusement park on a vacant part of VDNKh. The idea acquired strong religious connotations in the Russian Symbolism of the late nineteenth century. The milk farm was supposed to continue producing milk after filming was over, bringing the peasant Russian agriculture into the industrialized 20th century. Paradoxically, futuristic elements of the Westinghouse pavilion's interior look suspiciously close to abstract shapes of the movie's bad guy, the Russian art teacher. In the Soviet Russia, the idea, to some degree, went back to its nineteenth century Positivism and was understood as creating a new society and a new human being.
