ABSTRACT
Although finding the ultimate solution to the housing question was one of the central concerns of Russian Revolution, it was not until the 1950s that the USSR government succeeded in consolidating enough resources to launch a comprehensive mass construction campaign that significantly reduced the housing shortage. This chapter focuses on the history of Novyie Cheriomushki in Moscow, an experimental project conceived to test different systems of prefabrication, small apartment type designs, and the mikroraion urban plan diagram. Bocharnikova shows that what was unique to the Soviet housing was an institutional framework that supported the architects’ research and experimental housing designs, rather than the imposition of a construction technology or a specific political vision. Both as a model and as a theory, Novyie Cheriomushki was the result of sustained collective work carried out at the Academy of Architecture (a state-funded research powerhouse) and SAKB (a municipal lab for experimental design) over the course of at least two decades. By shifting the focus of historical research on the institutional and discursive practices of inventing socialist modern, the author seeks to deprovincialize the institutional knowledge and urban theory of the Soviet Union and offers it as a resource for rethinking the institutional and theoretical frameworks of today’s housing crisis.
