ABSTRACT
The Palace of the Soviets, in the majority of Western accounts, has been poised and accepted to be the complete opposite of our previous example. My intention is to show how the two may be more similar than they initially appear. Similar to the case of the Tower from the beginning, 1 we find a multitude of many likely narratives for what turned out to be one of the most famous Soviet architectural competitions of all times. However, it is important to stress that this is not an attempt to find the single most plausible narrative but to evaluate how the category of the unbuildable operates in this particular example. I will include many possibilities, the presence of the Palace through paintings, models, and other imagery, the reception by its audiences, and the reactions by the international modern architects, together with the 1934 variant formally resembling Tatlin's. Although the Tower tends to be perceived as a ‘utopian’ but ultimately a positive and even poetic structure, to which many eagerly return, the Palace is often ridiculed or simply forgotten. 2 The underlying question here will be whether the two unbuildables, the Tower and the Palace, are really as different as they initially seem. Previously, the notion of the ‘cloud’ permeates disparate accounts, including, of course, an only apparently absurd suggestion that the Palace may actually have been built after all.
