Building New Worlds: Social Condenser Across the Ages

Alla Vronskaya is the professor of history and theory of architecture at the University of Kassel. Previously, she had taught at Illinois Institute of Technology and ETH Zürich. Her book Architecture of Life: Soviet Modernism and the Human Sciences (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) explores the intersections between architecture, labor management, and human sciences in interwar Russia. She is currently working on a project that investigates the ways in which the environment was mediated and analyzed in imperial and Soviet architecture. This new research has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) and the Volkswagen Foundation. Vronskaya is also one of the principle investigators of the DFG-funded research training group “Organizing Architectures” and the founder and editor of the website womenbuildingsocialism.org.

How to build a new world? While the meaning of “the new world” in European culture has changed over time, from heavenly Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, to the Americas in the aftermath of their discovery by the Europeans, and finally, to the socialist project of reorganizing society along the principles of social justice, in essence, the responses provided by thinkers and architects remained alike: to build a new world, architects have to a design new humans, and do so, they have to organize their everyday life. Recently, such of a program for reshaping personality by architectural means has been popularized, by Rem Koolhaas and others, as “the social condenser.” Tracing this concept’s history and prehistory, this lecture will examine three case studies, each presenting an attempt rebuilding the world by regulating the environment of the everyday: the earliest surviving Medieval architectural plan, the plan for St. Gall abbey in Switzerland (820-830); Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment project for the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (1822-1826); and Moisei Ginzuburg’s original articulation of the “social condenser” concept in his project for the Soviet Ministry of Finance (Narkomfin) residential complex in Moscow (1928-1930).