Postwar Heuristic Strategies of Exclusion and Inclusion in Moscow Architecture

Abstract

Moscow is a city of a thousand faces, constantly changing over the centuries and its high-rise buildings has been forming the shape of the city for centuries. From the «Third Rome», without stratified urbanization, unlike the Rome it would have liked to emulate at the end of the XIV century, Moscow went through a long period in history in which the innovations and changes made to its urban landscape overlapped the existing structure, erasing the architectural features and, thus, the historical memory. This article focuses on the transformation of Moscow from a Soviet capital to a capitalist mega-city, corroborating the thesis that the «immortalization of memory», through the monumental architecture of the Stalinist era, gave a sense of stability and was meant to be remembered by posterity. After the archetypal Soviet city, which embodied the Soviet Union’s radiant future in the Thirties and Forties of the Twentieth Century, the city was characterized by a new urban appearance, made up of monumental buildings, privilege of apparatchiki (аппара́тчики), who lived in stalinki (сталинки), examples of socialist classicism, characterized by an original layout. Influenced by this Soviet legacy and its nostalgic impulses, Moscow’s contemporary urban governance framework for planning reveals a strong nostalgia for the splendours of the past. The post-Soviet Muscovite experience resembles however more like a hybrid city than a palimpsestic one.

Keywords

• moscow
• post-socialist city
• high-rise buildings
• urban form
• iconic buildings
• urban redevelopment
• urban planning
• skyscrapers
• urban design
• monumentality