An Eldorado for the Working Class? The import of Constructivism and the Lubetkin Legacy

Abstract

This paper focuses on the work of a particular architect whose work between the 1920s and 1960s traverses of the Cold War divides between 'east' and 'west': Berthold Lubetkin. Beginning as a student at the Soviet institutions of the post-revolutionary period and then practicing in France and Britain as a paradoxically pro-Soviet emigre, Lubetkin introduced avant-garde ideas to apparently sleepy and anti-modernist Britain. Following his career over this long period, this paper tracks the manner in which his work responds to the development of Soviet architecture from Constructivism to Stalinism, in the apparently different economic and political context of post-war Britain, then embarking on an experiment in social democracy. It then discusses the way in which the buildings have been either conserved or not conserved in the context of neoliberalism in Britain, and the ways in which this does – or doesn't – contrast with contemporary Russian practice.