Americanism in Russia : architecture, design, urbanism

The aim of the lecture was to rewrite the history of architecture in contemporary Russia in the light of the persistent Americanism that has accompanied its development. Within this broad phenomenon of cultural transfer characteristic of both modernity and modernization, the most paradoxical relationship is undoubtedly that between Russia and the United States since the end of the ^19th century. Each phase of Russian history, even before the Bolshevik period, has been marked by a specific configuration of Americanism, understood as a set of idealized representations of American politics, techniques, territorial and urban development, architecture and visual culture. The analysis was aimed at a comprehensive presentation of a phenomenon too often limited to the undeniably monumental case of the high-rise buildings erected in Moscow at the end of the Stalinist period. A broad definition of architecture underpins an approach that extends to the related fields of urban planning, landscape, industrial and graphic design, photography and, on occasion, cinema.

Two historical thresholds provide a diachronic framework for theamerikanizm, if we use the Russian term. Following the early writings of Alexander Herzen and his contemporaries, who were passionate about the new republic that had emerged overseas, the first corresponds to the 1877 discovery of industrial America by the chemist Dimitri Mendeleyev and the civil engineer Vladimir Shukhov. The second was the U.S. government's direct presentation of its country's technology and culture at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow's Sokolniki Park, the scene of the famous "kitchen debate" between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon.

In the eight decades that separate these two episodes, the observation of America has never ceased in Russia. Capitalism developed with the help of American companies. Even before 1914, Vladimir Lenin adhered to the methods of scientific organization of work advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, a strategy he recommended for the creation of the planned economy after the October 1917 revolution. Leon Trotsky, for his part, went so far as to assert in 1924 that "Americanized Bolshevism will triumph and crush imperialist Americanism".

From that moment on, each phase of Soviet history was accompanied by a particular configuration of Americanism. Although very few intellectuals or architects visited the United States in person, the flow of information and images was uninterrupted. While writers celebrated Fordism, techniques developed in Detroit were borrowed without permission from their inventors. And each avant-garde group produced its own interpretation of Taylorism.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, as part of the first five-year plans, American firms, including architects, were invited to build factories for all branches of industry, and spetzy - or specialists - were recruited from across the Atlantic to supervise and train the workforce and coordinate major projects such as the dam on the Dnieper. In the next phase, during which the doctrine of "socialist" realism was imposed on literature, art and architecture, theamerikanizm took on different forms. Architects and engineers were finally sent to New York to study the construction of skyscrapers, while urban planners studied American park systems. During the Second World War, the Lend-Lease program shipped military equipment and food to Russia, enhancing the prestige of American techniques, while suburban models deployed from New York to California were considered for post-war reconstruction.

In the early days of the Cold War, double standards were the rule. While Andrei Zhdanov's campaign against "cosmopolitanism" implied the rejection of capitalist skyscrapers, "high-rise buildings" inspired by early ^{twentieth-century} New York edifices were constructed in Moscow. American aircraft and automobile models were copied. During Nikita Khrushchev's term of office, a more dispassionate view of America once again became legitimate, as the First Secretary had unwisely trumpeted that the USSR would soon "overtake" the USA. Architects, journalists and political leaders once again made the trip, bringing back new types of buildings and a wide range of objects for everyday use, the very ones that had been the focus of the 1959 exhibition in Sokolniki.

These different episodes correspond to modes of observation and transfer that constituteamerikanizm in its specificity and diversity. The most fundamental position was undoubtedly that taken by leaders, technicians and many intellectuals, the "New World" that the Soviet Union intended to build had everything to learn from what had historically been the first New World - the United States. As a result,amerikanizm took on the most diverse forms, spreading through both scholarly and popular culture. The popularity of jazz, as revealed by S. Frederick Starr in his 1983 book Red and Hot, is one of the most obvious examples.

In the field of architecture, factory design and, of course, skyscrapers were the focus of Soviet attention. But the ideal of the decentralized city, as formulated by Henry Ford, then embodied in Frank Lloyd Wright's design for Broadacre City, and finally implemented after the war with urban sprawl, also left a strong imprint on Russia. Another remarkable aspect is that observation shifted from city to city, with accounts and accounts focusing first on Chicago and New York, which crystallized Russian attention in the 1920s and 1930s, and then on Los Angeles, discovered before the war, but hardly explored until the 1950s. Each of these cities has been considered in turn, and sometimes fetishistically, as a synecdoche of the United States as a whole.