CIAM and the Communist Bloc, 1928

CIAM and the Communist Bloc, 1928–59

Mumford, Eric

Despite a widespread perception of close linkages between CIAM (the International Congresses of Modern Architecture) and Soviet housing and planning, there was in fact very little direct overlap between the two after 1933. Although CIAM concepts of housing and urbanism were closely related to mostly theoretical developments in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, by the time the Soviet ‘Communist Bloc’ came into existence in the late 1940s, CIAM and other examples of Western avant-gardism had long been officially proscribed by the Soviet authorities. In that era of Stalinist ‘Socialist Realism’, various forms of modernised neoclassical planning became the official direction instead. After 1954, when Stalin's death and his successor Nikita Khrushchev's subsequent repudiation of Socialist Realism again made modernism possible in the USSR, Soviet architects began to build in a Western functionalist way, but without any involvement by CIAM architects. With a few exceptions, the same was largely true in Eastern Europe down to the end of the Communist Bloc there in 1989. So the topic is a paradoxical one: social and architectural ideas that were fused together in the 1920s, leading to CIAM's ultimately unsuccessful effort to hold its Fourth Congress in Moscow in 1933, followed different paths thereafter. This article examines these parallel but separate trajectories in more detail.