Modern architecture and planning in early Soviet Kharkiv | Kultura 2024

Christine E. Crawford, urban architecture historian and Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University, zeroes in on the experimental architecture of early Soviet Kharkiv.

This seminar focuses on the experimental modernist architecture and planning of Kharkiv during the years the city served as the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1919–34). As a new postrevolutionary capital city, Kharkiv had an expanded political role and its population and industry increased precipitously: it proved an excellent site to test socialist space-making and iconography. This seminar will introduce the innovative architecture of early Soviet Kharkiv’s building boom through specific projects that include the new governmental centre (Derzhprom), the main post office, housing, and workers’ clubs. 

Our primary focus will be on New Kharkiv (1930–32), an industrial-residential complex built during the Soviet First Five-Year Plan for industrialisation. The project was composed of a tractor factory and a ground-up residential ‘socialist city’ built on Kharkiv’s outskirts. The residential sector, designed by Ukrainian architects for the tractor factory workers, utilised standardized architectural types to ensure swift construction: housing, educational, social service, and commercial buildings were organised in repeatable urban blocks and constructed across the site. Design innovations developed on the New Kharkiv site were then harnessed by the increasingly centralized Soviet planning regime to quickly construct and colonise far-flung sites across the Eurasian continent, drawing Kharkiv into transnational networks of industry and expertise. Through the New Kharkiv case, the seminar will discuss the benefits of modern architectural iconography, functionalism, and design standardisation, while also questioning the ethics of construction during a time of forced famine.

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