Modern Architecture and Planning in Early Soviet Kharkiv | Kultura 2025
Date and time:
Monday 20 October, 2025
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
ONLINE
Dr Christina E. Crawford
📍 Emory University
Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University
Lecture Title:
Modern Architecture and Planning in Early Soviet Kharkiv
Lecture Synopsis:
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 standardised 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 centralised 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, we 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.
Lecturer
Dr Christina E. Crawford
Dr Christina E. Crawford is an architectural and urban historian, a trained architect, Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University, and affiliated faculty at the Kharkiv School of Architecture. Her research focuses on the transnational exchange of ideas about housing and urban form in the twentieth century. Her first book, Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Cornell University Press, 2022), winner of the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, follows the development of socialist urban theory and practice in three seminal industrial sites: Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv. She is co-editor of Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialisation, 1917–1945 (MIT Press, 2023), and is currently writing a book about interwar exchanges of worker housing expertise between the US and Europe using Atlanta, Georgia as a primary node. Crawford received her PhD and MArch from Harvard University, and her BA from Yale University. She was a Fulbright student in Kyiv in 2001–2002, during which she researched the emergence of post-independence Ukrainian architecture.
