Mystiques of Socialist Architecture

Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Pier Vittorio Aureli

An established history of soviet architecture appears to have risen in the West, mostly focused on the short period of its first two decades. The bulk of soviet architectural production after the 1930s seems to be necessarily understood always in contrast to this avant-garde, giving birth to a rich series of mystiques surrounding soviet architecture as a whole. This new PhD project aims to address these mystiques at a historiographical level. While keeping close attention to historical data regarding the architectural production of the Soviet Union and other states closely related to it, the purpose of this work is to critically reframe the wealth of historiographical material available today on the subject, focusing on the disparity between the accounts that deal with the early avant-garde and those that deal with the currents that superseded it.

Ricardo Ruivo is an architect and a PhD candidate at the AA Graduate School of Architecture. He finished his diploma in architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto in 2009, and has been a practising architect, as well as a researcher and teacher, since then. He was a researcher at the Research Centre of the Faculty of Architecture (CEFA), as well as assistant in the unit of Urbanistics II of the Degree in Architecture of FAUP, between 2009 and 2010. He has practiced architecture in Portugal since 2010, and finished Master studies in Architectural History at FAUP in 2011. He has been since 2014 teaching assistant for History and Theory Studies II in the AA Undergraduate School of Architecture.