Newly published reviews I’ve written for fantastic recent books on architectural histories of Eastern Europe (and beyond—) are now available online. See the links at the end of this post.
I write of Martin Kohlrausch’s interdisciplinary book Brokers of Modernity that Kohlrausch seeks to rectify this geographical asymmetry in architectural scholarship by placing the new, or significantly reshaped, post-1918 nation-states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary at the heart of his narrative. Kohlrausch has a larger goal, however: to investigate modernist architecture’s group formation.
Clayton Strange’s beautifully designed Monotown explores the urban phenomenon of the monotown (monogorod in Russian), a self-contained urban node built ex novo for a solitary industrial enterprise on a remote site, most often by a socialist state with a robust centralized planning apparatus. Strange’s book provides important new case studies in Russia, China, and India that will prove impactful for historians and present-day designers alike.
Crawford, Christina E. Review of Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910-1950 by Martin Kohlrausch. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, September 2020, vol. 79, no. 3: 344-346.
Crawford, Christina E. Review of Monotown: Urban Dreams, Brutal Imperatives by Clayton Strange. Journal of Urban Design, January 2021, vol. 26, no. 1: 133-135.
