Re-centering Soviet Architectural Innovation: Baku’s Superblock
Architectural and Urban History of the South Caucasus Session, April 15, 2021, 10am CDT
The historiography of Soviet architecture and planning has always favored Russia, and particularly Moscow. But when looking for design innovation in the early Soviet period, it is Baku, the oil-rich capital of the Azerbaijani SSR, that rewards the historian. Baku was the site of the Soviets’ first comprehensive city plan (1927), and two experimental socialist residential neighborhoods. Stepan Razin, a worker settlement close to the oil fields, was a modified English Garden City. When this low-density experiment proved too expensive, the planners developed a large block-based urban scheme to increase the number of units and to “economize on the length of piping, paving, interior sidewalks, street lighting, etc.” required for the municipality to fund and maintain. The distinctly Constructivist Armenikend test block (1925-27) sat on an enlarged territory that accommodated more housing units, integrated social services, shared green space, and reduced vehicular traffic. Armenikend, this talk argues, marks the birth of the socialist residential superblock, a persistent planning model throughout the Soviet period because it took full advantage of socialist land ownership structure and was agnostic about architectural language. Both the Stalinist-era kvartal and the Khrushchev-era mikroraion—installed pervasively throughout Soviet space—owe a debt of precedent to the Armenikend test block. Bringing projects like Armenikend to the fore effects a historiographical re-centering of early Soviet experimental modernism. This re-centering is not only, or even primarily, in service of geographic inclusion; it also allows the architectural historian to study materialization. In an economically central city like Baku, and a built project like Armenikend, on-the-ground issues of funding, supply chains, labor, and eventually reception can be posed.
Armenikend (top) + Azneft’s Surukhany garden-settlement (bottom). Photographer: Leila Mamedbekova, SSSR na stroike, June 1932.