Thinking about the historical architectural and technical exchanges between the United States and Russia might not seem like an important topic at the moment, suggesting as it does espionage, nuclear war, and disinformation campaigns. Yet both of these books offer much about the importance of design in a relationship that was once far from one-sided.
Jean-Louis Cohen’s Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture is the latest academic book from the eminent New York– and Paris-based French historian of modern architecture and urbanism. Cohen offers a concise account of how Russian “Amerikanizm,” the perception that emerged there in the 19th century that the United States was an industrial civilization from which much could be learned, shaped a variety of Russian architectural and urbanistic efforts down to the 1970s. It is the companion volume to an exhibition that Cohen, who is fluent in Russian, organized at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. It is also the third volume of Cohen’s rich archival documentation of the development of global modernity in the built environment, which began with his Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893–1960 (1995) and continued with his probing Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (2011).
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