[Seminar - Cities are back in town] How to understand the Soviet build environment: experiments, methods, tools

SEMINAR CITIES

Sciences Po, Salle du Conseil, 13 rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris Compulsory Registration

Interpretations of socialist heritage are often quite one-sided or limited. Critical analysis of such heritage requires an extension of methods, knowledge, and fields. During the seminar, Ievgeniia Gubkina will share her experience and interdisciplinary approach that she uses in her scientific and activist work within various architectural, art and educational projects. It allows her to reveal other layers of social, political and historical through architecture and built environment. The focus will be on the methods and optics that she refer to.

The screening of "You See, Time Becomes Space Here" short documentary will be held within the seminar. This documentary was filmed before the start of a full-scale war in Ukraine within the multimedia project Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Architecture. This artwork is the result of a collaboration between director Tetjana Kononenko and architectural historian Ievgeniia Gubkina. It aims at reflecting the phenomenon of power in an urban environment through personal experience and microhistory. Filming took place on Freedom Square in Kharkiv, a large-scale modernist urban planning project of the interwar period in the then capital of Soviet Ukraine, the main masterpiece of which is the Derzhprom (House of State Industry) – the first Soviet skyscraper built in 1925–1928.

Speaker

Ievgeniia Gubkina is an architect, architectural historian, and curator of architectural and art projects. She is a co-founder of the NGO Urban Forms Center. Her work specialises in architecture and urban planning of the 20th century in Ukraine, and a multidisciplinary approach to heritage studies. She has published the books Slavutych: Architectural Guide (DOM Publishers, 2015) and Soviet Modernism. Brutalism. Post-Modernism. Buildings and Structures in Ukraine 1955–1991 (Osnovy Publishing and DOM Publishers, 2019) and curated the multimedia online project Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Architecture (2020-2021).

Collective discussion 

Compulsory Registration

For more information: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr