Authors

Discussion

Architectural fantasy was well-represented in the modern and postmodern periods of Russian and Soviet cultural thought. Famous examples of unrealized modernist projects include the 1933-1937 Palace of the Soviets project, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920), and Krutikov’s Flying Cities (1928); more recent research is shedding light on the postmodern fantasies of ‘paper architecture’ in the 1980s (see cf. Avvakumov 2019), and arguably protometamodern sensibilities within the NER Group in the 1970s (see Panteleyeva and Goutnova 2019).

This paper looks at the project SibKul’tKommuna (Siberian Cultural Commune), prepared for a 2019 seminar at the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow by SibGruppa a team of architects and artists from Novosibirsk. Distinct in its vibrant, discordant collisions of colour, form and sign, SibKul’tKommuna oscillates freely between the absurd and the ideal. The text, a parodic semi-manifesto, promotes a ‘compulsion to culture’; intratextually, this is interpreted as forceful compulsion, yet an extratextual reading suggests a general summons to engage with art and creation. The paper explores these themes, along with others which the author considers to ‘feel’ metamodern, in SibGruppa’s project, and links them back to the work of three of the project’s participants in the Novosibirsk paper architecture tusovka between 1982-1994.