Resumen de Remembering the future: Traces of tradition in innovative projects of Soviet constructivism

Maxim Romanenko, Taisia S. Paniotova

• This chapter concerns the past (tradition) attitude in constructivism – an avant-garde movement in early twentieth-century culture. In the 1920s, constructivism became the theory and practice of urban planning in Soviet Russia. The enthusiasm of constructivist architects, who pretended to change the old world by art, fully corresponded to the pathos of novelty that engulfed Russian society after the October Revolution. Constructivist projects served to visualize the Communist ideology, mainly promoting a collectivist model of life and forming a new person. The article reveals that the attitude to the past in constructivism was not strictly unambiguous. In the utopian space of an open future that coincided with the new world fighters’ social expectations, one can also see “traces of the past”: the legacy of the utopian classics and the traditional Russian conciliarity (sobornost).