PAPER ARCHITECTURE The aesthetics in Afrofuturism were created not with the intention to ever be translated into reality, but instead to expose injustices in society. For that reason, one could draw parallels between Afrofuturism and the Paper Architecture movement. Paper Architecture was a movement that spurred in Soviet Russia in 1984 when a group of Architecture students from the Moscow Architectural Institute began to create imaginative, dystopian works that criticized the dehumanizing nature of Soviet Architecture. Soviet Architecture featured buildings that were cheaply made with not much care allotted to their design. Yuri Avvakumov, Micheal Belov, and Alexander Brodsky are thought to be the originators of the movement (“Yuri Avvakumov”, n.d.). The movement spread through a series of competition entries. International competitions served as a good vehicle to explore the ideas of whimsy in architecture because these competitions existed outside of the strict constraints of Soviet Architecture. Drawings allowed these young architects to create buildings beyond their wildest dreams. The common elements in their work were “precariously drawn scaffolding buildings, classical domes, glass towers” (Piepenbring, 2015). The aesthetic of this movement also borrows from Post-modern imagery. This movement was a blatant form of protest because it showed a direct reaction to being artistically suppressed. In looking at the pieces from the Paper Architecture movement “Contemporary Architectural Art Museum”, “Doll’s House” and “Glass Tower II” the theme of the sublime rings true (Onion, 2015). All of these pieces aim to make a commentary on the existential dread that people at this time seem to be feeling. This dread was fueled by the monotony of modern architecture.
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