PAPER ARCHITECTURE

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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.

“Contemporary Architectural Art Museum” by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

“Doll’s House” by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

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“Glass Tower II” a piece by Paper Architect duo Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin aims to formulate a critique by presenting an alternate universe where a tower is created to project an image to the city of any man that walks into the tower. This commentary calls to question the idea that perhaps the creation of these lifeless towers during the time period in Soviet Russia was a reflection of the human ego (Meier, 2015). The skyscrapers existed only as symbols of power and the only way to make other people feel the intensity of this critique was to create these kinds of exaggerated illustrations. The duo’s other piece, “Columbarium Habitabile” tells the story of a museum created to mourn the death of the communal apartments torn down to build modern high-rise apartment buildings in the city. The title of this etching translates to “Museum of Disappearing Buildings” and shows older buildings being preserved in the same way one would preserve the ashes of a dead loved one. The narrative in this museum is that each of these buildings begs for the attention of the visitors to the museum so much so that if someone overlooks one of them, the massive ball in the middle swings to destroy it. The drawing is nostalgic about a time before modernization where people were perceived to have more individuality and self-expression. Paper Architects were rejecting the elimination of these classical houses because they were a large part of Russian history. The most common type of housing in the Soviet Union before the 1980s was the communal apartment. The group of families that lived in these communal apartments would share a kitchen, bathroom, and telephone room. Although this style of living grew to be unhygienic, inefficient, and cramped, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin associated communal apartments with feelings of nostalgia hence the reason their reactions to modernism were so strong. They began to create buildings that would store their feelings of nostalgia towards past forms of building and clearly illustrate their disdain for modernization. The museum setting was chosen in an attempt to preserve not only architecture but to preserve childhood memories as well (Crowley, 2012).

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Columbarium Habitabile by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

“Glass Tower II” by Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin