Alexander Brodsky

"Historically, architecture in Soviet Union has served as a useful art - not just in the sense of providing shelter and work space but as a visual form of propaganda. In 1957 Khrushchev declared Socialist Realist architecture the over-decorated style and abolished the Academy of Architecture. The doctrine was of unadorned utilitarism. Modern technology, especially prefabrication, was exploited to produce the urgently needed mass housing, and aesthetic discourse of any kind was considered unnecessary and immoral.
This scenario confronted Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin and their classmates at the Moscow Institute of Architecture in the mid-seventies. At the time of their graduation international competitions sponsored by foreign magazines and corporations provided a creative outlet for those who decided to carry on n architecture. Competitions tended to be theoretical rather than practical and proved particularly appealing to young designers chained to the quotidian tedium of official architectural practice. As Brodsky and Utkin and a dozen or so other friends began to produce such projects in evenings and weekends over the next few years, the group assumed the title of paper architects. They were creating visionary schemes in response to a bleak professional scene in which only artless and ill-conceived buildings, diluted through numerous burocratic strata and constructed out of poor materials by unskilled laborers, were being erected - if anything. As such their work constitutes a graphic form of architectural criticism, an escape into the realm of imagination that ended as a visual commentary on what was wrong with social and physical reality and how its ills might be remedied" (Extracts from: Man in the Metropolis: The Graphic Projections of Brodsky & Utkin by Lois Nesbitt, 1991).