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Stalin's Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow by Deyan Sudjic
English | June 14, 2022 | ISBN: 0262046865 | 320 pages | PDF (Converted) | 65 Mb
When Stalin's henchmen crushed the architectural avant-garde, it was Iofan who created the new national style, from the grand projects he realized-including the House on the Embankment, a megastructure of 505 homes for the Soviet elite-to even more ambitious unbuilt projects, in particular the Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist dream whose image was reproduced throughout the Soviet Union. His career took him to New York and Paris, and to the destroyed city of Stalingrad. He was a friend of Frank Lloyd Wright; a rival of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Erich Mendelsohn; and an enemy of Hitler's architect Albert Speer, whose Nazi pavilion faced Iofan's Soviet one at the Paris Expo in 1937. He kept silent when Stalin executed his friends, including Rykov; he also sacrificed his own talent by following the dictator's instructions to the letter in creating the regime's landmarks.