Join author/editor Christina E. Crawford and author/co-editor Claire Zimmerman for a look at the book Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (MIT Press, 2023). They will discuss the book’s exploration of the similarities and differences between the hyper-industrialization that took place in the USSR and the US during three critical decades. Crawford will also discuss her chapter on the memoirs of US architects and engineers who returned from long-term technical exchanges in the USSR in the early 1930s, and Zimmerman will discuss her chapter on the Soviet experiences of Albert Kahn, Associates.
The innovative research presented here explores spatial development, manufacturing, mass production, and organizational planning across geopolitical lines to demonstrate that capitalist- and communist-built environments in the 20th century were not diametrically opposed and were, on certain sites, coproduced in a period of intense technical exchange between the two world wars.
Crawford is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architecture at Emory University and faculty of Emory’s Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program. She is the author of Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Cornell University Press, 2022).
Zimmerman is a member of the Daniels Faculty at the University of Toronto; previously she taught at the Taubman College of Architecture at University of Michigan. She has two books scheduled for 2024 release: Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, and Industry (MIT Press) and Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (co-editor; University of Minnesota Press).
