META BAUER, Ute; OEN, Karin; TAN, Pelin (eds.)
The Ideal Communist City

A facsimile of a visionary tract of 1960s Soviet urbanism—with additional text.

In 1968, lauded American architect Mary Otis Stevens (born 1928) and her partner, fellow architect Thomas McNulty (1919–84), initiated i Press, the influential imprint that focuses on the social context of architecture. Over the next five years, the duo released five books under the thematic umbrella of “Human Environment” with the publisher George Braziller. The first of this series, The Ideal Communist City (1969) was an English translation of urban concepts advanced by architects and planners from the University of Moscow. The book was first published in a Soviet journal of a communist youth organization in 1960 and was then republished in Italy in 1968. Offering a new way of thinking about mobility, equity and social interaction in neighborhood planning, The Ideal Communist City was a direct response to suburban development and its focus on private spaces for family life: “the new city is a world belonging to all and each” where life is “structured by freely chosen relationships representing the fullest, most well-rounded aspects of each human personality.” [publisher's note]

Texts by Andrei Baburov, Georgi Djumenton, Alexei Gutnov, Zoya Kharitonova, Ilya Lezava, Stanislav Zadovskij. Edited with text by Ute Meta Bauer, Karin Oen, Pelin Tan.

Published by Weiss Publications, 2022
Facsimile & Reprints / Architecture / Urban Studies / Politics