What connects modern architecture and design with the varied fields of literature, statistics, theatre and space travel?

Tijana Vujoševic explores these questions through a study of the most radical and comprehensive of modernist projects: the invention of communist culture in the aftermath of the October Revolution. During this period, creative people from all disciplines shared a great zeal for inventing the Soviet citizen – the New Man – as well as for designing and narrating the places in which he or she might live. Drawing unique connections between official culture and its 'personalised' versions – utopia and reality, the will for progress and for tyranny – Vujoševic investigates architecture as a vehicle for creating Soviet identity. In so doing, she traces the evolution of Soviet culture from a productivist model, according to which citizens are imagined as workers, to a representational one, where they are connoisseurs of socialism as a total work of art. This evolution provides key insights into the ethical dimension of architecture as a nexus between politics and aesthetics, and as a practice that defines modern culture in a fundamental way.