Christina Crawford’s richly illustrated Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union provides a fascinating view into the distinctive, experimental, often ad hoc, yet globally connected development of Soviet planning and housing strategies in the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on the serial construction practices in the Soviet Union prior to World War II, Crawford explains why and how global knowledge and international professionals entered and dominated the early-Soviet planning and construction scene. The uniform Soviet housing blocks created using serial construction methods have become symbolic of the late USSR and still remain among the most characteristic visuals of Soviet cityscapes. Crawford shows that, contrary to the usual assumption that these methods arose in the post–World War II decades, the roots of serial construction can be traced to the 1920s.

Of course, the scale of such construction in interwar Soviet Union could not compare to the later midcentury mass...

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