Acknowledgments

Writing requires time, space, archives, and intellectual dialog, and I am immensely thankful to everyone who provided me with that: to those on whose research I relied and by which I was inspired, to librarians and archivists, and to my children’s caregivers. And of course, my deepest gratitude goes to institutions and individuals who generously supported my research with funding, material, work space, and feedback.

This project began as a dissertation at the MIT History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program. I am deeply indebted to my inspirational dissertation advisor, Mark Jarzombek, and the thoughtful dissertation readers, Caroline A. Jones and Danilo Udovički-Selb, as well as to my other teachers, including Erika Naginski, Kristel Smentek, and David Friedman. At MIT, I was lucky to meet a cohort of fellow students, a dialog with whom proved to be equally formative: Tijana Vujošević, Ana Maria Leon, Rebecca Uchill, Nicola Pezolet, Christian Hedrick, Sarah Katz, Shiben Banerji, Ateya Khorakiwala, Jordan Kauffman, Razan Francis, Mohammed Alkhabbaz, Farshid Emami, Azra Dawood, and Yavuz Sezer, among others. The memory of Yavuz, who left us too early, lives in our hearts.

This project has since traveled between institutions and continents, supported by a Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Grant, the Graduate Research Fellowship from the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Getty Research Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, a Dumbarton Oaks Research Library Junior Fellowship, a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, and membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Working with Philip Ursprung and his team at the ETH Zurich provided an invaluable and fruitful experience. I also benefited from the financial and institutional support of my employers, the ETH, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Kassel University. I would like to thank Provost Peter Kilpatrick at IIT, and President Reiner Finkeldey and Dean Uwe Altrock at Kassel University in particular. I am also deeply grateful to my students at the ETH, IIT, and the University of Kassel who became fellow riders on this intellectual journey.

My mentors (in alphabetical order) Edward Dimendberg, Laurent Stalder, and Danilo Udovički-Selb were instrumental in nourishing my thinking and bringing this project to life. This book would not have been possible without the support of and scholarly exchange with many, including (in alphabetical order) Haseeb Ahmed, Maria Ametova, Rahman Azari, Daniel Barber, John Beardsley, Philipp Blom, Anna Bokov, Benedikt Boucsein, Annie Bourneuf, Aaron Butts, Juan José Castellón, Paroma Chatterjee, Peter Christensen, Jean-Louis Cohen, Leah Comeau, Pierluigi D’Acunto, Nasrin Davatgar, Paola De Martin, Maryana Demchenko, Nikolay Erofeev, Martin Frimmer, Ron Henderson, Daniel Hershenzon, Max Hirsh, Gordon Hughes, Dora Imhof, Leslie Johnson, Elisabet Jönsson Steiner, Jennifer Josten, Harald Kegler, Sean Keller, Nikita Kharlamov, Igor Khristoforov, Tim Klauser, Heike Klussmann, Valérie Kobi, Anne Kockelkorn, Katharina Kucher, Vladimir Kulić, Torsten Lange, Jennifer Dorothy Lee, Michael Lee, Ayala Levin, Tatyana Levina, Benjamin Lytal, David Mather, Ákos Moravánszky, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Ginger Nolan, Esen Ogus, Alexander Ortenberg, Michael Osman, Philipp Oswalt, Elena Ovsyannikova, Nancy Perloff, Tobias Pohlmann, Ekaterina Pravilova, Wiebke Reinert, Sophia Rochmes, Michelangelo Sabatino, Sabine Sarwa, Brett Savage, Emily E. Scott, Alexa Sekira, Alexandra Selivanova, Maria Silina, Andrey Smirnov, Kim Soss, Martino Stierli, Adrian Täckman, Misha Tsodyks, Noa Turel, Philip Ursprung, Nikolai Vassiliev, Catherine Wetzel, Mechtild Widrich, Mantha Zarmakoupi, and Nina Zschocke.

I am particularly thankful to the leaders and participants of the Art History and History of Science seminars at the IAS, who provided insightful feedback on chapter drafts: Yve-Alain Bois, Charlotte Denoël, Heidi Gearhart, Marius Hauknes, Clémence Imbert, Frances Jacobus-Parker, Isabelle Marchesin, Anthony Petro, and Laura Weigert; Myles Jackson, Sarah Dry, Rob Iliffe, Deirdre Loughridge, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Marion Thomas, and Glen Van Brummelen. Megan Eardley, Adam Jasper, Serguei Oushakine, and Georgi Parpulov also provided helpful comments on drafts of the chapters. Presenting different parts of this project at conferences, workshops, and as invited lectures at the Getty Research Institute, Dumbarton Oaks, and the IAS helped me strengthen the argument. I sincerely thank Michael Osman, Simon Baier, Kenny Cupers, Eva Ehninger and Julia Bryan-Wilson, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Adam Jasper, Vladimir Kulić, Edward Dimendberg and Steven Jacobs, Lorens Holm and John Hendrix, Dale Allen Gyure, Samia Henni, Anna-Maria Meister, Benedikt Boucsein, and Torsten Lange and Dietrich Erben for the invitations.

This work would have been impossible without the help of archivists and librarians at the Russian State Library, the State A. V. Shchusev Museum of Architecture, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, the Russian State Archive in Samara, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, the Getty Research Institute Library and Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries, among other collections, particularly to Maria Ametova, Irina Finskaya, Anna Stoiko, Larisa I. Ivanova-Veen, and Tatiana Lysova.

My infinite gratitude goes to the University of Minnesota Press, in particular to Pieter Martin for his interest, engagement, and patience, to Deborah Oosterhouse for her careful reading of the text, as well as to Anne Carter and Ana Bichanich for their support. I am deeply indebted to the manuscript’s anonymous readers for their thoughtful and helpful reviews, to Lenore Hietkamp, whose skillful editing improved the manuscript in innumerable ways, and to Douglas Easton, who prepared the index. I would also like to thank Laura Jung, who assisted with obtaining illustrations, and Fee Huschenbeth, who helped with administrative matters.

Last but not least, I am beyond indebted to my family, which had to share the burden of writing. I am infinitely grateful to my mother, Olga Vronskaya, for her unconditional support, to Igor Demchenko for taking on much more child-sitting than he had ever imagined while engaging in discussions about Soviet architecture, and to Stanislav and Vladimir, who arrived with the dissertation and grew with the book, for making this world brighter and livelier. I dedicate this book to the memory of my father, Genrikh Vronsky, who taught me to love history and care for old buildings.