Designing Steel City: All-Union Architectural Competition for the City of Magnitogorsk, 1929-30

• In Event: Modernism in Soviet Architecture of the 1920s-1930s: Experiments and Myth-Making

Abstract

This paper explores the architectural and urban designs that emerged from the All-Union competition for the socialist city adjacent to the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. For the authors of the first Five-Year Plan of the USSR, Magnitogorsk was foremost a concept rather than a physical place, a blank slate waiting to be populated with aspirational ideas. The Union-wide design competition—launched in December 1929 at the height of the socialist urbanism debate—provided the chance for all sides to apply physical form to their ideas.

Author

• Christina Elizabeth Crawford, Emory U