Soviet fascination with Ford is just one chapter among many in the prolonged saga of Americanism, the now-rickety byword for the ardent reception American developments in manufacturing and culture have met with around the world, perhaps nowhere more so than in the USSR. The formidable architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen has assembled an ambitious, consistently insightful—if overly tidy—exhibition on the theme at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, where it runs through April 5. Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture brims with material, spanning the disciplines of film, literature, planning, and, naturally, building, all putatively attesting to an analogical relationship between the two countries. In the show’s unfolding, however, analogy congeals into reality, whether in the hundreds of factories that the mercenary Detroit engineer Albert Kahn designed for Soviet Russia in the 1930s, or in the belligerently inventive skyscrapers erected in Moscow under High Stalinism. But just as quickly, the real, too, sheds its bulk, evaporating back into the ether and resurfacing as images in the televisual waves of the 1959 American National Exhibition, glimpsed in one of the concluding displays.

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