The concept embodying the Constructivists’ vision for completely new kinds of human communities, an architectural device for electrifying people into a communist way of life, is being revisited by scholars on the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Michal Murawski explains how the Social Condenser was applied throughout its history and what makes it relevant in the 21st century.
The idea of the Social Condenser—promoted by Soviet Constructivist architects during the late 1920s—is arguably the most powerful architectural concept produced in the Soviet Union in response to the earth-shattering events of October 1917.
“Having eradicated the fetters of private property ownership, October has opened up new perspectives for Soviet architecture: of grand planning works, of the development of new types of architecture, of new architectural organisms, and of new complexes and ensembles in place of the narrowly individualistic parameters dictated by pre-revolutionary clients.”
—Editorial, Sovremennaia Arkhitektura, 1927
The Social Condenser, then, was the key term coined by the Constructivists to express what the new type of post-Revolutionary architecture would consist of, and what its social function would be.
In its various articulations, the Social Condenser was a proposal for a type of architecture that would serve as a tool for the construction of radical new kinds of human communities: communities of collective residence, work, and public culture, in which the alienation and privation of bourgeois or peasant life would be overcome; and communities of equality and empathy, in which the old hierarchies of class and gender would be designed out of existence.
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This essay is an abridged and updated version of Michał Murawski’s Introductory essay to The Social Condenser: A Century of Revolution Through Architecture, 1917-2017, a special issue of The Journal of Architecture (vol. 22, No. 3), co-edited by Murawski with Jane Rendell, and published in May 2017. An edited fragment of this essay was also published as the “Outrage” column in the October 2017 issue of The Architectural Review.
Michal Murawski: An anthropologist of architecture, whose work focuses on the afterlives of communist architecture and planning. His first book was on the Palace of Culture, a Stalinist skyscraper in Warsaw; and he is currently carrying out research on Moscow during and after the reign of Yuri Luzhkov, with a focus on Zaryadye Park. His PhD is from Cambridge, and he currently teaches at Queen Mary, University of London and the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism in Moscow.