Screening Soviet Standards: Estonian Collective Farms and Postmodern Architecture

Join us for a lunch lecture by Dr. Andres Kurg, Senior Researcher, Institute of Art History, Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Presented by The Center for the Study for Europe, Department of History of Art and Architecture, and Prof. Sophie Hochhäusl, Boston University. Co-moderated by Ewa Matyczyk, PhD Candidate, History of Art and Architecture and PJ Carlino, PhD Candidate, American and New England Studies.

Krug's talk will focus on Soviet Estonian rural co-operative farms – kolkhozy and sovkhozy – that maintained their economic efficiency in these years and reused their profits to build large-scale culture houses, office buildings, kindergartens, schools and recreational sanatoria on the seaside resorts. New architecture, often in dialogue with the emerging postmodernism in the West, became for these collectives an important means for self-representation and differentiation; some kolkhozy even opened their own design offices, providing work places for radical young architects.

Andres Kurg is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Art History, Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. His research explores the architecture and design of the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to technological transformations and changes in everyday life as well as its intersections with alternative art practices.