Yuri Avvakumov is an architect, artist, and curator and one of the pioneers of conceptual design that developed in the USSR in the 1980s. In 1984, he coined the term “paper architecture,” meaning the creation of architectural fantasies on paper, or projects that were difficult to realize for technical, financial or ideological reasons. The works were characterized by a synthesis of text, theatricality, and postmodernist reflection.
In 1986, Avvakumov began the series Temporary Monuments, which reinterpreted the legacy of Constructivism and the avant‑garde. The heroes of his interpretations are Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Vera Mukhina, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pavel Grokhovsky, and Kazimir Malevich. Projects include Red Tower, Polar Axis (Axis of Ascent), Tribune for a Leninist, Fire Escape Monument, Red Galley, Flying Proletarian, and others. To create ambivalence, Avvakumov uses Communist red for the drawings and chooses a fragile Soviet newspaper sheet (Pravda, Moskovsky komsomolets, Sovetskaya Rossiya, etc.) as a base, thus emphasizing the contrast between form and content. Some projects were also realised as models of unrealised buildings.
Avvakumov considers the main work in the series to be the project with the general title Worker and Collective Farm Woman International, to which the sheet Worker + Farmer (1990–1993) belongs. It is a fusion of two grandiose Soviet projects, Vladimir Tatlin's unrealized “Tower” (Monument to the Third International) and Vera Mukhina's monument Worker and Collective Farm Woman, which epitomized the power of the Soviet Union at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Avvakumov places the framework of the two‑figure composition, which became a standard of Socialist Realism, inside the utopian dream of Constructivism, merging two irreconcilable sources of Soviet art‑abstraction and realism.
The project Worker and Collective Farm Woman International has been exhibited several times around the world, including in the Main Project of the 6th Venice Architecture Biennale (1996). In parallel, in the Russian Pavilion, Avvakumov presented the exhibition Russian Utopia: A Depository, which included 480 unrealized projects by Russian architects of the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
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