General plan
General plan, 2011
Installation view
The Centro Cultural Montehermoso,
Vitoria-Gasteiz City (SP)
The building of the Soviet society by the work and duty of the architects which gives these ideals a functional form stands in the centre of the project. What did it mean for the Belarusian periphery architects who wanted to assert themselves and were standing constantly in the shadow of the Moscow great architects?
Belarus soviet architecture placed on industrial architecture set an example to the whole USSR. „General plan“ primarily means city planning. But in Belarus they are strongly connected with industrial construction. The planning of most large-scale Plants and enclosed cultural buildings and residential areas stamped the city planning of Minsk and other Belarusian cities.
The Project consists of the video „General plan“, an archive with some working material and a drawing series.
In the video „General plan“ two Minsk based architects, who spent there working life on Minsk reconstruction, tell how the city and the biggest industrial complexes were planned and built by them.
The archive shows historical photos, slides and books about city planning and industrial architecture in the Soviet Belarus; the current shots in the plant buildings show the change of the political and economic system of the country. Furthermore, the archive shows pictures from the 70s and 80s which were taken on the rare „foreign tours“ of the Soviet architects to the Western countries and Asia.
The drawing series is based on the handwritten memories of wife of the architect. The growing up of a gifted boy from the province up to one of the most important and deserving architects of the republic – a story like one of the communist propaganda movies, shown from a very much private perspective. The result is a multi-layered picture where the private and the political melt into each other. And this is a story about hopes, faith and defeats of people who decided „to build“ the communism.