Utopia in the Snow

When talking about social and architectural experiments, Soviet avant-garde is usually implied.

However, in Siberia, this trend emerged almost 10 years before the revolution. Architects, engineers, artists, writers, politicians, doctors, and even agronomists were all participants in the active transformation of life that swept through Siberia in the 1910s to the 1930s. The book presents a broad panorama of creative searches, somewhat utopian in nature—from attempts to find a "Siberian style" in the 1910s to the ambiguous "mastery of classical heritage" of the 1930s, from the development of economical housing for the working class to the construction of palace-like houses for the Soviet elite, from public initiatives to create pastoral garden cities to a centralized program for building socialist cities.