The NER project: a vision of post-industrial urbanity from post-Stalin Russia

Abstract

This article examines a Soviet visionary architectural project from the 1960s, entitled New Element of Settlement (Novyi Element Rasselenia, NER). The best-known architectural product of post-Stalin Russia is the khrushchevka, a small-sized apartment in a prefabricated building, that replaced the kommunalka, a communal apartment of the previous decades. However, Soviet architecture of that period was not limited to one brand of Khrushchev Modern. It was also a time of experimentation and active searching for alternatives to mass-produced urbanity. One such alternative was the NER project which proposed a diagram for future settlements of post-industrial, non-consumerist society. In this article, I argue that this project sought not only to significantly revisit contemporary urban planning and architectural grammar, but also to reconfigure society in line with the project of de-Stalinisation and the renewed aspiration to construct communism. In particular, I show that the project relied on an original understanding of the relationship between the individual and the collective, as well as on a specific interpretation of the function of leisure under communism.