Architecture of Life: Soviet Modernism and the Human Sciences is an extensively researched intellectual history of Soviet Modernism in the late 1920s. For Alla Vronskaya, the author and a professor of architectural history at Kassel University, modernism is not merely a style. Rather, she presents it in the book as an effort to formulate a new theory of art and an architecture of life. Situating her study midway between the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the peak of the Stalinist purges of 1937, she explains that the value of this type of multi-faceted investigation is twofold. On the one hand, Soviet theories on architectural design incorporated contemporaneous psychological and physiological studies of human life. On the other, the Soviet movement was developed from and integrated with the formation of an international modernism.
Incorporating more contextual history would have benefitted readers who are only minimally familiar with why this period of Soviet...