Ricardo Ruivo Pereira

Learning from Leningrad: complexity and contradiction in socialist architecture

Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Pier Vittorio Aureli

An established history of soviet architecture appears to have risen in the West, mostly focused on the short period of its first two decades. The bulk of soviet architectural production after the 1930s seems to be necessarily understood always in contrast to this avant-garde, giving birth to a rich series of mystiques surrounding soviet architecture as a whole. This new PhD project aims to address these mystiques at a historiographical level. While keeping close attention to historical data regarding the architectural production of the Soviet Union and other states closely related to it, the purpose of this work is to critically reframe the wealth of historiographical material available today on the subject, focusing on the disparity between the accounts that deal with the early avant-garde and those that deal with the currents that superseded it. New PhD project.

Ricardo Ruivo Pereira studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) graduating in 2009. He was a researcher at the Research Centre of the Faculty of Architecture (CEFA) between 2009 and 2010, and an assistant in Urbanistics II. He is a registered architect in Portugal and has co-authored a number of projects. He completed Masters studies in Architectural History in 2011 with a thesis on "Architecture and Revolution – Boullée, the Great Ideology – Brief Political History of 300 Years of Bourgeois Architecture".