The social condenser: a century of revolution through architecture, 1917–2017

In the centenary year of the Bolshevik revolution, this special issue is devoted to the idea of the 'social condenser'among the most powerful architectural concepts produced in the Soviet Union in response to the earth-shattering events of 1917.The idea of the social condenser proposed deploying architecture as a way to forge radical new kinds of human collectivities: collectivities of co-habitation, of coproduction, of intellectual work; as well as collectivities of affect, beauty, empathy and passion.Suffused with vivid connotations pertaining to electricity, radiation and magnetism, the social condenser is a concept with an extraordinary, totalising reach.In its very formulation, it encompasses society's economic and material infrastructure, the humdrum minutiae of everyday life as well as the unruly domains of the transcendental and fantastical.Crucially, it also encompasses the entire domain of architectural endeavour: from dwelling and work to public space and everything in between.But the precise significance of the social condenser is difficult to pin down.In the Russian Constructivist texts of the 1920s, the term was used in quite a broad way, often as something of an overarching term for referring to the new 'type' of post-revolutionary architecture.After 1928, the term 'social condenser' itself was abandoned in the USSR, although many of its postulates, it can be argued, continued to suffuse the practice of architecture, planning and social engineering during the Stalin years.From the late 1950s, the aesthetics, morphologies and ideologies of early Soviet modernism were being rediscovered not only in Khrushchev-era Russia, but also on the other side of the Iron Curtain.Thanks to the work of Western and Soviet historians such as Anatole Kopp and Selim Khan-Magomedov, the term 'social condenser' re-entered the lexicon of architects, artists and thinkers all over the world.Notably, the idea was appropriated-but, in the process, depoliticised, fragmented and ironised-by the towering ideologist of late-capitalist, turn-of-the-millennium architecture, Rem Koolhaas.