Italianisms in Soviet Architecture of the Thaw Era

Christian Toson will investigate the cultural relationship and technological transfer between the Soviet Union and Italy during the so-called Thaw era. Seemingly incompatible Soviet and Italian systems had numerous exchanges, documented by travel reports, journal articles, meeting resumes, etc.
How should we select and read the overwhelming quantity of documents that this recent, but distant era, has left for us? Starting from a multileveled contextualization that involves the history of construction, diplomacy, and shared cultural heritage, we can try to reconstruct the threads connecting the architectures of the two countries.

Christian Toson studied at the Iuav University in Venice and European University in Saint Petersburg. He finished his PhD in the History of Architecture at the Iuav in 2022 with the dissertation on the relationship between Russian/Soviet and Italian architecture. He is a co-editor of the journal La Rivista di Engramma and member of the research group classicA since 2017. Currently, he is a post-doc researcher at Iuav with a project on War and Architecture, collaborating with publishing companies and archives.

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Scientific Organization: Philipp Hubert, Alexander Lemeshinski

_{Image: Travel report picture showing Vladimir Promyslov and his team inspecting Nervi’s Palazzo dello Sport, 1960.}