Reactivating the Social Condenser: Architecture against Privation

“The new type of communal dwelling, the new type of club, Palace of Labour, Executive Committee building, factory… are to become the conductors and condensers of socialist culture…” (Soviet Organisation of Contemporary Architects Resolution, 1928)

1. We live in a time of privation, crisis and stratification, in housing as well as in public space. Space has become a commodity, and apathy is rife. 
2. For nearly a century, architects, artists and thinkers have been inspired by and toyed with the grand old Soviet idea of the social condenser. Most, however, have attempted to tame this idea, or have done little other than to pay lip service to it. 
3. It is high time, then, to reactivate the social condenser! We want to subject this electrifying idea to serious and systematic re-examination, to re-charge the social condenser as a vector for radical architectural thought and practice. 

Confirmed Participants:

• Dr Nick Beech (Oxford Brookes/Canadian Center for Architecture) Social Condensation in the Metropole: Locating the First New Left
• Dr Jonathan Charley (University of Strathclyde) “Molodoi Chelovek…my origins lie in the past, but I am from the future”
• Dr Udo Grashoff (UCL SSEES) Schwarzwohnen
• Dr Owen Hatherley (London) Actually-Existing Social Condensers
• Michael Marriott (artist, London) The Laundry Room
• Dr Michał Murawski (UCL SSEES) Dear Distributor of Architectural Power: Letters to a Stalinist Social Condenser
• Professor Andrea Phillips (Goldsmiths, Fine Art) Art, Housing, Activism and Social Condensation: Title TBC
• Professor Jane Rendell (UCL Bartlett) During Breakfast
• Dr Łukasz Stanek (Manchester School of Architecture) Collective Luxury
• Dubravka Sekulic (ETH Zurich, History and Theory of Architecture) Self-Management and the Social Condenser
• Oleksyi Radinskyi (Centre for Visual Research, Kiev) Annexed Architecture: Friendship of Nations in the Crimean Resort
• Dr Andy Willimott (UCL SSEES): Everyday Life and the Soviet Urban Communes
• Dr Victor Buchli (UCL Anthropology) - Discussant
• Professor Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge, Social Anthropology) - Discussant 

All staff and students welcome.

For more information see: snurl.com/condenser

Book your place via Eventbrite

This conference is supported by the UCL Urban Laboratory and the UCL Grand Challenge: Human Wellbeing, convened by Dr Michal Murawski (UCL SSEES) and Professor Jane Rendell (The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL).

Image: Michal Murawski, Yoga at the Narkomin, Moscow, July 2014