Thread by @cecrawford_

I was curious about the architectural history of #AzovStal, so I pulled out this 1935 Soviet publication on industrial building. Azovstal (right) was begun around 1930, @ the end of the first Five-Year Plan (FFYP). It was modeled on the Gary, Indiana (USA) steel plant (left). 🧵

Like many Soviet industrial complexes from the 1930s, #AzovStal's design hewed to US design standards, because the USSR took advantage of the 1929 stock market crash to hire US, German, Czech and other underemployed industrial architects & engineers to assist with FFYP projects.

#AzovStal was a giant in the Soviet steel ecosystem. The "shop type" was American, compared in this chart with Weirton Steel (in WV, USA), a US Ford plant, a German plant, and Vítkovice Steel (Czech. Rep.).

The rapid industrialization of Ukraine in the 1930s that #AzovStal belongs to was a deeply exploitative, colonizing project, and foreign experts enabled both the population displacement that preceded construction & the environmental degradation of the context that followed.

There is no debating these historical facts. This negative history is now, however, in dialogue with a countervailing narrative. The #AzovStal complex has become a material artifact and symbol of #Ukrainian resistance.

Its meaning has transformed through its persistence over nearly a century, and through its utility to Ukrainians in the war. Architecture *can* absorb new cultural meaning, as @IAPonomarenko's tweet this morning makes clear:

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1527594527913033729

I'll talk about this and more re: the rocky history of foreign architectural assistance in Ukraine @assc_bbk on Tuesday in London.

https://twitter.com/assc_bbk/status/1526546856276283398

Images from the remarkable book A. S. Fisenko, ed., Arkhitektura Promyshlennykh Zdanii, vol. 2, Promstroiproekt: Spravochnik Proektirovshchika Promyshlennykh Sooruzhenii 1 (Moscow: Glavnaia redaktsiia stroitel’noi literatury, 1935).

#СЛАВАУКРАЇНІ 🇺🇦