Facing Hitler’s Pavilion: The Uses of Modernity in the Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition

Abstract

Overwhelming the Trocadéro’s majestic esplanade, the Soviet and German pavilions faced each other in a commanding gesture across the central axis of the Paris ‘Exposition des arts et des techniques dans la vie moderne’ – the last French World’s Expo in the twentieth century. More often than not, the two pavilions have been dismissed in architectural terms as having merely ‘competed in archeological rhetoric’. In this article I argue, with a primary focus on the Soviet Pavilion, that far from displaying such reductive and unambiguous architectural qualities, each pavilion offered, in two very different ways, a complex response to the challenges of an exhibition dedicated to ‘modern life’. The two instrumentalized for their own political purposes both modernity and historicism. From two radically different ideological starting points, the pavilions exploited some significant aspects of the defunct avant-gardes, while reaching out, in different degrees, for stabilizing references to classicism. Frank Lloyd Wright’s unwavering admiration for the Soviet Pavilion, the main topic of this article, resonates with the astonishing discovery of white Suprematist ‘Arkhitektoni’ by Malevich’s disciple, sculptor Nikolaj Suetin gracing the interior of the Soviet Pavilion. The legacy raises the question of thus far unsuspected survival of the architectural avant-garde deep into the years of Stalin’s totalitarian terror.