Of Houses And Sputniks. Ada Louise Huxtable’s 1967 Narrative Of Soviet Architecture: Negotiations Between Experience, Representation, And Expectations.

This portion of the research frames the premises and the implications of an investigative journey to the Soviet Union that architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable took for the New York Times in 1967, and that resulted in a series of different writings. This essay examines the processes and operations behind Huxtable's construction of a distinct image of Soviet architecture intended for the North American public by combining the articles with their background archival material. Because this journey to the East occurred in a moment of already consolidated relations between America and the Soviet Union, this essay starts questioning to what extent Huxtable’s perspective on the post-war Soviet built environment inserts itself within the framework of the cultural Cold War in relation to the rhetoric that other testimonies had contributed, at different extents, to codify and disseminate. The study of the investigative journey to the Soviet Union adds up to a series of other writings linked to a plurality of overseas realities, such as Italy, Northern Europe, Israel, or Great Britain. They all belong to a research agenda that argues a repositioning of Huxtable as a figure of mediation in the processes of cultural and disciplinary transfer of knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century, a moment in which these occasions became increasingly manifold, and their pace expedited. The doctoral research thus investigates the gap between first-hand experiences abroad and their narrations, reviewing the processes of translation, selection, and networking behind the construction of specific (national) architectural narratives. It does so by putting in tension archival research material with written outputs intended for specialized and general audiences.