The Ideal Communist City by Alexei Gutnov, et al. Weiss Press, 192 pp., $25.
While it existed, the Soviet Union was generally understood in Western European and North American design circles through its “paper architecture.” This was the case both in its early years—the utopia-to-dystopia sequence, beginning with the Monument to the Third International and ending with the Palace of the Soviets—and at its end, with the perverse and bleak dream projects of Brodsky and Utkin during the 1980s. In between, it seems, architecture was too actual to interest many people west of the Elbe, but there was one major exception—a book titled The Ideal Communist City, written by a team of authors at Moscow State University headed by the architect Alexei Gutnov, first published outside the USSR in Italy, in 1968. In its open-ended speculation, the work showcased here can be seen hazily as a kind of nonsatirical Soviet Superstudio, its mystique aided by its scarcity (its 1971 English translation will set you back $200-plus on eBay).
But now, a new edition fro…