Disseminating a design vision: the Soviet collective housing and its international fortune

Soviet research on collective housing developed rapidly between the end of the NEP and the first pjatiletka.At the dawn of the 1930s, these experiments were interrupted by a series of legislative measures that redefined housing policies, sanctioning their incompatibility with the social and economic directions that accompanied the Stalinization of the regime.However, many of the solutions developed in this phase, banned in the USSR, experienced a significant international diffusion.Through many reformulations, in the pre-war period and in the first decades of the post-war period, they fueled one of the most relevant circulation phenomena of design vision and settlement organization of the XX century.Some significant passages of this story are retraced, starting from the pivotal case of the famous ‘transitional' house of Dom Narkomfina.