Architecture Program and Anthropology Program Present

Dark Reconstruction, or the Architecture of Russian Worlding

In Russian, the word for “world” (mir) has a double valence – it also means “peace.” Amid the devastation unleashed by the collapse of the USSR, a revanchist fantasy of a boundless “Russian world” (Russkiy mir) has gradually, but steadily, infiltrated the political and ideological mainstream. Russkiy mir denotes something like pax russica – an earthly realm which has been (or is yet to be) pacified by Russia by means of war. Today, this fantasy is steadily turning into material reality. This talk interrogates the forms and structures of Russkyi mir-in-the-making through the lens of “reconstruction” projects carried out by Russian (state and private) actors in places that the armies of the Russian Federation have laid to waste.

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Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and cities. He is Associate Professor of Critical Area Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He is the author of Only to Hell: Architecture, Nature and Violence in Re-colonial Russia (MIT Press 2026, forthcoming); A Form of Friendship: The Museum on the Square (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw/Chicago UP, 2024); and The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed (Indiana UP, 2019).

For more information, call 845-758-7662, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Hegeman 204

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