Ricardo Ruivo Pereira studied architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) graduating in 2009. He was a researcher at the Research Centre of the Faculty of Architecture (CEFA) between 2009 and 2010, and an assistant in Urbanistics II. He is a registered architect in Portugal and has co-authored a number of projects. He completed Masters studies in Architectural History in 2011 with a thesis on “Architecture and Revolution – Boullée, the Great Ideology – Brief Political History of 300 Years of Bourgeois Architecture”.
Mystiques of Socialist Architecture
Supervisors: Mark Cousins, Dr Pier Vittorio Aureli
The Soviet “avant-garde” has seen growing popularity since the 1960s, systematically presented as precedent to politically charged present practices and discourses. This thesis frames this link to the present as a “historiographical link”, an ideological projection of meanings the Western historiography of Soviet architecture produces over its own geo-political reality. “The avant-garde” as a category is itself constructed in this context as a means of legitimation of Western presents, where the relationship between history, design and politics is articulated through the category of “the project”, in a process that depoliticises the very idea of the politicisation of architecture itself.