Product Review

Svetlana Boym's Architecture of the Off-Modern is an imaginative tour through the history and afterlife of Vladimir Tatlin's legendary but unbuilt Monument to the Third International of 1920. Boym traces the vicissitudes of Tatlin's tower, from its reception in the 1920s to its privileged recall in "the reservoir of unofficial utopian dreams" of the Soviet era. Boym offers an alternative history of modernism, postulating the "architecture of adventure" as a poetic model for "third-route" thinking about technology, history, and aesthetic culture.