Matt Talks – Communist Architecture

AML Talks. Think of TED Talks, ideas worth sharing and delivered in 18 minutes. It’s a simple, powerful thing. After a conversation over lunch about people’s interests, AML Talks was born.

Every 5-6 weeks an AMLer speaks on a subject they’re passionate about. It’s a great opportunity to share something that interests them, and for everyone else to learn a few new things. To make it even simpler, talks are timed to 15 minutes with 15 minutes for Q&A. That’s 30 minutes out of people’s lunchtime. Not long at all.

So over to our inaugural AML Talks speaker, copywriter Matt Evans.

Much-maligned and (admittedly) mainly concrete, communist architecture first captured my imagination as I stood outside Lenin’s red granite mausoleum in 2004. Despite its diminutive size, its impact on me was huge; inspiring over a decade of travel across the former eastern bloc. In my talk, I wanted to fly through the range of styles created during the decades of communist rule and show that its architectural legacy is far more interesting than just pre-fab flats and space-age bus stops and that, even today, it can still teach us something about simplicity.