Radu-Mihai Măldărescu

‘Ion Mincu’ University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest, Romania
radu.maldarescu@gmail.com

Alexander Brodsky: An Architect’s Double

Following various readings of the double in architecture, Alexander Brodsky’s approach emerges as a distinct addition, marked by its emotional depth and resistance to
literal reconstruction. For Alexander Brodsky, the double is not a mere replica but an act of survival, an instinctive human response to erasure. Emerging from the profound wounds inflicted by the Soviet regime, his work seeks a reconciliation with history, a way to restore what was lost not through exact reconstruction, but through the evocative power of memory. As a child, Brodsky witnessed the dismantling of the vernacular city, the small houses scattered around Moscow’s periphery, with their fragile wooden walls and deep-set windows, swallowed by the tide of Soviet urban planning. These spaces, once formative to his own sense of home, became ghosts, existing only in the subconscious. The architect, now an adult, does not attempt to recover them through archival precision but through something far more intimate: the double as an imagined memory, an imperfect yet deeply truthful echo of what once was. His works are not restorations but reimaginings, where familiarity is drawn not from the material reality of the past but from its lingering presence in the mind. These architectural doubles capture not the object itself, but its absence, its afterimage. They embody the paradox of loss: to rebuild is not to restore, but to relive. In Brodsky’s world, the double is a gesture of defiance against time and destruction, an attempt to hold onto the past not through fidelity, but through feeling. His architecture is an archive of what cities forget, a space where the vanished finds a way to exist again, not as it was, but as it is remembered.

Keywords: Alexander Brodsky; memory; dacha; soviet architecture; nostalgia.