Name: Samanta Turovska
Track: Architecture
Studio: Borders & Territories
Year: MSc2 / 2025
Type: Elective - “Experiments in Drawing Theory“
Tutor: Marc Schoonderbeek
Description:
Ivan Leonidov’s Linear City - Magnitogorsk (1930) imagined a utopian, linear city weaving together work, leisure, and culture. Through intensive hand-drawn techniques explored in the Experiments in Drawing Theory seminar, his visionary language of geometry and abstraction was reinterpreted through typography. Inspired by Leonidov’s modular forms, a new typographic system was developed, with each letter designed as a spatial, cube-based structure. These characters echoed the rhythmic, ideological precision of his urban layouts. Working in white ink on black paper and black ink on white, the drawings captured the tension between void and form, architecture and language. Typography became a way to not just reflect Leonidov’s vision, but to reimagine it through rhythm, structure, and space.