Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935

What a revolutionary exhibition this is: bold, ambitious, exciting, full of grandiose attempts to make you see the world differently, and more than a little crazy. 'Building the Revolution' aims to show the connections between radical art and architecture in the years after 1917, as creative Communists strained to invent a new style of architecture to house their new world. Beauty for its own sake was bourgeois, ugliness unworthy of the new dawn. Even before Stalin stamped down on their inventiveness, this was not a comfortable space for architects to work.

The exhibition is grouped by building: 1930s images, explanations and Richard Pare's enormous, glossy modern photographs, with (loosely) relevant art lurking nearby. Pare's images are wonderful but the old photos, tiny and ill-lit, come off badly; why not blow up reproductions, so we could see them properly? That would have further highlighted their subsequent deterioration, which is one of the show's aims, along with offering a crash course in Modernism, Constructivism, Suprematism and a few other isms. It's a photography gallery, an art exhibition, a history course, an architecture lecture and a wistful look at a time when art was considered directly relevant to life. In short, it's an ideological mess with laudable aims - just like the majority of revolutions.

But goodness, it's exciting. Pare has poked his camera under balconies, up radio towers and into defunct mass bakeries and unrealised rooftop gardens. His photographs celebrate the radical thinking that could make the medium the message, incorporating a wheel-shaped wall of glass into the Gosplan garage, or - my favourite - constructing a staircase of such curling beauty that it takes a while to realise how easily one can see up and down it - ideal, surely, for a housing scheme for members of Cheka, the feared secret service.

Pare's images also decry the dilapidated state of many of these remarkable buildings. He peers at peeling paint, scrutinises damp patches, glares at broken canopies. The architects' biographies tell a similar story of compromise and disillusionment. The glory days did not last long. By the 1930s, a Stalin-approved version of Neo-Classicism was firmly in place. Some compromised. Some embraced the new rules: Merzhanov became Stalin's personal architect, and carried on working even after his inevitable arrest, designing buildings in the gulag. Some, like Aleksandr Vesnin, gave up and went back to painting. This was the sad coda to the thrilled response of painters such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich to the revolution: they had believed that painting was headed towards architecture, probably via theatre (Solomon Nikritin's strange painting 'The Connection of Painting to Architecture' is here, as are photographs of Liubov Popova's wonderful maquettes for theatre productions, and several of El Lissitzky's strange drawings glorifying what he described as 'the transitional stage from painting to architecture').

The massed contradictions are most picturesquely summed up by the architect Konstantin Melnikov, a creative loner in a system dedicated to quashing individuality, who built communal accommodation and took as reward the right to design a home for just his family, to his own specifications: the ultimate bourgeois fantasy. The house, which is absolutely beautiful, is currently neglected and unoccupied, the victim of an ownership tussle. Really, what better epitaph for the Communist revolution could there be?