. Image:Â Reds and Whites, a war game!
A Soviet board-game from 1929. .
It’s the 1920s. You’re a young revolutionary living in the newly-formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Now that the Allied Intervention’s been frustrated, and the reactionary White Army beaten back, the threat of counterrevolution seems to have momentarily subsided. All in all, it’s a good time to be a Marxist in old Muscovy.
There’s only one problem with this new arrangement: What to do with the free time you’re not spending locked in combat against the tsarists, yankees, and Huns? Sure, you’ve got a job at the local shoe factory. But war communism’s out, and the New Economic Program is in. It’s time to kick back and relax. Communism will be built soon enough.
Luckily, there’s a new product available to help pass the time. A.V. Kuklin’s come out with a whole batch of revolutionary board-games, featuring such riveting class-conscious titles as Electrification, Revolution, Reds vs. Whites, and Maneuvers: A Game for Young Pioneers [Soviet Boy Scouts]. Games for the whole family, even though the family form of property-relations must eventually be abolished. Let the capitalists have their Monopoly; let the imperialists play their Risk. I’ll stick to Modern War or Air Struggle.
Ages 8 and up?
1930
1927
1925
1924
1924
Air Struggle! 1925
1925
1929
1938
1926
1925
1925
Modern Fight, the game! 1933
1928: “Electrification,” the board game
1931
1931
Russia vs. China (1925)
1924
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My favorites among these include the “electrification” board-game, the chemical war game, and the Reds vs. the Whites game. You can tell that they reflect the immediate experience of devastating world war, revolution, and bloody civil war, followed by a project of social engineering and economic modernization the likes of which the world had never seen. The only other thing I’ll say is that, from an aesthetic perspective, one can see the change in the officially-sanctioned styles from the more avant-garde lines, shapes, and typography to the cartoon realism of caricatured figures in the Sots-art of the 1930s. Enjoy!
ENTER a new era. Are we ready for the changes that are coming? The houses we live in tomorrow will not much resemble the houses we live in today. Automobiles, railway trains, theaters, cities, industry itself, are undergoing rapid changes. Likewise, art in all its forms. The forms they presently take will undoubtedly have kinship with the forms we know in the present; but this relationship will be as distinct, and probably as remote, as that between the horseless buggy of yesterday and the present-day motor car. We live and work under pressure with a tremendous expenditure of energy. We feel that life in our time is more urgent, complex and discordant than life ever was before. That may be so. In the perspective of fifty years hence, the historian will detect in the decade of 1930-1940 a period of tremendous significance. He will see it as a period of criticism, unrest, and dissatisfaction to the point of disillusion when new aims were being sought and new beginnings were astir. Doubtless he will ponder that, in the midst of a worldwide melancholy owing to an economic depression, a new age dawned with invigorating conceptions and the horizon lifted.
Critics of the age are agreed upon one thought: that what industry has given us, as yet, is not good enough. Another plea of critics hostile to the age is that machines make automatons of men. They fail to see that the machine age is not really here. Although we built the machines, we have not become at ease with them and have not mastered them. Our condition is the result of a swift industrial evolution. If we see the situation clearly, we realize that we have been infatuated with our own mechanical ingenuity. Rapidly multiplying our products, creating and glorifying the gadget, we have been inferior craftsmen, the victims rather than the masters of our ingenuity. In our evolution we have accumulated noise, dirt, glitter, speed, mass production, traffic congestion, and the commonplace by our machine-made ideas. But that is only one side.
We have achieved the beginnings of an expression of our time. We now have some inkling of what today’s home, today’s theater, today’s factory, today’s city, should be. We perceive that the person who would use a machine must be imbued with the spirit of the machine and comprehend the nature of his materials. We realize that he is creating the telltale environment that records what man truly is.
It happens that the United States has seized upon more of the fruits of industrialism than any other nation. We have gone farther and more swiftly than any other. To what end? Not the least tendency is the searching and brooding uncertainty, the quest for basic truths which characterize the present day. Never before, in an economic crisis, has there been such an aroused consciousness on the part of the community at large and within industry itself. Complacency has vanished. A new horizon appears. A horizon that will inspire the next phase in the evolution of the age.
We are entering an era which, notably, shall be characterized by design in four specific phases: Design in social structure to insure the organization of people, work, wealth, leisure. Design in machines that shall improve working conditions by eliminating drudgery. Design in all objects of daily use that shall make them economical, durable, convenient, congenial to every one. Design in the arts, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and architecture, that shall inspire the new era.
The impetus towards design in industrial life today must be considered from three viewpoints: the consumer’s, the manufacturer’s, and the artist’s. In his appreciation of the importance of design the artist is somewhat ahead of the consumer, while the average manufacturer is farther behind the consumer than the consumer is behind the artist. The viewpoint of each is rapidly changing, developing, fusing. More than that, the economic situation is stimulating a unanimity of emphasis, a merger of viewpoints. Continue reading →
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The great Le Corbusier rendered in color. Thanks to Sammy Medina, a wonderful chap, for alerting me to these great photos! Originally posted at Le Journal de la Photographie.
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The controversy surrounding the celebration of Columbus Day notwithstanding, the various radical Soviet avant-garde project submissions for the 1929 international competition to design a memorial to Christopher Columbus in Santo Domingo were pretty incredible.
Engels’ 1847 speech on Columbus’ accidental journey to what would become known as the Americas is appended below. After that, there are a couple excerpts from Franz Mehring’s 1895 text On Historical Materialism.
Minutes of Engels’s Lecture to the London German Workers’ Educational Society on November 30,1847
The discovery of America
Written: November 30, 1847; Source:MECW Volume 6, p. 627; First published: in Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, jg. 8, Leipzig, 1919.
Citizens! When Christopher Columbus discovered America 350 years ago, he certainly did not think that not only would the then existing society in Europe together with its institutions be done away with through his discovery, but that the foundation would be laid for the complete liberation of all nations; and yet, it becomes more and more clear that this is indeed the case. Through the discovery of America a new route by sea to the East Indies was found, whereby the European business traffic of the time was completely transformed; the consequence was that Italian and German commerce were totally ruined and other countries came to the fore; commerce came into the hands of the western countries, and England thus came to the fore of the movement. Before the discovery of America the countries even in Europe were still very much separated from one another and trade was on the whole slight. Only after the new route to the East Indies had been found and an extensive field had been opened in America for exploitation by the Europeans engaged in commerce, did. England begin more and more to concentrate trade and to take possession of it, whereby the other European countries were more and more compelled to join together. From all this, big commerce originated, and the so-called world market was opened. The enormous treasures which the Europeans brought from America, and the gains which trade in general yielded, had as a consequence the ruin of the old aristocracy, and so the bourgeoisie came into being. The discovery of America was connected with the advent of machinery, and with that the struggle became necessary which we are conducting today, the struggle of the propertyless against the property owners.Continue reading →
Some gorgeous models I found of Soviet avant-garde architecture (both realized and unrealized structures) designed by Australian students.
Model reconstruction of one of Ivan Leonidov’s “blackprints” (1929).
Model of Ivan Leonidov’s internationally-renowned proposal for the Lenin Institute (1927).
Angled view of the model of Ivan Leonidov’s internationally-renowned proposal for the Lenin Institute (1927).
Model of El Lissitzky’s fantastic “cloudprop” proposal (1925).
An amazing visual recreation of one of Yakov Chernikov’s brilliant abstractions from 101 Architectural Fantasies (1925-1933).
Model of Alexey Shchusev’s third and final (stone) version of the Lenin Mausoleum (1930) in Moscow, still standing to this day. From Shchusev’s brief stint with primitivist/pyramidal modernism.
Scaled model of Konstantin Melnikov’s legendary 1925 Soviet pavilion building at the Paris World Fair.
Model of Konstantin Melnikov’s famous house. Personally, I’ve never been as big a fan of Melnikov’s work as others (say S. Frederick Starr) seem to have been.
Model of a section from Konstantin Melnikov’s legendary 1925 Soviet pavilion building at the Paris World Fair.
American Union model of proposed monument to Christopher Columbus (1929).
. Image:Â Friedrich Engels and
the “hoax” of the platypus .
Below are reformatted PDF versions of those issues of the Platypus Review that have appeared to date.  I make these available in this layout for ease of reading online, as the actual printed copies are made on a foldable broadsheet that does not conform to ordinary viewing from page to page.  It should be noted, then, that these texts are reformatted for reading, and are thus not intended for printing.  The versions intended to go to the printers can be found on http://archive.org.  My original reason for providing these reformatted versions is in case anyone was interested in citing from the individual pages as they appeared in print, something I have done quite a bit in my own writing.
Reviewing they body of work accumulated in the Platypus Review so far, I have to say that its output in terms of both quantity and quality of contributions, as well as in design, is far greater than I thought.  This comes as quite a surprise to me, considering I’ve been reading its issues for years now, and even served as an editor for several months.  Anyway, I suppose readers can decide for themselves.  Compiling them all here in one place makes for a nice retrospective, though, I think. Continue reading →
. Image:Â Recent picture of
Dom Narkomfin (2011) .
Today it is well known that the future has become a thing of the past.
Gone are the days when humanity dreamt of a different tomorrow. All that remains of that hope is a distant memory. Indeed, most of what is hoped for these days is no more than some slightly modified version of the present, if not simply the return to a status quo ante — i.e., to a present that only recently became deceased. This is the utopia of normality, evinced by the drive to “get everything running back to normal†(back to the prosperity of the Clinton years, etc.). In this heroically banal vision of the world, all the upheaval and instability of the last few years must necessarily appear as just a fluke or bizarre aberration. A minor hiccup, that’s all. Once society gets itself back on track, the argument goes, it’ll be safe to resume the usual routine.
Those for whom the present of just a short time ago already seemed to be charting a disastrous course, however, are compelled to imagine a still more remote past: a past that humanity might someday revisit, after completing its long journey through the wilderness of modernity. Having lost its way some centuries back — around the start of the Industrial Revolution — this would signal an end to the hubristic conceit that society can ever achieve self-mastery. Humanity’s homecoming, in this model, is much like that of the prodigal son’s. Never again will it wander too far afield. From this time forward, it’ll stick to the straight and narrow.
Neither of these temporalities, whether oriented toward the present or the past, is entirely what it seems, however. How so?
For one thing, the present (at least, the present of the last two hundred or so years) is never fully present. It’s always getting ahead of itself, lunging headlong into the future, outstripping every prognosis and expectation. But no sooner has its velocity increased than it finds itself right back where it started. Just as swiftly as the present speeds itself up, it feels the ground beneath it begin to shift: a cyclolinear running in place, as it were. The ceaseless proliferation of the new now presents itself as the eternal return of the same old, same old. Novelty today has become quotidian, if not wholly antique. It should thus hardly come as a shock that Marxian theorists like Moishe Postone have described a peculiar treadmill effect that occurs under capitalism.[1] History of late may be going nowhere,[2] but it’s going nowhere faster.
Problems of modern architecture . ……Final diploma project for Aleksandr ……Vesnin’s studio at VKhUTEIN
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In order to really know an object, it is necessary to comprehend, to study all sides of it, all its internal and external connectivities.
— Lenin
It is necessary to pursue and elaborate the implications of this proposition in every specialized field.
Nikolai Krasil’nikov’s “New City” (1928)
My initial premises:
The environment in which an organic body exists has an influence upon its form.
The forms of the various parts of the organic body are determined by their functions. Thus in a tree the forms of the root, the trunk, and the leaves are determined by the purposes they serve.
To put it mathematically, the form of every body is a complex function of many variables (and the concept of form embraces the internal structure of the body matter).
A scientific theory of the design of form can be developed through the dialectical method of thinking, with the application of mathematical methods of analysis; analysis, that is, which uses the infinitesimal quantities of analytical geometry along with both differential and integral calculus, and the theory of probability and mathematical statistics.
A theory of the design of architectural form must be based on the physical, mechanical, chemical, and biological laws of nature.
Socialist construction is unthinkable without the solution of economic aspects of the problem such as would yield the maximum economic effect in the very broadest sense. So the constructional economics of a building for human work or habitation must be measured in terms of:
the material resources expended in erecting and running it;
wear (amortization) and repair of the building;
the time expended by people on all forms of movement in and around it;
impairment of the health of individuals, which depends on the extent to which the sanitary-technical norms and laws on safety at work and leisure are observed; and
the working conditions which would promote an improvement in the productivity of labor in general and mental work in particular, or in the conditions for leisure.
7. Under present Soviet circumstances [destvitel’nosti], the ……achievement of maximum constructional economics in ……architecture is also a vital necessity for the successful ……realization of socialism.
This is what I’m planning to read at the Platypus Affiliated Society’s Prometheus in Drift: A Night of Modernist Readings event: Maiakovskii’s 1925 sci-fi piece, “The Flying Proletarian.” Here’s the description that Viktor Terras provided of it:
…set in the year 2125 and features a giant air battle, with death rays and such, between the Soviet proletarian and the American bourgeois air forces. The latter prevails until an uprising of New York workers against their government turns the tide. Maiakovskii’s communist future is all comfort and electric ease: electric razors, electric toothbrushes, everybody with his own private airplane (Moscow no longer has any streets, just airports). Labor is wholly mechanized, so that a worker merely operates a keyboard. Altogether, Maiakovskii’s utopia is written from the viewpoint of a laborer who is tired of backbreaking, dirty work…There are no kitchens, no housework. People eat in aerocafeterias and amuse themselves with cosmic cinemas, cosmic dances, and such — all nonalcoholic (alcohol is served by prescription only). The sport of the future is avio-polo — football has long since been abandoned as crude and boring.
The cartoon itself is a degenerate Khrushchev-era attempt to retrieve the contributions of the avant-garde movement that Stalinism crushed. Notice the space-age imagery, the cosmonauts. But something of the original futurism survives even still here. It’s something that’s been lost.
[vodpod id=Video.16162674&w=425&h=350&fv=]
So anyway, to plug the event taking place tomorrow, here’s the info:
Prometheus in Drift
G o e t h e  |   H ö l d e r l i n  |   R e n a r d  |   K l e i s t  |   W a l s e r  |   V a l e r y  |   B e c k e t t
|   K a f k a  |   S t e v e n s   |  E s e n i n  |   B a u d e l a i r e  |   M a i a k o v s k i i  |   C e l a n
friday, 03.02.12, 7pm | nyu kimmel, rm 909, 60 washington sq s
if you would like to volunteer to read one of the selections or have any questions about the event, please contact nyu@platypus1917.org.
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