architectural theory

“КУДА итти?”/“WHERE are We Going?”

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Original title of the piece

Из Современная архитектура –  (1930) — â„– 1/2

Pg. 4

И деревня и город—обе эти старые формы расселения не отвечают потребностям настоящего дня. Они МЕШАЮТ правильному размещению промышленности и сельского хозяйства, мешают развитию новых общественных отношений людей.

Старое жилище патриархальной или мелкобуржуазной крестьянской семьи, старое мещанско-семейное жилище рабочих к служащих разлагается на наших глазах, бешено сопротивляясь неизбежному. Замена старого жилища подновленной рабочей казармой с огороженными или полуогороженными индивидуальными нарами — казармой под вывеской «Дома – Коммуны», на словах — коммуной  на деле казармой не радует больше ни потребителя — рабочего и служащего, ибо она не удобна, ни производителя, ибо она дорога.

Продолжать СТРОИТЬ ПО-СТАРОМУ значит РАССТРАЧИВАТЬ [sic] сотни миллионов, пускать на ветер МИЛЛИАРДЫ рабочих рублей из фондов КАПИТАЛЬНОГО СТРОИТЕЛЬСТВА, из фондов индустриализации, значит многовековый опыт российской технической и экономической отсталости приспособлять к новому или — что одно и то же — новым требованиям размещения производства, новым требованиям строительной техники, новым отношениям людей в производстве, новым отношениям людей между собой противопоставлять старую технику размещения, старую технику производства. Наступила пора разочарования а той якобы коммуне, которая отнимает у рабочего жилую площадь В ПОЛЬЗУ КОРИДОРОВ И ТЕПЛЫХ ПЕРЕХОДОВ. Лжекоммуна, позволяющая рабочему ТОЛЬКО СПАТЬ в своем жилище, лжекоммуна уменьшающая и площадь и личные удобства (очередь на умывальник, в стоповою, уборную, вешалку) начинает вызывать массовое безпокойство в рабочей среде. Экономическая невозможность создания даже таких ничтожных удобств встала со всей ясностью и перед руководящими хозяйственными органами.

А жилищная нужна растет. Промышленность борется с ней, напрягая все силы…растет и жилищная скученность…Все и вся ее усиливают.

ЧТО ДЕЛАТЬ!

КУДА ИТТИ?

Both the village and the city — neither of these old forms of settlement meet the needs of the present day.  They INTERFERE with the correct distribution of industry and agriculture, interfere with the development of new social relations between men.

The old dwelling of the patriarchal or petit-bourgeois peasant family, the old petty family-dwelling of workers to employees decomposes before our very eyes, furiously resisting the inevitable.  The replacement of old homes by refurbished workers barracks with enclosed and semi-protected individual bunks — a barracks in the guise of “House-Commune,” in words — a commune, practically a barracks, does not gladden the worker and the employee, since it is not convenient, any more than it does the manufacturer, because it is expensive.

To continue TO BUILD IN THE OLD WAY means WASTING hundreds of millions, to release into the wind THOUSANDS of the workers’ rubles from the funds of CAPITAL CONSTRUCTION, from the funds for industrialization, and consequently the age-old experience of Russian technical and economic backwardness in adjusting to the new or — what is the same — placing new demands on production, new requirements of construction equipment, a new relation of people in production, new relations between people to oppose the old placement techniques, the old production techniques.  There arrived a day of disillusionment with this supposed commune, which deprives the workers of living space IN FAVOR OF CORRIDORS AND WARM PASSAGES.  The pseudo-commune allows workers ONLY TO SLEEP in their dwellings, the pseudo-commune reducing both the total area and the private facilities (in all a washstand, a bin, restrooms, and a coat-hanger) begins to cause massive unrest in the working environment.  The economic impossibility of such poor facilities rose clearly to the state and economic organs.

But housing needs to grow.  The industry is struggling with it, straining its every nerve…and the growth of overcrowded housing…The whole thing increases.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

WHERE ARE WE GOING?

(Anonymous author, February 1930)

Recommended Architectural Blogs and Articles, along with My Gratitude

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Leonidov's Proposed "Ministry of Heavy Industry" (1934)

I should like to thank the following architecture-related websites and point to some of their best articles:

  1. dpr-barcelona: I would like to thank Ethel Baraona not only for her enthusiastic promotion of my site on Twitter and so on, but for her friendship.  After I posted some links to a few of the journals I’d uploaded, she immediately e-mailed me personally expressing her thanks.  That said, she and her co-contributor have produced some excellent content of their own, in articles both in English and in Spanish.  To point to just a couple of them: “Ivan Leonidov and the Russian Utopias” and “Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms | Iakov Chernikhov.”
  2. Critical Grounds: Thanks to the author of this blog for pointing his students to the English-language modernist architectural archive I created.  And if you have the time, please read the following excellent articles: “In the Name of Being: Critical Regionalist Landscape Urbanism, a Critique,” his reference to another critique of environmentalism in “Ross Adams on the ‘eco-city’,” and finally his own “Parallel Lines: formal expression as publicity in the architecture of Hadid’s Central Building for BMW Leipzig.”
  3. sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy: As always, the Bolshevist and “interdistrictite” Owen Hatherley must make the list.  Not only for his incredibly helpful promotion of my own blog, but for his numerous good articles.  Some of his older articles from his previous blog are more immediately related to what I’ve been working on: “No Rococo Palace for Buster Keaton: Americanism (and Technology, Advertising, Socialism) in Weimar Architecture,” “The Functionalist Deviation Politics of building, aesthetics of anti-architecture,” and especially “A Pod of One’s Own — Architecture or Revolution: the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne, 1928-33.”
  4. Kosmograd: There’s too much good, cosmopolitan material at this site, which is mostly dedicated to early Bolshevik architecture and the Soviet space program.  He has linked to my site on several occasions, for which I am very thankful.  Interesting articles on this site include “Communal House of the Textile Institute,” the hilarious “Eco-town of Tomorrow and Its Planning,” and his interesting piece on “Decaying Orbiters.”

Free PDFs of the German Avant-Garde Architectural Journal Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau (1926-1931)

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Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau's Coverage of Ivan Leonidov's Proposal for the Lenin Institute

 The modernist movement was alive and well in interwar Germany.  Not only at the Bauhaus, which stood at the forefront of the avant-garde, under the leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, but all over the country.  László Moholy-Nagy and Gropius published their famous Bauhausbücher series, El Lissitzky established his journal ABC: Beitrage zum Bauen, and Theo van Doesburg transplanted his Dutch De Stijl magazine to Germany. Continue reading →

Another Batch of Soviet Avant-Garde Architectural Journals (Free PDFs)

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Plan for "New Moscow" (April 1929)

Here’s another batch of early Soviet avant-garde architectural journals, from between 1929-1930.  The 1929 one is the one I most recently worked on; the others were converted into PDFs back before I had perfected the method of separating out the text from the rest of the page.  As a result, these are all in grayscale, though they remain very readable.  The image quality is a little lower than on my more recent uploads.  But here they are, so enjoy!

  1. Строительство Москвы – (1929) – â„– 4
  2. Строительство Москвы – (1930) – â„– 7
  3. Строительство Москвы – (1930) – â„– 8/9
  4. Строительство Москвы – (1930) – â„– 10
  5. Строительство Москвы – (1930) – â„– 12

Nadezhda Krupskaia, Articles on the Socialist City (1929-1930) — Free PDF Download

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A Young Nadezhda Krupskaia

The problem of the “socialist city” introduced by Sabsovich was not exclusively pondered over by architects and urban planners.  Indeed, quite a number of prominent Soviet officials weighed in on the matter, from the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, to the renowned Bolshevik and member of the Politburo Grigorii Zinoviev, all the way to Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaia.

Krupskaia, who will be the subject of the present post and whose writings will be included along with it, had largely been relegated to the sidelines of Soviet politics by 1929-1930.  The Stalinist bloc had by then established itself on fairly firm footing in the political sphere, but knew that Krupskaia was too symbolically important to the Revolution to silence altogether.  So Krupskaia was still able to publish some political articles here and there, and became a popular pedagogical and matriarchal figure for the young Soviet regime for her writings on education and children.

In 1929, when the economist Sabsovich published his seminal article on the Socialist city, Krupskaia became intrigued by the prospect of a new mode of social and municipal reorganization.  Early on, she sided with Sabsovich’s proposal to overcome the antithesis of town and country with a more uniform system of settlement.  She thus wrote her article, “Cities of the Future,” which can be found on pages 161-165 of the volume uploaded below, in which she announced her support for Sabsovich’s Urbanist plan.  As a correlative of that plan, in which Sabsovich had proposed that children have their own “little cities” (детьские городки), Krupskaia responded by writing an article posing the question, “Where will Children Live in the Socialist City?”  This can be found between pages 206-209.

Also, as the competition for the “Green City” of Moscow heated up, Krupskaia offered her input, as she (amongst other Soviet intellectuals) tried to conceptualize a city for workers’ rest and leisure.

Надежда Крупская – Педагогические сочинения в десяти томах – Том 6

The articles:

  1. “Where will Children Live in the Socialist City? (in the order of consideration)” = «Где жить детям и социалистическом городе? (в порядке обсуждения)»
  2. “‘The Green City’ and the Leisure Activities of the Workers” = ««Зеленый город» и задачи отдыха рабочих»
  3. “The City of the Future” = «Города будущего»

The Architecture for the Palace of the Soviets/Архитектура Дворца Советов (1939) – Free PDF Download

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The Archetype of Stalinist Architecture - The Palace of the Soviets

Continuing our theme of the decline of architecture, literature, and the visual arts under Stalin, it is perhaps appropriate to post here a document that was printed in order to educate the public on the proposed architectural design of  the building.  The Architecture of the Palace of the Soviets (Архитектура Дворца Советов) was intended to accomplish this task.  In it, numerous architects, some of them having formerly belonged to the now-vanquished Soviet avant-garde, sing the praises of this bizarre, wedding-cake blend of monumentalist gigantism and neoclassical stylization (the columns and lavishly-decorated façades).  Some, like Vladimir Paperny, have suggested that Stalin himself might have had a hand in its design, personally stepping in to oversee the realization of Iofan, Fomin, and Shchuko’s abominable vision.  Considering the sheer monstrosity of the final structure, it is not too unlikely that this might have been the case.  Either way, below you can download a free .pdf file copy of the 1939 text, which sadly includes a declaration from the once-great architectural modernist Nikolai Miliutin written in in support of the final proposal:

Архитектура Дворца Советов (1939)

And the following is a Stalinist propaganda film made a year before this text, in 1938, called New Moscow (Новая Москва), which features both the interior and exterior of the proposed building:

Anti-Constructivism in the Soviet Avant-Garde: Nikolai Dokuchaev and ASNOVA

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Nikolai Ladovskii's Rationalist Metro Station in Moscow (1931)

Not all of the early Soviet architectural avant-garde was “Constructivist,” strictly speaking.  Though this was the title often generically ascribed to all modernist architecture coming out of Russia, only those pieces produced by the architectural group OSA can be considered constructivist.  OSA’s self-proclaimed position was that of constructivism, which was founded on the principle of the “functional method” of design, as Ginzburg and the Vesnin brothers described it.

An earlier avant-garde group, ASNOVA, had been founded in 1923 by Nikolai Ladovskii, Nikolai Dokuchaev, Vladimir Krinskii, and El Lissitzky (though Lissitzky spent most of his time abroad).  This school of architectural thought was deeply informed by the principles of abstract Suprematism in painting, the style invented by Kazimir Malevich some years before.  In fact, Lissitzky’s PROUN series led directly into his architectural phase of production.

As opposed to the Constructivists in OSA, which was founded two years later (in 1925), the premise of architectural Rationalism, as it came to be called, was formalistic, rather than functional.  The members of ASNOVA appealed to evidence gleaned from the study of psychotechnics, a science imported from Germany and America, to claim that certain formal shapes and patterns of design had a direct effect on the psychology of those who viewed the structure of a building.  Once these formal principles could be discerned, they could be used to produce an ideological effect, lifting viewers out of their state of false consciousness and inspiring their participation in the construction of the new society.

Nikolai Dokuchaev was, next to Ladovskii, the main theoretical exponent of Rationalism in architecture.  With Lissitzky in Germany, working on periodicals like G, ABC, and Merz, and the majority of Krinskii’s time devoted to teaching and designing new projects, it fell to Dokuchaev and Ladovskii to explicate ASNOVA’s programmatic stance.  In the following series of articles, taken from the early Soviet periodical Советское искусство (Soviet Art), Dokuchaev compares the Soviet Constructivist architecture of the OSA group with architectural parallels he sees in the capitalist West.  He criticized the Constructivists’ “functional method,” equating it with the spare style of Functionalism that was prominent in Germany at the time.  Then, in a later article, published in the journal Строительство Москвы (Building Moscow) [the issue is reproduced in full], Dokuchaev lays out his proposal for the Socialist city of Magnitogorsk, one of the first of many experimental cities that were planned to be built.

These articles and the one complete issue can be downloaded below:

Николай Докучаев – «Современная русская архитектура и западные параллели» (part 1) – Советское искусство – (1927) – â„– 1

Николай Докучаев – «Современная русская архитектура и западные параллели» (part 2) – Советское искусство – (1927) – â„– 2

Строительство Москвы – (1930) – â„– 4

“The Green City” of Moscow, 1930

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Mel’nikov’s Proposal for the Laboratory of Sleep (1930)

Included in this post is the original issue of Building Moscow (Строительство Москвы), in which the general planning schemes for the proposed “Green City” of Moscow were submitted. Contributors to this competition included some of the premier architects and city-planners of the day: Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch of OSA, Nikolai Ladovskii of ARU (a splinter group of ASNOVA), and Konstantin Mel’nikov, who was more of an independent (his membership in the different avant-garde architectural societies of the day varied over time).

The plans were wildly ambitious, and, unfortunately, none of them were realized. Nevertheless, the ambition and utopianism of their proposals remain as fascinating and haunting today as ever. Haunting, because these plans were so crudely shoved aside by Kaganovich and the Stalinist bureaucracy — because the ideas survived as artifacts long after their potential for realization had passed, because their fantasy has since outlived history and continues to linger over it, like a ghost. Thus, the fact that these science fictions were discarded, placed on the Hegelian “slaughterbench of history,” did not mean that they altogether vanished without a trace. They survive, spectrally, as testaments to a society that could have been.

The extraordinary ambitions of the Soviet planners were declared unrealistic and impracticable. And indeed, given the Soviets’ technological and material limitations at that time, they may well have been impossible. But such a verdict has often been passed on past visions of the future, and utopian speculation in general. Yet the modernists who took part in this competition felt that such utopianism was not only warranted, but required by a revolutionary society like the Soviet Union. Under capitalism, they argued, utopianism was a waste of time and impossible to realize. Now that the October Revolution had overturned these social relations, however, utopia was at last realizable, and so fantastic visions of the future were at last justified.

In any case, this issue contains Ginzburg and Barshch’s reproduction of their famous Disurbanist scheme for the Green city, which they had first unveiled in an issue of Modern Architecture (Современная архитектура) a month before. It also includes Mel’nikov’s mysterious and intriguing proposals for a “Laboratory of Sleep,” an “Institution for the Transformation of the Perspective of Man,” and a “Sonata of Sleep.” Ladovskii’s project for “the rationalization of rest and socialist living” saw him experimenting with his notion of a parabolic city within the municipal limits of Moscow. The rationalization of rest and sleep were indeed very important when it came to the Green City; Le Corbusier mentioned over and over his delight at the Soviets’ abolition of the seven-day week, replaced now by a five-day cycle of working for four days and resting on the fifth.

Below is the original issue, digitized and restored to the best of my ability from the microfiche copy:

Строительство Москвы – (1930) – â„– 3

Mikhail Okhitovich, Moisei Ginzburg, and Disurbanism

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Public-House for 100 People (1930)

According to legend, the Soviet sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich wandered into the VKhUTEIN (ВХУТЕИН) studios one day in the summer of 1929.  He left after a short while, having only been noticed by a few students and instructors.  Okhitovich returned the next morning, this time storming directly into the office of the esteemed Constructivist architect and theorist, Moisei Ginzburg.  Okhitovich then promptly locked the door, sequestering the surprised Ginzburg and himself inside the office.  Ginzburg, whose work had hitherto mainly been focused on the problem of the collective dwelling and its place in the modern city, was known to have been an enthusiastic supporter of Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme.  In fact, he had personally translated extracts from Corbusier’s book on city-planning for the inaugural issue of Sovremennaia arkhitektura (Современная архитектура) in 1925.  After an hour and-a-half of heated discussion, however, Ginzburg emerged from his office with Okhitovich a convinced Disurbanist.  The suddenness of his conversion was stunning.  He would later suffer a great deal of criticism for his perceived fickleness in this matter.  But Ginzburg would remain committed to the Disurbanist vision despite pressure from his friends and colleagues (Sabsovich and the Vesnin brothers) to revert to his earlier position.  Ginzburg only relinquished his allegiance to this philosophy of decentralization after Stalin’s government stepped in and put a stop to all this “utopian” speculation, as they called it.

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A Few More Issues of Строительство Москвы

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Here are a few more issues of Строительство Москвы:

Строительство Москвы – (1929) – â„– 5

Строительство Москвы – (1929) – â„– 6

Строительство Москвы – (1930) – â„– 6