modernism

Models of Soviet avant-garde architecture

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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).

Яков Чернихов, «Архитектурные фантазии: 101 композиция» (1925-33) — Along with fully searchable, downloadable PDFs of the original Russian texts

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Forty-five sketches by the brilliant former Suprematist painter and visionary architect Iakov Chernikhov, all composed between 1925-1933 and published together in his book Architectural Fantasies: 101 Compositions.

For any of my readers who know Russian, please feel free to download the full-text, searchable PDFs of these brilliant texts:

Memories of the future

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After Krzhizhanovskii

Untitled.
Image: Recent picture of
Dom Narkomfin (2011)
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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.

The idea of a prelapsarian past, of the “good old days” before everything went wrong, proves just as problematic. Not by chance does the imagery used to depict this past recall biblical overtones. Make no mistake of it: this is Eden before the Fall, the paradise of a blinkered naïveté — those carefree days before humanity dared to taste the fruit of knowledge. Trying to locate the precise moment at which things took a turn for the worse is trickier than it looks, however. As suggested earlier, this past stands at a far greater remove from the present than the chain of presents that expired not too long ago.[3] Its reality recedes into the mists of prehistory. Continue reading →

Ruins of the future

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Riffing on some lines from the inimitable Owen Hatherley:

Erase the traces.

Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1929)

Destroy, in order to create.

Hallway inside Narkomfin building, photo by Liza Dedova (February 2011)

Build a new world on the ruins of the old.

Hallway of Narkomfin, photo by Max Semakov (April 2009)

This, it is often thought, is the Modernist imperative, but what of it if the new society never emerged?

Narkomzem building, designed by Aleksei Shchusev, Dmitrii Bulgakov, Iosif Frantsuz, Grigorii Yakovlev; photo by Max Semakov (April 2009)

We have been cheated out of the future, yet the future’s ruins lie about us, hidden or ostentatiously rotting.

NCSR, Commissariat of Communications, designed by Ivan Fomin (1928-1931); photo by Max Semakov (April 2009)

So what would it mean, then, to look for the future’s remnants?

Tsentrosoiuz building, designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Nikolai Kolli (1928-1933), photo by Max Semakov (April 2009)

To uncover clues about those who wanted, as Walter Benjamin put it, to “live without traces”?

Souvenir of the Crystal Palace (built 1851, destroyed by fire 1936)

Can we, should we, try and excavate utopia?

Le Corbusier painting in the nude at Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027

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Plus, the story behind
his nasty leg scar

Untitled.
Image: Le Corbusier painting a fresco in the nude
at Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027 (Summer 1939)
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Shirtless Corbu relaxing at Villa E-1027

Shirtless Corbu relaxing at Villa E-1027

I didn’t know about this until just now.Le Corbusier apparently got the scar while swimming in Saint-Tropez bay in 1938. He’d been staying at the architect Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027. He got trapped under a yacht’s propeller-blades as it passed over him. As he lated recounted the incident in a letter to his mother, in his characteristically clinical tone:

The motor going at 200 horsepower — a good clip.

Le Corbusier in Saint-Tropez bay (1938)

Le Corbusier in Saint-Tropez bay (1938)

Needless to say, his right leg got terribly mangled. Apparently he remained remarkably calm, however, even while losing a ton of blood. From that same letter:

After the first turn of the blades, I was thrown out of the circuit and seemed not to have been hurt. I reached the surface, and breathed air. I hadn’t swallowed a drop of water. I saw the boat gliding slowly away. I shouted: “Hey, wait a second, you went right over me, there may be some damage!” Quite automatically my hand went to my right thigh, my arm fitting nicely inside. I looked down: a big area of blood-red water, and half my thigh floating like a ray (the fish!), attached by a narrow strip of flesh: “Throw me a buoy, I’m badly hurt.”

The yacht headed toward me, throwing me a sort of rope knot too big to be held in one hand. The side of the yacht was too high for anyone to help me. “Throw a lifesaver.” It comes, and I sit inside it. And here are some fishermen coming into port; their boat is low, they hold out their hands, and I give them my left hand, because I’m holding my thigh together with my right; we reach the place I started from, on the breakwater; I get up on the jetty; a kind driver appears out of nowhere and helps me sit down beside him. The fisherman gets in the backseat. Hospital. They put me on the table and begin sewing me together. This lasts from six to midnight, in two sessions.

Le Corbusier and his wife along with Romanian architectural critic Jean Badovici at Villa E-1027, photographed by the Irish modernist Eileen Gray

Le Corbusier & wife w/ Romanian architecture critic Jean Badovici at Villa E-1027, photographed by Irish modernist Eileen Gray

After recovering, Le Corbusier set about making some “alterations” to Gray’s design at Villa E-1027. Gray was none too happy about the liberties he took with her visual and conceptual schematization of the villa. You can read more about it here.

Vladimir Maiakovskii’s “The Flying Proletarian”

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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.

The ultra-Taylorist Soviet utopianism of Aleksei Gastev

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Including Gastev’s landmark book
How to work/Как надо работать

Untitled.
Image: From the USSR to America,
the chronometric revolution (1925)
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Futuristic drawing of Aleksei Gastev by Tolkachev (1924)

Download Алексей Гастев - Как надо работать (1923) [Aleksei Gastev – How to Work]

The following are excerpts from my thesis on the scientific management of labor and psychotechnics in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s.

Arsenij Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens

The Constructivists’ goal to rationalize artistic labor and thus enter life can be traced to the early Soviet intellectual fascination with the Taylorist industrial theory of scientific management. As was covered in the previous section, American Taylorism exerted an influence throughout the European world of modernist art and architecture. However, the especially central role it played through its reception and dissemination in the Soviet Union warrants further contextual reflection. For the Soviet architectural avant-garde did not simply absorb the influence of Taylorism through its mediation by the Constructivists in art, but also directly from a number of academic sources as well. Taylorism was enthusiastically embraced in the USSR by many in the revolutionary intelligentsia and even some leading Bolsheviks, including Trotskii and Lenin himself[562] (despite his 1914 article “Taylor’s System: The Enslavement of Man to the Machine”). It was mostly popularized by writers like Osip Ermanksii[563] and later advocates of the Scientific Organization of Labor (abbreviated NOT [for Nauchnaia organizatsiia truda]) like the poet and factory worker Aleksei Gastev. Gastev was the founder and, from 1920 to 1937, the director of TsIT (Central Institute of Labor). TsIT was dedicated to the improvement of industrial efficiency. Under Gastev, its official philosophy was that of Taylorism. He was doubtless the most passionate exegete of Soviet Taylorism. For Gastev, Taylor was modern industrialism’s greatest theoretician, and Henry Ford its greatest practitioner. Ford was a heroic figure for many in the Soviet Union during the 1920s for his contribution to assembly-line production and his rationalization of labor practices. Gastev, however, took this much further, going so far as to align Ford with Karl Marx as compatible (and indeed complementary) thinkers in his 1927 article “Marx and Ford.”[564] For reasons that will be discussed later, Taylorism and machine-worship was stronger in Russia than in Western Europe. As the Hungarian academic René Fülöp-Miller keenly observed, “[i]n contrast to the intoxicated enthusiasm with which Russians speak of the application of the mechanizing process to the whole of existence, Europeans describe the invasion of their life by technical elements in a completely skeptical fashion.”[565]

Motion tests, TsIT (1924)

Motion tests, TsIT (1924)

The choreography of labor: TsIT cyclograph testing motive efficiency

The Constructivists’ artistic and architectural appropriation of Taylorism in large part came by way of Gastev. Indeed, Gastev’s significance as an interlocutor can hardly be overstated, since it was his own distinctive interpretation of Taylor that so lent itself to modernist aesthetics. It was his fanatical promotion of its aspects of automation and mechanization, emerging out of a decidedly Futurist Weltanschauung, that made it a vital contribution to the early Soviet cult of the machine. He advocated “systematic planning,” the “chronometration [khronometrirovanie] of time” through the introduction of time cards, and an “automated uniformity of labor” through that standardization of the most efficient laboring motions.[566] Addressing the workers’ relation to industrial machinery, Gastev wrote:

The modern machine…possesses its own laws of pulsation, functioning, and relaxation — laws that do not stand in conformity with the rhythm of the human organism. The world of the machine, the world of mechanical equipment [oborudovaniia] and urbanized labor [trudnogo urbanizma], produces specially connected collectives, begets certain types of people. These are people who we must accept, just as we accept the machine, though we must not smash their heads on its gears. We must bring some kind of equalizing coefficient into the machine’s iron disciplinary pressure, though history insistently demands we pose these not as petty problems of the social protection of the individual personality [lichnosti], but rather the bold engineering [proektirovaniia] of human psychology according to such an historical factor as machinism.[567]

Motion tests, TsIT (1923)

Motion tests, TsIT (1923)

Cover page of Aleksei Gastev’s “Kultures” (Kharkhov 1923), along with a futuristic representation

In training workers, reasoned Gastev, “[w]e begin with the most primitive, the most elementary motions and carry out the mechanization of man himself. This mechanization we understand in the following manner: the less perfect the motion, the greater the element of deceleration and the less kinetic automatization. The perfect mastery of a given movement implies maximum automatization.” Furthermore, “[t]his principle of the mechanization or biological automatization [of man] must go very far, all the way to his so-called mental activity.”[568] Notice also, then, that here psychology is encompassed by biology (or physiology). Continue reading →