They still radiate the future

Introduction

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Last night I went to see a preliminary screening of Isabella Willinger’s newly-released documentary Away from all suns. Sammy Medina of FastCo, with whom I frequently collaborate, and Anna Kats of ArtInfo were also in attendance. 
The movie was being shown as part of  Tribeca Cinema’s “Architecture and Design Week,” an event sponsored by Archtober and a host of other companies/publications (far too numerous to name). Her film focuses on three contemporary individuals whose lives are somehow connected to utopian modernist buildings slowly decaying in Moscow. One building, Ivan Nikolaev’s student commune (1929), is currently being renovated. Another, El Lissitzky’s printing factory, is in danger of being torn down. Yet another, Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’ Dom Narkomfin, is left in a general state of disrepair. Stunning archival footage is mobilized to juxtapose these buildings’ original state against their current dilapidation.

Hopefully I’ll be writing up a review of the film and pitching it to Art Margins or Calvert Journal, so I’ll spare the reader any further thoughts of my own. What follows is an interview with the director Isa Willinger conducted by Boris Schumatsky. It’s being reposted here from the film’s official website. Willinger expresses some sentiments in this exchange that more or less approximate statements that writers like Owen Hatherley, Douglas Murphy, Agata Pyzik, and myself have voiced in the past, independently of or in close dialogue with one another — nostalgia for an age we never knew, awe before the ruins of a past seemingly more futuristic than our own, hope against hope that radical transformation might yet be possible. The line from Willinger I paraphrased for the title of this entry runs as follows: “Many of [these Constructivist buildings in Moscow] are quite run down today, yet they still radiate their futuristic visions.” It recalls, consciously or not, something Owen Hatherley wrote about Il’ia Golosov’s Zuev Club nearby:

The windows might be infilled, the balconies long since disappeared ⎯ what all this damage proves is that buildings with this much power and conviction can still carry you away with them. Or it carries me, anyway. I look at this and I can still feel radiating off the bloody thing the promise of a better society.

Below you can watch a trailer of the film, followed by the edited transcript of the interview.

Away from all suns (2013)

Isa Willinger interviewed
by Boris Schumatsky

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Boris Schumatsky:
 Your film is about people living in buildings of the Russian avant-garde and about the buildings themselves. You seem to be just as fascinated by the buildings as by your protagonists. What is it that struck you about the Constructivist buildings?

Isa Willinger: To me the buildings seem like ruins from another future. I spent some time in Moscow some years ago and on my walks through the city I discovered these exceptional buildings. They really stick out from the rest of Moscow’s city landscape. Many of them are quite run down today, yet they still radiate their futuristic visions. This, of course, is a stunning paradox: Something is from the past and at the same time it seems from the future.

Boris Schumatsky: Can you tell us about the background of Constructivism?

Isa Willinger: The term was first applied to the abstract works of art by Tatlin, Malevich, Popova, Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and others in the 1910s and 1920s. Soon, the artists’ works transgressed the boundary between geometrical shapes on paper or canvas and architectural drawings toying with those shapes. The first Constructivist buildings were built in the mid 20s only, due to a lack of resources in early Soviet Russia. The Constructivist movement was infused with the hopes of socialist revolution, overcoming a repressive tsarist regime, and building a better, more modern society. Continue reading

The Mel’nikov house [Дом Мельникова]: A retrospective evaluation

An embarrassing admission: I’ve never been too keen on the Mel’nikov house.

This may seem odd coming from someone who just signed a petition calling for the preservation of Mel’nikov’s works and heritage. Not least among these is his famous house, which the experts say is presently “under threat.” A campaign to restore and maintain the aging structure — spearheaded by a talented young photographer currently residing in Moscow, Natalia Melikova — has already managed to muster a great deal of publicity. Coverage of this effort has not been limited to Russian press, either, though several articles have recently appeared in well-established news outlets like Известия (an old heavyweight, now in an online edition). Even before they began reporting in the vernacular, however, Sophia Kishkovsky ran a story on it for The New York Times‘ ArtBeat section back in April.

Unsurprisingly, the motion to preserve the Mel’nikov house has enjoyed an outpouring of support from a number of high-profile scholars and architects. Many readers of this blog are no doubt that my own stance on this issue has been one of deep ambivalence, despite my reluctant signature and endorsement of the letter. Basically, my reservations were as follows:

As a student of history and a great admirer of Mel’nikov’s architectural corpus (built and unbuilt), I am of course in favor of maintaining and restoring the many iconic examples of his work that remain. But knowing that pitiless, unsentimental attention to the demands of technical turnover and the imperative to overturn obsolescence formed part and parcel of the worldview animating Soviet modernism, it is impossible to deny the irony of the wish to preserve buildings that no longer serve any meaningful function — except, perhaps, as a physical reminder of the project that was once underway in Russia. Nothing would seem so preposterous to an avant-garde architect of the time than to cling to the past out of melancholy or nostalgia, let alone museumify it.

Whatever the reasons or principles I invoked, these are not the subject of today’s post. Just having stumbled upon a trove of rare images showing the building’s plan, a bisectable small-scale model of its proportions, and some rare photographs of its construction and eventual realization, I thought I’d post them along with some reflections on its strengths and weaknesses vis–à–vis housing projects by other architects of that time, as well as its place within Mel’nikov’s own corpus. Since I suspect my opinion belongs to that rather tiny, discordant minority of Soviet architecture geeks who don’t instantly kvell over the Mel’nikov house, we’ll first offer an expiation in advance of the outrage that might follow. And so, without any further ado, here are some of the plans and sketches for the house.

Plans, paintings, sketches

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Enough already: What’s not to like about the Mel’nikov house? Continue reading

Period photographs of Soviet avant-garde built exteriors, 1926-1934

Hi-resolution images

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Image: Nikolai Trotskii,
Stachek region (1933)

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Alesei Shchusev, hotel in Sochi, USSR (1928)

Alesei Shchusev’s hotel in Sochi, USSR (1928)

Just a couple remarks in prefacing these breathtaking photos, nearly all of which have never appeared online.  Even those that have aren’t available on anywhere near the scale or resolution as they are here.  In the past I’ve often posted pictures — sketches, blueprints, proposals, models, etc. — of Soviet modernist structures that were never built, whether they simply could not have been built at the time (given the material, technological, and industrial limitations of the Soviet Union in the 1920s or 1930s) or were abandoned or rejected.  But the focus of this post is on those buildings that were actually built; more specifically, their exterior aspect.  These period photographs should attest to the built legacy of the early architectural avant-garde in the Soviet Union, even if the window during which such pieces of architecture could have been realized was extremely brief. Continue reading

Narkomfin

Video: ДОМ НОВОГО БЫТА (Dom Novogo Byta)

Re:centering periphery 2 – Moscow

A film by OginoKnauss
Directed by Manuela Conti and Lorenzo Tripodi

With:

Roman Sinitcin as Michail Bulgakov´s reader
Ekaterina Milyutina,
Valentin, Nikita, Zhenia and other residents of the Narkomfin Building
Alexei Senatorov, owner and CEO at MIAN Real Estate
Elena Olshanskaya, Resident of Zhourgaz House and campaigner for the preservation of EL Lissitsky’s Printing Plant.

Script: Lorenzo Tripodi
Cinematography: Manuela Conti
New York assistant: Nicola “Teach” Guarneri
Sound design and recording: Francesca Mizzoni
Editor: Manuela Conti
Moscow executive: Anastasia Volkova
Russian Translation: Liliana Polyanska
Text revision: Paul David Blackmore, Mike James.
Narrator: Lorenzo Tripodi
Voice recording: Gino Roberti / joprec
Software programming and internet application: Sergio Segoloni / k-labo

ДОМ НОВОГО БЫТА
(Dom Novogo Byta)

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Dom Novogo Byta is a new stage into the investigation led by Ogino:knauss on how Twentieth century’s modernist principles shaped the everyday life of urban dwellers, and what is their heritage in a global urbanization perspective. Invited by the “RKM-save Urban Heritage” campaign for the preservation of constructivist architecture to produce a piece for an art exhibition, the collective landed in Moscow in 2009 to shot a video installation. This film is the diary of our journey chasing the remnants of the extraordinary utopian season of the avant-gards and confronting with the contemporary reality of post-communist Russia. It adopts as a vantage point of the shanty Narkomfin building, hardly surviving today in a central plot of land appealing for real-estate speculators. Designed in 1927 by Moisei Ginzburg this is one of the earlier projects to absorb Le Corbusierian modernist principles. It was a prototype for revolutionary communes to come, aimed at reforming the everyday life of Russian citizens together with their spatial environment, but its utopian aims were soon annihilated by the rise to power of Stalin. From the story of the Narkomfin, the film progressively divagates into the imagined landscapes promoted by propaganda, finally getting lost in the inhuman periphery of the new mass urbanization.