Lidiia Komarova, architectress of the Soviet avant-garde

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Lidiia Komarova
is one of my favorite architects of the Soviet avant-garde, even if the vast majority of her work was, as with so many others, never realized. She was a student Ladovskii and Dokuchaev in the “rationalist” camp of ASNOVA for most of the 1920s, but eventually migrated over to “constructivist” school of OSA headed by Ginzburg and Vesnin by the close of the decade.

Her drawings, models, and floor plans were some of the best to come out of VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN during its brief ten years of existence. They stand as a testament to what once seemed imaginable, even in an economically impoverished, technologically backward country encircled by its would-be gravediggers.

Very few of her designs ever saw the light of day, as was stated earlier, and none of her more modernist compositions. Continue reading

Architecture in revolutionary times

Parallels after Emil Kaufmann

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Image: “Le Corbusier in Boullée” by Romeo D’Orazi

Determining the relation of architecture to revolution clearly depends in no small measure on how these terms are defined. Before revisiting this familiar counterposition, however, it is worth noting that revolutionary politics makes up only one part of politics proper. Even if one were to grant architecture some kind of inbuilt political status, this by no means guarantees the politics it embodies are of the revolutionary variety. Architecture can for instance be politically reformist in character, as in Ernst May’s Neue Frankfurt settlement or Walter Gropius’ Törten district outside Dessau, Karl Ehn’s iconic Karl Marx-Hof block in Red Vienna, and JJP Oud’s Spangen/Kiefhoek estates in Rotterdam.[1] In the last few decades, critical regionalists such as Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis, and Lilliane Lefaivre have likewise spoken of “an architecture of resistance,” understood as “a cultural density which under today’s conditions could be said to be potentially liberative in and of itself.”[2] Despite its many outspoken adherents, practical examples of critical regionalism are harder to come by than those associated with interwar Sozialpolitik.[3] Most of the time it’s tended to emerge alongside movements struggling for autonomy against neoliberal integration, as in Catalonia, Scandinavia, and the Baltics during the ’70s and ’80s. But objections have been raised even on purely theoretical grounds.[4]

So much for the architectures of resistance and reform. Is there, then, an architecture of revolution? Certainly, some have made the case that there is. Foremost among them is the Viennese art historian, Emil Kaufmann, who in his 1952 study Three Revolutionary Architects: Boulée, Ledoux, and Lequeu described these most radical bourgeois architects of the French Enlightenment as “men imbued with the great new ideals set forth by the leading thinkers of the century [who] strove, unconsciously rather than intentionally, to express these ideals in their own medium.”[5] Though the actual basis for this correlation is never spelled out in detail, inferred from a shared emphasis on the idea of “autonomy,”[6] Kaufmann’s chief merit consists in precisely this intuition of a nonsensuous similarity between the philosophic and architectonic modes of its expression. At times he came close to discerning its sociopolitical root. “Having lived in the atmosphere of growing political and social discontent,” Kaufmann wrote, “the revolutionary architects wished to realize, for the common good, the ideals of the time by contriving architectural schemes such as had never existed before.”[7]

Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s Monument to the revolution (1791)

Two aspects of Kaufmann’s classic account of revolutionary architecture deserve to be mentioned. First, there is the procedure he adopts in attempting to situate architecture and revolution. Rather than assume direct correspondence between them, either according to a linear model of cause and effect or a reciprocal model of mutual causation and effectuation, Kaufmann suggested a more circuitous and indirect link. In other words, architecture neither brings about revolution by itself nor prevents it from coming about, and vice versa. Still less could the matter be resolved simply by asserting that they simultaneously codetermine one another. Kaufmann instead contended the apparent isomorphism of moral and architectural conceptions of autonomy during this period arose out of their common participation in its revolutionary Zeitgeist.[8] A materialist would only add that this radical spirit of innovation he perceived was but the ideological reflection of real historical dynamics. Continue reading

Nikolai Ladovskii’s studio at VKhUTEMAS (1920-1930)

With an original translation
of Ladovskii’s 1921 program

Untitled.
Image: Photograph of Nikolai Ladovskii
during his professorship at VKhUTEMAS

untitled2.

Special thanks are due to Monoskop for pointing out to me a number of new images, as well as to TotalArch for providing Selim Khan-Magomedov’s selected Russian text online to translate for this post.

Nikolai Ladovskii and students at VKhUTEMAS, 1922

Nikolai Ladovskii and students at VKhUTEMAS, 1922

“On the program of the working group of architects” (1921)

The task of our working group is to work in the direction of elucidating a theory of architecture. Our productivity will depend on the very rapid articulation of our program, on clarifying the investigative methods to be used and identifying the materials we have at our disposal to supplement the work. The work plan can be broken down into roughly three basic points:

I) aggregation of appropriate theoretical studies and existing theories of architecture of all theoreticians,
II) excavation of relevant material from theoretical studies and investigations extracted from other branches of art, which bear on architecture, and
III) exposition of our own theoretical perspectives to architecture.

The result of these efforts must be the compilation of an illustrated dictionary that establishes precisely the terminology and definitions of architecture as an art, its individual attributes, properties etc, the interrelation of architecture with the other arts. The three elements of the work plan relate, in the case of the first, to the past, to “what has been done”; in that of the second, to the present, and “what we are doing,” and in that of the third, to “what must be done” in the future in the field of theoretical justifications of architecture. A commission, which might be necessary to set up for the program’s elaboration, must build upon the foundations we have suggested.

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The Soviet Moment: The Turn toward Urbanism, the Crisis in the West, and the Crossroads of the Architectural Avant-Garde in Russia

Ivan Leonidov, proposal for a section of Magnitogorsk (1930)

Introduction to Part Two of The Graveyard of Utopia: Soviet Urbanism and the Fate of the International Avant-Garde

The Soviet architectural avant-garde was never as unified as its counterparts in the West.  Almost from the moment of its emergence in the early 1920s, its members were divided along theoretical and methodological lines.  The two main currents of modernist thought on architecture in the Soviet Union could not come to terms over which positive basis of the new architecture held primacy over the others.  One side upheld the formal properties of abstract art as the prime determinant of avant-garde architectural practice; the other side stressed the functional properties of the machine as its foundation.  A similar tension was always latent in modernist architecture internationally, but in no other nation did there result a full-on split like the one experienced by the Soviet avant-garde.  The two competing tendencies were organized into the groups OSA and ASNOVA, as mentioned previously,[1] though subsequent schisms would also occur.  These groups respectively identified themselves as Constructivists (disparagingly dubbed “functionalists” by their opponents) on the one hand and Rationalists (disparagingly dubbed “formalists” by their opponents) on the other.  Though no equivalent rift ever formed within the other national avant-gardes, the Soviet example serves to highlight some of the internal contradictions that existed in modernist ideology as a whole.

German Building in the USSR (1929)

Ernst May’s proposal for the city of Magnitogorsk (1931)

Though the modernist architects in the USSR were fully conversant with avant-garde developments in the West, this was the fractured and fragmented theoretical landscape on which their European and American colleagues would have to stake out their positions.  With the global crisis of capitalism in 1929 and the crisis of parliamentary democracy in the West — along with the ominous rise of ultranationalist (fascist) sentiments in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain — many architects outside the Soviet Union looked to the young socialist state as a beacon of hope in an increasingly dark world.  As fortune would have it, the Soviet government was launching its revolutionary program of centralized planning and deliberate industrialization just as the international avant-garde was starting to expound its theories of urban planning post-1925.  The Soviet Union seemed to offer an unprecedented opportunity to the modernists.  It presented a vast canvas onto which the architects could project their most utopian ambitions.

The New Russia, a German periodical (1928)

Mart Stam’s blueprints for Makeevka (1932)

Here, the inherently totalizing aspect of modernist architectural thought was first made manifest.  As the members of the avant-garde began to extrapolate their theories of urbanism from first principles, they came to a deadlock over which particular vision to follow.  While many of the foreign architects were invited to the Soviet Union in order to negotiate some of these impasses, they often found it difficult to make such compromises themselves.  New fissures surfaced as longstanding alliances between certain architects broke down.  Meanwhile, Russia’s technological deficit and relative paucity of advanced building materials led to insurmountable obstacles, preventing the practical realization of the modernists’ plans.  Even more troubling was a cultural shift that was taking place within the Soviet Union, as some of the more radical and novel forms introduced by the modernists in literature and the arts were condemned as “bourgeois” and illegible to the working masses.  The logic of this shift may have owed to a dynamic intrinsic to Russian culture, as Paperny has suggested,[2] but if so, I would like to advance the hypothesis that this occurred mainly as a consequence of the failure of social revolutions to spread in the West following World War I.  If socialism had been established on a more international basis, it is perhaps possible that the peculiarities of Russian culture might not have imposed their logic so unilaterally.  This is, of course, a counterfactual speculation, and it is admittedly a dangerous business to insinuate what alternate historical sequence might have resulted had things only played out differently.  Nevertheless, it is not a point of too much controversy to assert that the USSR’s political isolation had something to do with the grim turn of events that took place for the modernist enterprise in that country.  Also, it should not be thought impossible that some of the cultural binaries that Paperny locates within Russian history (horizontal/vertical,[3] uniform/hierarchical[4]) might not have reflected — or even been reinforced by — broader social binaries emerging out of the dialectical development of global capitalism (such as the spatiotemporal dialectic we have hitherto identified).

OSA’s proposal for Magnitogorsk, by Moisei Ginzburg, Mikhail Okhitovich, and Mikhail Barshch (1930)

Ivan Leonidov – Magnitogorsk Proposal (1930)

Either way, it is crucial to review some of the proposed solutions to the question of planning in the Soviet Union advanced by the international avant-garde, insofar as they sought to address the social problems that so preoccupied them — the housing shortage, the liberation of woman, urban alienation, the antithesis of town and country, and man’s greater estrangement from nature.  Even if these plans were never realized, even if their blatant utopianism foreclosed any possibility they might have possessed from the start, the fact that they were ever imagined at all is itself significant.  For no such visions of an ideal world had ever been dreamt up on such an extraordinary scale: from Plato to More and Campanella, from Renaissance sketches of the città ideale to the fantasies of Boullée and Ledoux, to Owen’s New Harmony, Fourier’s phalanstère, and beyond — never had these propositions amounted to anything more than idle thought experiments or modest programs for single cities existing in isolation from the rest of society.  “[The utopians] still dream of an experimental realization of their social utopias, the establishment of individual phalansteries, the foundation of home colonies, the building of a little Icaria — pocket editions of the new Jerusalem,” wrote Marx and Engels, in their famous Manifesto.[5]  Such utopias were doomed to fail, they argued, as they simply fled from bourgeois society rather than try to overcome it.  By the 1920s and 1930s, however, the Bolsheviks had seemingly uprooted capitalism in Russia, and the rest of the world still appeared ripe for revolution (especially with the onset of the Depression).  For with the maturation of capitalism over the latter half of the nineteenth century, utopia had now been reimagined on a global scale, reflecting at once the real commercial and economic interdependence of nations as well as socialist theories of world revolution.  H.G. Wells expressed this succinctly in his famous Modern Utopia (1905):

No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a modern Utopia.  Time was when a mountain valley or an island seemed to promise sufficient isolation for a polity to maintain itself intact from outward force; the Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensive war, and the New Atlantis and the Utopia of More in theory, like China and Japan through many centuries of effectual practice, held themselves isolated from intruders.  Such late instances as Butler’s satirical “Erewhon,” and Mr. Stead’s queendom of inverted sexual conditions in Central Africa, found the Tibetan method of slaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple, sufficient rule.  But the whole trend of modern thought is against the permanence of any such enclosures…A state powerful enough to keep isolated under modern conditions would be powerful enough to rule the world, would be, indeed, if not actively ruling, yet passively acquiescent in all other human organizations, and so responsible for them altogether.  World-state, therefore, it must be.[6]

Nikolai Ladovskii’s dynamo-“parabolic” vision of “New Moscow”

Andrei Burov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Le Corbusier (1928)

A Modern Utopia, which in many ways marked the culmination of the series of utopian novels that started in the last decades of the nineteenth century, envisioned the world that was already beginning to emerge around Wells.  This world stood in stark contrast to the ones portrayed in previous utopias, especially in that it was all-encompassing.  It did not admit of localization; nothing could rightfully stand outside of it.  Thereby mirroring the abstract, globalizing spatiality of capitalism, the planetary scale of modern utopianism was combined with the social mission of modernist architecture in its ambition to reshape all of society.  Though Stalin already formulated the notion of sotsializm v’odnoi strane (“Socialism in One Country”) by 1924,[7] the architectural avant-garde within Russia and without retained its commitment to internationalism.  As Paperny has rightly observed, “‘Workers of the world unite!’ — this Marxist slogan, written in Culture One [Paperny’s term for avant-garde culture] on the covers of nearly all architectural publications (and totally absent from that venue in Culture Two [Paperny’s term for Stalinist culture]), indicates that the idea of the international unity of a single class clearly dominated in Culture One over the concepts of either national or state unity.”[8]  The last traces of this celebrated slogan from the end of the Manifesto only disappeared in 1934 from the covers of the popular architectural journals Building Moscow and Architecture of the USSR (successor to the 1931-1934 union journal Soviet Architecture, itself the successor to the iconic 1926-1930 Constructivist periodical Modern Architecture).

Plan for “New Moscow” (April 1929)

Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch, Disurbanist scheme for a linear city (1930)

The ultimate collapse of the avant-garde project in the Soviet Union, symbolically marked first by the outcome of the 1932 design competition for the Palace of the Soviets and capped off by the expulsion of all foreign architects in 1937, signaled the demise of one important dimension of modernist architecture.  The social mission that had provided the avant-garde with such positive momentum in its early years was now abandoned.  Its fascination with the forms of industrial engineering and abstract composition remained, but its sense of duty to redress social grievances (or to even fundamentally transform society) vanished.  Curtis makes the following remark regarding this point: “The modern movement was a revolution in social purpose as well as architectural forms.  It tried to reconcile industrialism, society, and nature, projecting prototypes for mass housing and ideal plans for entire cities.”[9]  Following the Soviet fiasco and the general hiatus of new construction up through the end of the Second World War, this feeling of social purpose had evaporated.  Already by 1960, Banham could take stock of the way that modern architecture had come to be perceived as part of the armature of Fordist administrative capitalism.  “[I]f the [modern] style has finished up as the architecture of anonymous corporate domination,” reminded Banham, “it is worth remembering that this was not how it started out.”[10]  It is the thesis of the present study that the modernists’ experience in the USSR, the Soviet moment, marked the pivotal turning point in this development.


[1] See page 6 of the present paper.

[2] The principal focus of Paperny’s brilliant Culture Two is on the structural opposition of two patterns operative within Russian culture, which can be identified with the “avant-garde” 1920s and the “Stalinist” 1930s-1950s: “The concept of Culture One is constructed here primarily based on materials from the 1920s, whereas Culture Two is based on materials from the 1930s to 1950s.”

However, Paperny identifies these two cultural patterns as broader tendencies within Russian history as a whole, extending back at least as far as the ascension of the Muscovite principality in the sixteenth century: “The juxtaposition of Cultures One and Two is a convenient way to describe the events that transpired in the same space but at different times.  This work voices that a certain portion of the events in Russian history (including events having to do with changes in spatial conceptions) can be described in terms of an alternation of the ascendancy of Culture One and Culture Two.  Therefore, because I wish to trace a unifying principle throughout history, my attention is primarily focused on the territory of the Muscovite State under Ivan III, and especially Moscow.”  Paperny, Vladimir.  Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two.  Translated by John Hill and Roann Barris in collaboration with Vladimir Paperny.  (Cambridge University Press.  New York, NY: 2002).  Pg. xxiii.  Originally published in 1985.

[3] Ibid., pgs. 44-69.

[4] Ibid., pgs. 70-103.

[5] Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party.  Pg. 28.

[6] Wells, H.G.  A Modern Utopia.  (University of Nebraska Press.  New York, NY: 1967).  Pgs. 11-12.

[7] “[T]he theory that the victory of socialism in one country is impossible, has proved to be an artificial and untenable theory.  The seven years’ history of the proletarian revolution in Russia speaks not for but against this theory.”  Stalin, Iosif.  “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists? [Preface to a book On the Road to October].”  Translator uncredited.  Collected Works, Volume 6: 1924.  (Foreign Languages Publishing House.  Moscow, Soviet Union: 1954).  Pg. 414.

[8] Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two.  Pg. 44.

[9] Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900.  Pg. 15.

[10] Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age.  Pg. 9.

Models and Sketches from Nikolai Ladovskii’s Studio at VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN (1922-1930)

The following models and sketches were produced by students at VKhUTEMAS (1921-1928) or VKhUTEIN (1929-1930), under the supervision of Nikolai Ladovskii, in his famous classes regarding architectural problems and formal solutions, unbound by physical constraints.  Though I will not be adding captions for each individual piece, I will say that they are in roughly chronological order:

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

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

Adolf Behne’s The Modern Functional Building (1926)

 

 

The Original Cover to Behne’s Book, Featuring El Lissitzky’s “Cloudprop”

 

Foreword

Man’s primordial reason for building is to protect himself against the cold, against animals, against enemies.  He is driven by necessity: he would not build were it not for definite, compelling, urgent purposes.  His early buildings are purely functional in character; they are in their nature essentially tools.

But when we study the earliest stages of human culture, we find that the instinctive joys of play cannot be separated from practical matters.  Primitive man is not strictly utilitarian.  He demonstrates his instinct for play even in his tools, which he makes smooth and beautiful beyond the demands of strict necessity, painting them or decorating them with ornaments.

The tool called “house” is no exception to this.

From the very beginning the house has been as much a toy as a tool.  It is difficult to say how long a balance was maintained between the two poles.

In the course of history we only rarely find such a balance.

The play instinct led to interest in form.  Without that instinct it would be impossible to understand why the tool called “house” must look good and be a certain shape.  Thus our play instinct established certain laws of form, although they are subject to change from time to time.

The laws of form did change periodically.  But if laws of form were unquestionably the secondary element in the origin of all building, they became the stronger, stricter, more rigid principle in the history of human building — stronger, stricter, and more rigid than mere fulfillment of utilitarian function.  Formal considerations outweighed considerations of purpose.

Thus a return to purpose is always revolutionary in its effect.  Forms that have become tyrannical are discarded in order to create — from the recollection of the original function, from as neutral a condition as possible — a rejuvenated, living, breathing form.

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