Here are a few more issues of СтроительÑтво МоÑквы:
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1929) – â„– 5
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1929) – â„– 6
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1930) – â„– 6
utopia
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы/Building Moscow Explained, Plus Some More Issues
Diagram for the Proposed Reconstruction of Moscow
 СтроительÑтво МоÑквы, pronounced “Stroitel’stvo Moskvy,” was a Soviet journal published from 1924-1941. In the first couple years of its existence, its focus was primarily on the construction industry and its activities in Moscow, talking about city renovation following the end of the devastating Civil War. Its articles during this period were of a mostly journalistic nature, reporting recent developments and discussing new building proposals. One section toward the end was usually reserved for a “Chronicle of Foreign Technology,” in which new technological achievements in the West were detailed.
Around 1927, however, the focus of the journal shifted to more theoretical matters, absorbing some of the avant-garde influences of magazines like SA, which was reflected by some of the more programmatic articles it featured. The nature of modern architecture was discussed, in a way that was slightly more inclusive than the strictly Constructivist SA, under the editorship of Ginzburg and the Vesnins (and later Khiger). Nikolai Ladovskii published several articles in Building Moscow, as well as his protégés Krutikov and Krasil’nikov. Some of the more traditional, academic architects were also able to publish during this period.
Between 1929 and 1931, the subject of greater city planning was introduced to the journal, with a great deal of attention devoted to the plans to reconstruct Moscow, overseen by Stalin’s henchman Kaganovich. The competition for the design of the Palace of the Soviets, planned for construction right outside the Kremlin, was also a major subject dealt with by Building Moscow. After 1932 or so, with the results of the competition in, the journal slowly began to drift into a neoclassicist direction, where it would remain until it ceased publication in the leadup to war with Germany in 1941.
Anyway, here are another few issues of the journal, of a more avant-garde and theoretical flavor, talking about urbanism and design:
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 5
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 6
Digitizing Microfiche: СтроительÑтво МоÑквы и другие СоветÑкие журналы об архитектуре (Building Moscow and other Soviet Journals about Architecture)
Aleksandr Sil'chenkov's Proposal for the "House of Industry" Project, 1929
Another long overdue update. My two-month absence can be explained by a series of personal matters to which I’ve had to attend, as well as by an exceedingly laborious part of my research in which I’ve been involved. This post will share some of the fruits of that labor, however, providing a sneak-peak into some of the subjects I’ve been working on. I flatter myself to think that I am also hereby contributing to the further democratization of knowledge, freeing long-forgotten documents from their obscurity in old libraries and distant archives. But the truth is that I have been the beneficiary of so much of the work undertaken by people with similar motives, scanning valuable documents and thereby disseminating their information, that I feel this is the least I could do.
Cutting to the matter at hand, the files attached to this post are just some of the old avant-garde journals which I’ve been carefully converting to a readable PDF format, in full-text versions that include illustrations as well as raw text. The difference between these files and the ones I digitized from Ð¡Ð¾Ð²Ñ€ÐµÐ¼ÐµÐ½Ð½Ð°Ñ Ð°Ñ€Ñ…Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐºÑ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð° late last year is that I actually never encountered the physical documents that I was working with. These rare documents were only accessible to me in microfiche and microfilm format, preserved as part of Columbia University’s and the New York Public Library’s effort to catalogue early Soviet periodicals. Some of these microform documents were in good condition, with minimal dust and other imperfections. Others, unfortunately, were not.
To briefly describe the process by which I digitized these journals (for those who might be interested or are perhaps considering similar work), I shall here sketch out the major steps it involved. First, I had to create a makeshift light-table separate from the actual microform scanners at the library, which tend to produce extremely shoddy and unreadable facsimiles. I then proceeded to photograph each individual frame of microfilm or microfiche with a digital camera. I personally do not own a camera with a very high-resolution optical lens (this requires something like a 40-100x zoom), so I instead removed one of the detachable high-zoom lenses from one of the scanners and then shot my own pictures at my camera’s maximum zoom through this second lens. Anyone who has better equipment than I did can easily bypass this step.
It took a while to get used to taking good shots of each individual frame, but once I had gathered all of them I loaded them onto my computer and began running them through image-processing software. The number of programs I ended up using, which probably could be simplified by anyone who knows how to work with images better than I, included Aperture, Photoshop, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). If anyone is interested in the actual adjustments I made to each file to render them more readable, they can inquire in the comments section. I shall spare my readers these boring details. Anyway, clarifying the text portions of these journals I found often distorted the images that appeared alongside them, and so I decided to process each page with images twice, once for the images and once for the text. I then mapped on some cleaned-up versions of the pictures onto the cleaned-up texts and ran the resulting images through the ABBYY FineReader text-recognition program.
The final product of this whole confounded process can be found below. Enjoy! More will be coming soon. I’ve catalogued the entire run of СтроительÑтво МоÑквы from 1926-1932, СоветÑÐºÐ°Ñ Ð°Ñ€Ñ…Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐºÑ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð° from 1931-1934, and a number of assorted articles relating to architecture from the journals СоветÑкое иÑкуÑÑтво, Плановое хозÑйÑтво, and Ð ÐµÐ²Ð¾Ð»ÑŽÑ†Ð¸Ñ Ð¸ культура. They shall be forthcoming. Here are some of the ones I’ve finished so far:
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 9
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1931) – â„– 8
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1930) – â„– 1
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1929) – â„– 1
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 4
СтроительÑтво МоÑквы – (1928) – â„– 2
The Major Works of Iakov Chernikhov
Many thanks to Arch-Grafika.ru/ for making available the following major works of the famed Russian avant-garde architect Iakov Chernikhov, which I have converted into PDF form and rendered searchable:
1. Яков Чернихов — 101 Ð°Ñ€Ñ…Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐºÑ‚ÑƒÑ€Ð½Ð°Ñ Ñ„Ð°Ð½Ñ‚Ð°Ð·Ð¸Ñ (1927) [101 Architectural Fantasies]
2. Яков Чернихов — ОÑновы Современной Ðрхитектуры (1930) [The Fundamentals of Modern Architecture]
3. Яков Чернихов — КонÑÑ‚Ñ€ÑƒÐºÑ†Ð¸Ñ Ð¼Ð°ÑˆÐ¸Ð½Ð½Ñ‹Ñ… и архитектурных форм (1933) [The Construction of Machine and Architectural Forms, of which I have recently posted an excellent full-text translation by the late Catherine Cooke]
An additional thank you to Arch-Grafika for crediting my work in uploading Izvestiia ASNOVA.
Ernst May, “City Building in the USSR†(1931)
Ernst May and collaborators, “The General Plan of Magnitogorsk — a settlement for 150,000 inhabitants attached to the Magnitogorsk industrial complex†(1931)
From Das Neue Rußland, vol. VIII-IX. Berlin, 1931:
City Planning in Evolution
If there is any one area of endeavor in the USSR where the Revolution is still in full motion, then city building and dwelling construction must be considered first. This is not surprising, for the replacement of a thousand-year-old social system by a new one is a process that will take more than just a dozen years to complete, or even to provide a clear and unequivocal direction. Moreover, since the thorough reorganization of the the entire social life of the USSR, which covers on sixth of the land area of our globe, will vitally affect city development and housing everywhere, it follows that within the context of this general process of change it is at the present moment impossible to offer a panacea that would suddenly cure all the many ills accumulated over centuries and bring about immediate mature results.
Nevertheless, a number of theories have been advanced and are in hard competition with each other. Some have been published abroad, and this in turn may have led to the impression that it is only these that represent the mainstream of Russian city planning. Nothing could be more misleading!
So far there has been no firm commitment to one or the other system of city planning, and by all indications no such commitment should be forthcoming in the near future. This does not mean that the field is dominated by a lack of planning or by arbitrariness. The basic precepts of modern city planning, which in the past years have found wide acceptance in Europe, and which are now being implemented, have become the A to Z of planning in the USSR as well. Clear separation of industry and residence, rational traffic design, the systematic organization of green areas, etc., are considered as valid a basis for healthy planning there as here; similarly, open-block planning is giving way to single-row building.
The Central Problem of the Socialist City
However, even though the general principles for the planning of Socialist cities have been established, the real problem is only beginning. In other words, a city structure will have to be developed that in terms of its entire genesis as well as in terms of its internal articulation and structuring will be fundamentally different from the capitalist cities [189] in the rest of the world. While our own cities in most cases owe their origin to commerce and the market place, with private ownership of land largely determining their form, the generating force behind the development of new cities in the Soviet Union is always and exclusively industrial economic production, regardless of whether in the form of industrial combines or agricultural collectives. In contrast to prevailing practice in Europe, and with particular reference to trends in the USA, building densities in Soviet cities are not influenced by artificially inflated land values, as often happens in our case, but solely by the laws of social hygiene and economy. In connection with this it should be pointed out most emphatically that the word ‘economy’ has taken on an entirely new meaning east of the Polish border. Investments, which in a local sense may appear to be unprofitable, become convincingly [190] viable when seen from the vantage point of over all national planning by the state.
At this point I should like to point out most emphatically that among the innumerable misjudgments made abroad, none is more incorrect than that which assumes that work in the field of city planning and housing in the USSR is done without rhyme or reason, and that the ground has been cut out from under their feet. The truth is that the economic and cultural reconstruction of all life in the USSR has no parallel in the history of mankind. It is equally true that this reconstruction is being accomplished by a sober evaluation of all the realities, and it should be obvious to any observer that in each successive stage, matters recognized as desirable and ideal are being consciously subordinated to matters that are feasible and possible within the limitations of the present. In the course of this discussion I shall return to this point on appropriate occasions.
Iakov Chernikhov’s Principles of Modern Architecture (1930)
Browsing the Russian search engine Ð¯Ð½Ð´ÐµÐºÑ for information about Iakov Chernikhov, I came across an online copy of his 1930 book, Principles of Modern Architecture (ОÑновы Ñовременной архитектуры). It’s free to browse in its entirety.
Enjoy!
The transformation of utopia under capitalist modernity
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IMAGE:Â Ivan Leonidov’s
City of the Sun (1940s)
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Utopianism has always involved the imagination of a better world, a perfected society set against the imperfect society of the present. Whether as an object of speculative philosophical reflection, a practical program for social transformation, or an idle daydream, utopia has always evinced the hope that reality might be made ideal.
Underneath this general rubric, however, “utopia†can be seen to signify several related but distinct things. The term is commonly used to refer to that literary genre, deriving its name from Thomas More’s eponymous Utopia, which depicts various “ideal commonwealths.†Beyond this meaning, many commentators have identified these literary utopias as belonging to a broader impulse that exists within the very structure of human experience, of which they are but one expression.[1] Karl Mannheim, for example, described utopianism as a mentalité, writing that “[a] state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs…and at the same breaks the bond of the existing order.â€[2] Others have linked the idea of utopia to more metaphysical foundations, explaining how the condition for the possibility of utopia is carried by the category of possibility itself. Understood in this way, a utopia could be an alternate social configuration that is imaginable either as a pure fantasy wholly apart from existing conditions, or as one that is potentially viable, somehow implied by those same conditions.[3] The former of these constitutes an abstract or merely logical possibility, whereas the latter represents a concrete or real possibility.