“The Green City” of Moscow, 1930

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) – № 3

Le Corbusier’s “The Atmosphere of Moscow,” along with His Letter to Ginzburg on Deurbanization

Barsch and Ginzburg, Proposal for the Green City (1930)

From Le Corbusier’s Precisions on the Present

State of Architecture and City Planning (1930)

*****

I am not trying to learn Russian, that would be a wager.  But I hear people saying krasni and krassivo.  I question.  Krasni means red, krassivo means beautiful.  Before [the Revolution], they say, the terms meant the same: red and beautiful.  Red was beautiful.

If I base myself on my own perceptions, I affirm: red is what is a living being, life, intensity, activeness; there is no doubt.

So naturally I feel I have the right to admit that life is beautiful, or that the beautiful is life.

That little linguistic mathematics is not so ridiculous when one is preoccupied with architecture and planning.

*****

The USSR has decided to carry on a general program of equipment for the country: the five-year plan.  It is being carried out.  It was even decided to concentrate the greater part of the product of present work on carrying out this program: that is why there is no longer any butter on the spinach here,nor any more caviar in Moscow; the savings are used to make foreign exchange.

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