15 | November | 2010 | The Charnel-House

Advertisement on the back of Современная архитектура — (1929) — № 5

This post is dedicated to Owen Hatherley of the blog Nasty, Brutalist, and Short, the Kosmograd newsfeed, Doug Spencer of the Critical Grounds blog, the brilliant Vladimir Paperny (for his help and insight), and anyone else who’s interested in Marxism and modernist architecture:

First, I would like to apologize to everyone who follows my blog for the long absence. The reason I’ve been gone the last two weeks is that I’ve been meticulously putting together some PDFs of the early Soviet architectural journal Modern Architecture, the main periodical published by the Constructivists in OSA. Needless to say, this was an extraordinarily time-consuming process. Nevertheless, I am hoping to return to posting fairly regularly, and to write a long-delayed contribution to Renegade Eye.

Modern Architecture was edited by Moisei Ginzburg and the Vesnin brothers, until Roman Khiger took over in 1928, and was throughout the leading architectural avant-garde journal in the USSR. From February 1926 to the end of 1930, six issues of the journal were published annually. It provided an outlet for architectural theory and design for both Soviet and Western European architects, pursuing a distinctly internationalist program of design. The journal was unfortunately shut down toward the beginning of 1931, replaced by the All-Union journal Soviet Architecture, which gradually shifted in the direction of neoclassicism.

The following are nearly full-text PDF versions of some of the journal’s most outstanding issues, capturing almost its entire run. As the gaps will suggest, the following issues are missing: 1926, № 2; 1927, № 4/5; 1928 № 2 & 5. In addition, I mostly just included those pages which have sizable blocks of text in them, or which form part of an article in the journal. Many of the pages that were solely devoted to illustration have been omitted. This is because the focus of my research is centered on the writings of the modernist architects more so than their designs. Still, Modern Architecture was fairly text-heavy, and most of the time at least two-thirds of each issue are reproduced, along with images.

The images comprising the pages of each PDF were gathered from photos I took of the various issues, which I then edited and rearranged. The quality of the images varies, though they get notably clearer toward the end. Part of this owes to my own lack of skill as a photographer, and the other part to the notoriously poor quality of early Soviet print. Every page has been cropped, rescaled, and clarified as much as possible, before finally being run through some Cyrillic text-recognition software. Some sections remain difficult to read, however, and are not quite as reliable. Even for those who don’t read Russian, they still are worth taking a look at, if only for the masterful layout designed by Aleksei Gan.

And so, without further ado:

1926

Современная архитектура — (1926) — № 1

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 2 (missing)

Современная архитектура — (1926) — № 3

Современная архитектура — (1926) — № 4

Современная архитектура — (1926) — № 5/6

1927

Современная архитектура — (1927) — № 1

Современная архитектура — (1927) — № 2

Современная архитектура — (1927) — № 3

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 4/5 (missing)