B. Mikhailov, Bear in Space: How he flew [Б. Михаилов, Медведь в космос: Как летал], (1970)

Image: The book’s cover

Moscow, 1970.

The Soviet Union, having all but dominated space exploration for over a decade — launching the first earth satellite in October 1957, putting the first man (Iurii Gagarin, April 1961) and woman (Valentina Tereshkova, June 1963) in space — now seems to have been eclipsed by the United States in the race to the moon.  Though not an insignificant logistical and engineering feat, this can’t help but feel somewhat lackluster when compared against the more coveted “firsts” the USSR already accomplished.  Moscow all but shrugs its shoulders.

So what is the Soviet response to the USA’s belated boast of rocketry?

1970BearInSpace03

B. Mikhailov, Bear in Space: How to fly [Б. Михаилов, Медведь в космос: Как летал], 1970

Simple: Медведь в космос.

For those who don’t read Russian, it’s Bear in Space, a picture book by Boris Mikhailov for children.  Clearly, Moscow is unimpressed.

Bear with bird, hedgehog, and helpful mice prepare for liftoff

Bear with bird, hedgehog, and helpful mice prepare for liftoff

Besides being bizarre and incredibly cute, this book is semi-instructional.

Thanks to the excellent Dreams of Space blog for posting these images.  Add/follow this blog, immediately.

Self-explanatory

Self-explanatory

Also, a headless mouse.  Enjoy!

Images

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Soviet avant-garde architectural negatives (mid-1920s to early-1930s)

Blueprint abstractions (all blueprints, really, are anticipatory abstractions) of modernist building projects by Soviet architects Ivan Leonidov, Leonid Vesnin, Aleksandr Vesnin, and Nikolai Krasil’nikov.

From Sovremennaia arkhitektura [Modern Architecture], 1930 (no. 5, pgs. 2-3):

In publishing projects for the Palace of Culture to be built on the Simonov Monastery site as discussion material, the editors of SA observe that not one of them provided a generally and entirely satisfactory solution to the problem. The arguments which have developed around these projects in the press, higher education establishments, and in public debates have mainly emphasized the design submitted by I. Leonidov, and as a result have come to assume the character of an undisguised persecution and baiting of the latter.

The editors of SA are perfectly well aware of the shortcomings of certain of I. Leonidov’s projects: ignoring the economic situation today at the same time as indulging in certain elements of aestheticism. All these features are undoubtedly a minus in Leonidov’s work.

Architectural blackprints.

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But the critics of Leonidov’s work totally fail to see what from our standpoint is a great plus in it, which for all these shortcomings makes it in certain respects better and more valuable than the work of his competitors.

…The editors of SA, whilst recognizing that some of the accusations made against him are correct (abstractness, schematicism, etc.) consider that despite this the works of Leonidov are highly valuable as material of an investigative and experimental character, and they most forcefully protest against the groundless persecution of him.

Signed,
The editors of Modern Architecture.

Ivan Leonidov, Sketches for City of the Sun

Ivan Leonidov’s late series on Campanella’s City of the Sun (1940s-1950s)

after Tommaso Campanella

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Leonidov’s late work, inspired by Campanella’s famous utopia:

The greater part of the city is built upon a high hill, which rises from an extensive plain, but several of its circles extend for some distance beyond the base of the hill, which is of such a size that the diameter of the city is upward of two miles, so that its circumference becomes about seven. On account of the humped shape of the mountain, however, the diameter of the city is really more than if it were built on a plain.

It is divided into seven rings or huge circles named from the seven planets, and the way from one to the other of these is by four streets and through four gates, that look toward the four points of the compass. Furthermore, it is so built that if the first circle were stormed, it would of necessity entail a double amount of energy to storm the second; still more to storm the third; and in each succeeding case the strength and energy would have to be doubled; so that he who wishes to capture that city must, as it were, storm it seven times. For my own part, however, I think that not even the first wall could be occupied, so thick are the earthworks and so well fortified is it with breastworks, towers, guns, and ditches.

When I had been taken through the northern gate (which is shut with an iron door so wrought that it can be raised and let down, and locked in easily and strongly, its projections running into the grooves of the thick posts by a marvellous device), I saw a level space seventy paces wide between the first and second walls. From hence can be seen large palaces, all joined to the wall of the second circuit in such a manner as to appear all one palace. Arches run on a level with the middle height of the palaces, and are continued round the whole ring. There are galleries for promenading upon these arches, which are supported from beneath by thick and well-shaped columns, enclosing arcades like peristyles, or cloisters of an abbey.

City of the Sun (Civitas Solis, Город солнца)

Continue reading

A younger, beardless Manfredo Tafuri

“Il socialismo realizzato e la crisi delle avanguardie,” by Manfredo Tafuri

A fairly rare, untranslated article by Manfredo Tafuri on the crisis of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union.

Italian translators welcome! Jasmine Curcio, I’m looking at you.

[scribd id=126848164 key=key-m8mpkza4mqu2i7gjih0 mode=scroll]

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

Hi-resolution images

Untitled.
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

Ivan Leonidov

These are some utopian sketches and plans by Soviet avant-garde architect Ivan Leonidov.  Here’s a defense of Leonidov’s work against some of the criticisms leveled against it by the rationalist Nikolai Dokuchaev, written up by his fellow constructivist, Aleksandr Kuzmin:

Projects may be criticized in various ways.  Amongst the critics of Leonidov’s projects there is a category of architects who, whilst understanding and recognizing the great importance of the projects to the development of a genuinely contemporary architecture, try by all means fair and foul to discredit them.

True, for all who understand this, such manoeuvers appear dismal and trite.  But unfortunately they do not all understand this.  They do not all see clearly that the heart of the problem can all too easily be littered up with scientific rubbish; not everyone sees that there are very few true theorists of architecture on the pages of our magazine, but a lot of reporters who jump from one case to another and are helplessly attacking issues which are beyond their capabilities.  In just this way Professor Dokuchaev writes in the journal Building Moscow (and when not being unduly familiar, he is incoherent), in an attempt to shape public opinion on Leonidov’s work. 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

[vimeo 58960386]

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.

“Interview with Anthony Paul Smith on the slow reception of philosopher François Laruelle,” by C. Derick Varn

Originally posted on The (Dis)Loyal Opposition to Modernity.

Ross Wolfe: When I first began blogging in the summer of 2008, “speculative realism” and “object-oriented ontology” (still as yet largely undifferentiated) was on the rise.  Taylor Adkins contacted me about providing some insight into the German philosophical references used by François Laruelle in his “non-philosophy.”  I provided one brief commentary, having come out of a recent engagement with German Idealism via Dieter Henrich and Brady Bowman.  I’m still very ambivalent about Laruelle’s ideas, insofar as I pretend to understand them, though I find his critique of the common “Greco-Occidentalist” threads in the post-Hegelian “philosophies of difference” intriguing and appreciate Ray Brassier’s contributions that rely on Laruellean concepts.

[C Derick Varn: Anthony Paul Smith is a scholar and blogger for An und für sich. He came to my attention by a web seminar I “attended” on the philosophy of François Laruelle and non-philosophy which I attended.   I have since read his translations of Principles of Non-Philosophy (with  Nicola Rubczak)  and Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy both out with Continuum. While still trying to wrap by head around the implications of Laruelle, I also wondered why Laruelle has taken so long to catch on compared to many of his contemporaries like Badiou, Derrida, and Deleuze. ]

C. Derick Varn: Why do you think Laruelle has been slow to be introduced to the Anglophone world?

Anthony Paul Smith: Regarding your first question, I taught at DePaul University as an adjunct for a year bouncing between the departments of Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, and Philosophy. During that year Alan D. Schrift came and presented a paper to the philosophy department. You may know that he’s editing a pretty comprehensive history of Continental philosophy and I jokingly asked him about why he hadn’t included Laruelle in his history. After explaining that he didn’t really know anyone who worked on him, it didn’t come to mind and whatever, he did tell me that he thought Laruelle was one of those figures who just fell through the cracks. If things had gone a little differently, he said, or someone had picked up a text to translate in the 70s or 80s, who knows if he would have been picked up. I didn’t get the impression he particularly liked Laruelle or anything, but he did bring out for me the contingency of these sorts of things. I mean, there are lots of brilliant thinkers in the world and some of them are exceedingly smart. But in the same way we pass homeless people and think that there is some perfectly good reason why that’s him and not me, I think as readers of philosophy we just assume that there is a really good reason we all keep talking about Derrida or Deleuze or Badiou or even Meillassoux now (just to stick with some sort of contemporary names). So that is clearly part of it, just an accident of history. At the same time his work and the language he uses to express it are difficult and I think this has put off a number of potential translators. I always wondered why Ray Brassier, for example, never translated one of his works, even one of the shorter ones, considering his own skills in that area. But he has tended to go with relatively more straight forward writers like Badiou and Meillassoux. But that’s the real issue — the lack of anything of his to read unless you’re willing to track down the French and work through it in a language unfamiliar to most Anglophone readers.

C.D.V.: Do you think Laruelle’s linkage to Ray Brassier’s work and also to Badiou has limited his reading in the US and Europe?

A.P.S.: As for Laruelle being linked to Brassier’s work, I don’t know if it has limited his reading. Brassier really was the first person to advocate for him in his Radical Philosophy article. At the same time, I think that Brassier’s own development (which is ongoing as far as I understand) did really color how many younger readers ended up reading him. There was a certain assumption, since many of them weren’t reading the primary sources I don’t think, that Laruelle shared Brassier’s antipathy for the human, for religion, for meaning, even for a vision of science that isn’t itself colored by a certain grimness and darkness. I think with Laruelle’s own texts starting to finally be available in English this is starting to fade away, which means many of those first-generation of readers have moved on from Laruelle finding his work concerned with issues they are not. But, I think we are seeing new readers, many coming from the arts, and I’m looking forward to conversations that do build off of Laruelle’s actual work rather than Brassier’s. I should say, I think Brassier was always quite clear that he had found something  useful in Laruelle, that he wasn’t just explicating him. And I think we see some of the harshest criticism of Laruelle, if respectful, in the chapter of Nihil Unbound where Brassier deals with him. Continue reading

Chernikhov's dark turn

Iakov Chernikhov’s sepulchral city

The dark turn in Chernikhov’s late works,
the architectural necropolis
after the onset of Stalinism

Almost gothic.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.  —Conrad, The Heart of Darkness

МСВТ, о.п. Площадь Революции

Children of Iofan: Post-Soviet futuristic nostalgia

Stunning designs by architect S.V. Lipgart.

Enjoy! Continue reading