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The most breathtaking of all constructivist projects has to be the Gosprom complex (or “Palace of Industry”) in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. There can’t have been anything else of this scale and ambition anywhere else in Europe at the time: indeed, it resembles more some particularly ambitious work of the late 1960s than the mid-twenties, an unacknowledged prototype of that sixties motif, the elevated walkway, the street in the sky. Constructed between 1926 and 1928, apparently by volunteers from the local Komsomol, this is Metropolis — or Aelita — actualized. Concrete and glass blocks from 7 to 13 storeys connected by skyways, curving round a huge public square, this resembles a small city in its own right. Its designers, Serafimov, Kravets, and Felger, appear to have been as obscure at the time as they have been since, yet only an El Lissitsky, a Gropius, or a Corbusier were designing anything as ambitious in 1926. Eisenstein and Vertov both used it on film (The General Line and Three Songs of Lenin, respectively), aptly, as the contrasts, angles and multiple levels had spatial affinities to their montage techniques: more literally, Friedrich Ermler used it in Fragment of Empire, a communist Rip van Winkle tale, as exemplar of the incomprehensible new world that the sleeper awakes to.
(From Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism)
> El 11/07/2015, a las 03:49, “The Charnel-House” escribió:
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Very interesting!
The Marxist economist Henryk Grossman, then resident in Frankfurt am Main, participated in a tour of the Soviet Union in 1932. He was (sadly) very impressed. I wondered why he attended discussions at the Gosplan (the central planning agency) offices in Kharkov, rather than Moscow. The Stalinist regime’s effort to impress and duchess visitors with this complex is probably the explanation.
The pics of horses in front and involved in the construction of the building reveal a lot about the nature of Stalinist industrialisation.
Reblogged this on @phorismes and commented:
Impressionnante architecture, visible dans La Ligne générale, de Sergueï Eisenstein, 1929, et Trois chants sur Lénine, de Dziga Vertov, 1934.
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