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In­tro­duc­tion

Ig­or Dukhan
Be­lor­usian State
University, 2013
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Vic­tor Car­pov be­longs to that rare breed of con­tem­por­ary schol­ars who have pre­served the “pure prin­ciples” of such Rus­si­an art the­or­ists as Al­ex­an­der Gab­richevskii, Vassilii Zubov, and Aleksandr Rap­pa­port and linked them with the West­ern meth­od­o­logy of ar­chi­tec­tur­al ty­po­logy, drawn from the work of Joseph Ryk­wert, Gi­ulio Carlo Ar­gan and oth­ers. He is a seni­or fel­low of the In­sti­tute for the The­ory and His­tory of Ar­chi­tec­ture and Urb­an Plan­ning in Mo­scow and one of the lead­ing ar­chi­tec­tur­al thinkers in Rus­sia today.

The pa­per “Ty­po­logy and Ideo­logy: Moi­sei Gin­zburg Re­vis­ited” was pub­lished in 2013 in the magazine Aka­demia: Arkhitek­tura i Stroitel­stvo [Aca­demia: Ar­chi­tec­ture, and Con­struc­tion] and was based on a lec­ture, first presen­ted at the con­fer­ence “Style and Epoch,” which was or­gan­ized by the Aleksei Shchu­sev State Mu­seum of Ar­chi­tec­ture in co­oper­a­tion with the In­sti­tute for the The­ory and His­tory of Ar­chi­tec­ture and Urb­an Plan­ning, and ded­ic­ated to the cen­ten­ary of Moi­sei Gin­zburg’s birth. This pa­per is closely con­nec­ted with Vic­tor Car­pov’s en­tire re­search in­to the evol­u­tion of ar­chi­tec­tur­al ty­po­logy, which cel­eb­rated an im­port­ant step in con­tem­por­ary post-Heide­g­geri­an ar­chi­tec­tur­al the­ory.

Already in his dis­ser­ta­tion of 1992, the au­thor con­sidered the his­tory of ty­po­lo­gic­al think­ing in ar­chi­tec­ture from Vit­ruvi­us to the late twen­ti­eth-cen­tury ar­chi­tects and the­or­ists (Saverio Mur­atori, Gi­ulio Carlo Ar­gan, Aldo Rossi, Joseph Ryk­wert, Rob and Léon Kri­er and oth­ers). Later, an in­terest in ty­po­lo­gic­al (that is, on­to­lo­gic­al and pre-lin­guist­ic) think­ing in ar­chi­tec­ture — which might be called ar­chi­tec­ton­ic think­ing per se — led him to Al­berti and oth­er her­oes of ty­po­lo­gic­al think­ing in ar­chi­tec­ture in es­says in­clud­ing “Tip-an­ti­tip: k arkhitek­turnoi ger­me­nevtike” [Type-An­ti­type: To­wards Ar­chi­tec­tur­al Her­men­eut­ics] of 1991 (re­vised in 2012).

Photograph of a perspective drawing for the editing block of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of an elevation for the principal façade for the editing block of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of a perspective drawing for the editing block of the Izvestiia newspaper combine with an erased [?] plan, Moscow

Photograph of a perspective sketch for the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of a model for the editing block of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of a model for the club of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of first and second floor plans for the club of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of a plans and perspective sketches for the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

De­vel­op­ing tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of out­lining the ty­po­lo­gic­al ba­sics of ar­chi­tec­ture (like a prim­it­ive hut or the Temple of So­lomon), Vic­tor Car­pov re­cov­ers the pro­to­typ­al, ty­po­lo­gic­al ele­ments of ar­chi­tec­ture in Al­berti. They are: loc­al­ity (re­gio), area (area), di­vi­sion in­to parts (par­ti­tio), wall (par­ies), roof (tectum) and aper­tures (aper­tio). These six ba­sic ele­ments of ar­chi­tec­ture, in their con­struct­ive and on­to­lo­gic­al in­ter­pen­et­ra­tion, with the ground and the heav­ens, en­able us to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from non-ar­chi­tec­ture. The des­tiny of these fun­da­ment­al ele­ments, dis­covered by Al­berti and gradu­ally de­veloped in ar­chi­tec­ture, is stud­ied in Vic­tor Car­pov’s re­cent pub­lic­a­tions, which in­clude the es­say “Up­razh­ni­aia dobro­de­tel v on­to­lo­gii: Ger­me­nevtika pri­roda u Al­berti” [Ex­er­cising Vir­tue in On­to­logy: The Her­men­eut­ics of Nature in Al­berti] of 2009, and oth­ers.

The present pa­per on Moi­sei Gin­zburg ex­am­ines the ty­po­lo­gic­al ar­chi­tec­tur­al think­ing at the core of con­struct­iv­ist meth­od. The “re­volu­tion­ary” sense of this study lies in at­trib­ut­ing to Gin­zburg and Rus­si­an con­struct­iv­ism a dom­in­ant role in the ty­po­lo­gic­al move­ment of mod­ern­ism — a move­ment to­ward the ba­sic ele­ments of ar­chi­tec­ture as such. These as­pects of Gin­zburg and con­struct­iv­ism were just briefly out­lined in the stud­ies of Se­lim Khan-Magomedov, Christina Lod­der, and oth­er dis­tin­guished schol­ars of con­struct­iv­ism. The present pa­per relates to Car­pov’s re­cent con­tri­bu­tion to the theme of ty­po­lo­gic­al strategies of the av­ant-garde, in­clud­ing es­says such as “Mi­fo­lo­giia is­torii: ‘Ar­bor mundi’ versus Dvorets Sov­etov” [“The Myth­o­logy of His­tory: ‘Ar­bor Mundi’ versus the Palace of So­vi­ets”] of 1994.

In the present pa­per, the fig­ure of Moi­sei Gin­zburg ap­pears as the founder of an av­ant-garde ar­chi­tec­tur­al ty­po­logy that re­moves con­struct­iv­ist the­ory and prac­tice from its spe­cif­ic so­cial and artist­ic con­text and el­ev­ates it to a new ar­chi­tec­tur­al ty­po­logy of mod­ern­ism. This search for ty­po­logy re­flects the in­ten­tions that Gin­zburg shared with such av­ant-garde trends as the Su­pre­mat­ist of the “ar­chi­tec­ture of the World sur­face” or Ve­limir Kh­leb­nikov’s use of ar­chetyp­al lan­guage to struc­ture the ar­chi­tec­ture of “Bu­detly­ans” [Fu­turi­ans or Fu­tur­ists] in his po­et­ic­al ima­gin­a­tion. Moi­sei Gin­zburg rep­res­ents the most ar­chi­tec­ton­ic and con­struct­ive mani­fest­a­tion of this av­ant-garde to­po­lo­gic­al/ty­po­lo­gic­al trend.

Ty­po­logy and ideo­logy:
Moi­sei Gin­zburg re­vis­ited

Vic­tor Car­pov
March 2013
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I have vis­ited again…

—Al­eks­an­dr Pushkin¹

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Ra­tion­ally or para­dox­ic­ally, when events cru­cial for the ex­ist­ence and de­vel­op­ment of ar­chi­tec­ture (as a so­cially sig­ni­fic­ant or more mod­estly in­di­vidu­al phe­nomen­on) his­tor­ic­ally co­in­cide and be­come strangely con­nec­ted, they can de­term­ine, on an ex­ist­en­tial plane, not only the fate and vi­ab­il­ity of pro­fes­sion­al ar­chi­tec­tur­al or­gan­iz­a­tions or the des­tiny of an in­di­vidu­al per­son with­in these in­sti­tu­tions, but also, through their agency — the des­tiny of ar­chi­tec­ture it­self. In this re­spect, it is worth ex­amin­ing the fate of Moi­sei Iakovlevich Gin­zburg (1892-1946) as a pro­fes­sion­al fig­ure in the con­text of this para­dox­ic­al his­tor­ic­al per­spect­ive.

In 1992, on the cen­ten­ary of the ar­chi­tect’s birth, it was hard to ima­gine the nature of the his­tor­ic­al changes in so­ci­ety and ar­chi­tec­ture that would oc­cur with­in the space of twenty years. With­in the ex­pan­sion of pro­fes­sion­al activ­ity and the im­plac­able struggle and in­ev­it­able al­li­ance with aca­dem­ic tra­di­tions, the ele­ment­ary prob­lem of style and its re­la­tion­ship to the epoch con­tin­ued to be a prob­lem for Gin­zburg, who was cor­rect to ques­tion the nature of style in its re­la­tion to the mod­ern epoch. Per­tain­ing con­sist­ently to the his­tory of ar­chi­tec­ture and com­ing, from time to time, to the present, the rhythm of his re­turns com­men­sur­ate with cen­ten­ar­ies, Gin­zburg would be right to pose anew a ques­tion of the “style of the epoch” that today is of­ten simplist­ic­ally defined by math­em­at­ic­al ter­min­o­logy as di­git­al. Gin­zburg was deeply con­cerned, in a pro­found on­to­lo­gic­al sense, with the prob­lem of the “style of the epoch,” and this prob­lem once again re­turns to ar­chi­tec­ture, hav­ing nev­er left it, while ar­chi­tec­ture refers to Gin­zburg and lingers there. In its turn, the con­tem­por­ary body of pro­fes­sion­als — for Gin­zburg, “the young and un­known tribe” — em­phat­ic­ally turns to his leg­acy and that of the ar­chi­tects of his circle and gen­er­a­tion, just as they once turned (some­times un­wit­tingly and un­con­sciously) to the prac­tice of their pre­de­cessors.²

Narkomfin in the construction stage, with Moisei Ginzburg supervising (1929)

To a cer­tain ex­tent, any search for a style in ar­chi­tec­ture, art and life re­sembles a con­tinu­al at­tempt to define the es­sen­tial mean­ing of style. The cor­rel­a­tion — sim­ul­tan­eously between schol­arly and cre­at­ive pro­cesses and in­terests, cre­at­ive activ­ity and cul­tur­al and his­tor­ic­al in­ter­pret­a­tion — are evid­ent in the ar­chi­tec­tur­al leg­acy of Moi­sei Gin­zburg. Ac­tu­ally, in prac­tic­al, artist­ic and styl­ist­ic ex­per­i­ment­a­tion, as in at­tempts at his­tor­ic­al, crit­ic­al and the­or­et­ic­al per­cep­tions and ex­plan­a­tions of the prob­lems of style, the artist-ar­chi­tect and re­search­er-in­ter­pret­er more or less skill­fully, and of­ten un­con­sciously, op­er­ate and are ma­nip­u­lated by gen­er­ally ac­cep­ted and re­l­at­ively per­sist­ent his­tor­ic­al-cul­tur­al, philo­soph­ic­al-meta­phys­ic­al, and form­al-artist­ic con­ven­tions, motives and clichés, such as style and the epoch — words used in the title of a book and an ex­hib­i­tion of its au­thor’s work, which took place at the Shchu­sev Mu­seum of Ar­chi­tec­ture in Mo­scow in 1993. Sim­il­arly, Sovre­men­naia arkhitek­tura — Con­tem­por­ary Ar­chi­tec­ture or Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture — is the title of the journ­al pub­lished by the As­so­ci­ation of Con­tem­por­ary Ar­chi­tects as well as the term de­not­ing a broad­er in­ter­na­tion­al move­ment in twen­ti­eth-cen­tury ar­chi­tec­ture. So­viet con­struct­iv­ism, that was born, ac­cord­ing to Gin­zburg, in “an epoch which is doubly con­struct­ive (on the basis of the so­cial­ist re­volu­tion… and on the basis of the un­pre­ced­en­ted growth of tech­no­logy)” can be con­sidered, des­pite some re­ser­va­tions, as an in­teg­ral part of this move­ment.

Para­dox­ic­ally in today’s post- and sim­ul­tan­eously neo-mod­ern­ist epoch, the earli­er purely ideal­ist­ic ques­tion of an “ig­nora­mus,” presen­ted in 1926 be­fore young ma­ter­i­al­ist ar­chi­tects, still sounds per­fectly rel­ev­ant — al­though, as be­fore, ideal­ist­ic: “To what ex­tent is the cul­tur­al con­cep­tion of the epoch em­bod­ied in con­tem­por­ary ar­chi­tec­ture?” Iuda Gross­man-Roshchin, the au­thor of “Notes of an Ig­nora­mus” on the pages of Con­tem­por­ary Ar­chi­tec­ture, demon­strat­ing en­vi­able know­ledge, dis­cussed the ques­tion:

In a not very happy and not very dis­tant time, we were taught in the sol­id words of ar­chi­tec­tur­al teach­ers and in the lan­guage of ar­chi­tec­tur­ally lit­er­ate people the fol­low­ing: “Every build­ing, whatever its destined pur­pose, has the aim of ful­filling our re­quire­ments; these re­quire­ments, thanks to the ma­ter­i­al and spir­itu­al nature of man, are of two types: ma­ter­i­al re­quire­ments and mor­al re­quire­ments.” And fur­ther: “There is even one kind of build­ing, that ful­fills no ma­ter­i­al re­quire­ments, but is erec­ted ex­clus­ively by vir­tue of the spir­itu­al de­mands of the hu­man spe­cies.” I think that I am not mis­taken when I say that mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture struggles with this du­al­ity, that con­tem­por­ary ar­chi­tec­ture fun­da­ment­ally splits the ideal­ist­ic as­pect in­to util­it­ari­an and aes­thet­ic ele­ments.³

To some ex­tent, Gin­zburg’s art­icle “The In­ter­na­tion­al Front of Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture” (1927) provided an an­swer to this ques­tion:

Mod­ern So­viet ar­chi­tec­ture, or at least that as­so­ci­ated with our journ­al, is above all based on a pre­cise ma­ter­i­al­ist meth­od… Our front of mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture is based on the prin­ciple that a com­pleted work of ar­chi­tec­ture, just like any oth­er mod­ern ob­ject, is not a house or an ob­ject to which some kind of aes­thet­ic ad­di­tion has been ap­plied, but a ra­tion­ally and sys­tem­at­ic­ally or­gan­ized con­crete task, pos­sess­ing, in the very meth­od of its or­gan­iz­a­tion, the max­im­um po­ten­tial for its ex­pres­sion.⁴

But the au­thor of “Notes” did not find this to be a con­clus­ive an­swer to his ques­tion:

It would be in­ter­est­ing to know pre­cisely how the ele­ment of plan­ning is mani­fes­ted in build­ings or projects of con­tem­por­ary ar­chi­tec­ture. Least sat­is­fy­ing of all is the ideo­lo­gic­al em­phas­is on strictly util­it­ari­an design. It might be the taste­less re­sur­gence of du­al­ity: a build­ing plus a so­viet-ideo­lo­gic­al an­nex. No. I am in­ter­ested in something else. How is the char­ac­ter of the epoch or­gan­ic­ally “mani­fest” in an ac­tu­al, con­crete ma­ter­i­al­iz­a­tion of an ar­chi­tec­tur­al con­cep­tion? Please note, that in my char­ac­ter of an ig­nora­mus, I am not cri­ti­ciz­ing any­thing, but merely pos­ing ques­tions. Per­haps this ques­tion is in­trins­ic­ally un­reas­on­able. I do not know. The valid­ity of the for­mu­la­tion is partly jus­ti­fied by com­rade Gin­zburg.⁵

This act of ideo­lo­gic­al profan­a­tion of the doc­trine of con­struct­iv­ism in mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture, as­pir­ing to a uni­ver­sal and in­ter­na­tion­al status on the eve of world re­volu­tion, deals with ty­po­logy, but also with ideo­logy, and gen­er­ally — with the style of the epoch and with ar­chi­tec­ture. Ty­po­logy and ideo­logy, as the fun­da­ment­al con­stitu­ent ele­ments of Gin­zburg’s ar­chi­tec­tur­al the­ory, do not merely jus­ti­fy the reas­on for pos­ing the ques­tion. Here ty­po­logy and ideo­logy, as philo­soph­ic­al and meth­od­o­lo­gic­al con­ven­tions and clichés, can be used to the max­im­um, so to speak, against them­selves, in the ty­po­lo­gic­al and ideo­lo­gic­al (con­cep­tu­al) ana­lys­is of con­struct­iv­ism’s func­tion­al meth­od, the nature of the op­er­a­tion and ma­nip­u­la­tion, trans­form­a­tion and de­form­a­tion of tra­di­tion­al ar­chi­tec­tur­al ideas, meth­ods, and types, forms and con­cepts, which to a sig­ni­fic­ant de­gree de­term­ined mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture’s and con­struct­iv­ist ar­chi­tec­ture’s searches for style.

Exterior view of the house-commune for State Insurance (Gosstrakh) employees showing the ground floor under construction, 21 Malaia Bronnaia Street, Moscow

Moisei Ginzburg, Gosstrakh apartment building in Moscow (1926), early photograph

Partial view of the roof garden of the house-commune for State Insurance (Gosstrakh) employees, 21 Malaia Bronnaia Street, Moscow

Moisei Ginzburg, Gosstrakh apartment building in Moscow (1926), early photograph

Vladimirov, V. Exterior view of the house-commune for State Insurance (Gosstrakh) employees showing the ground floor boarded up, 21 Malaia Bronnaia Street, Moscow, 1927 or later

Moisei Ginzburg, Gosstrakh apartment building in Moscow (1926), early photograph

View of a building, Moscow, U.S.S.R. (now Russia)

Moisei Ginzburg, Gosstrakh apartment building in Moscow (1926), early photograph

Today, the an­swer to an­oth­er revered ques­tion of the post- or hy­per-mod­ern­ist peri­od — “When did the mod­ern move­ment in ar­chi­tec­ture be­gin?” — seems to be los­ing its former mean­ing and chro­no­lo­gic­al sig­ni­fic­ance as an ex­actly fixed his­tor­ic­al fact. Are the sources of this idea to be found in the dis­tant, ap­par­ently styl­ist­ic­ally and ideo­lo­gic­ally uni­fied nine­teenth cen­tury, be­gin­ning with the ideas of Wil­li­am Mor­ris and the arts and crafts move­ment, or even earli­er — in the ra­tion­al­ity of neo­clas­si­cism or in renais­sance hu­man­ism? Should two cen­tur­ies of mod­ern ar­chi­tec­tur­al de­vel­op­ment (1750-1950) be re­garded as a single his­tor­ic­al epoch, or is its vi­ab­il­ity lim­ited by the para­met­ers of the sci­entif­ic, tech­nic­al, so­cial and artist­ic re­volu­tions? The fun­da­ment­al ideas, pos­tu­lates, and state­ments of the mod­ern move­ment, as well as its philo­soph­ic­al, so­cial, ideo­lo­gic­al, and uto­pi­an ex­plan­a­tions, are prob­ably rooted in the same his­tor­ic­al and cul­tur­al con­text in which the treat­ise of Vit­ruvi­us and, more pro­foundly, the philo­soph­ic­al sys­tems of So­crates, Pla­to, and Ar­is­totle could be con­sidered mod­ern.

Without re­ject­ing the idea of the gen­er­al pro­gress of hu­man his­tory, des­pite the evid­ent present crisis of the evol­u­tion­ary view of the world, one can agree with Peter Collins that dur­ing the peri­od 1750-1950, new ideas and con­cep­tions not only fol­lowed each oth­er in an evol­u­tion­ary suc­ces­sion of nat­ur­al-his­tor­ic­al de­vel­op­ment and se­lec­tion, but con­stantly ap­peared in vari­ous re­la­tion­ships and dif­fer­ent com­bin­a­tions with the old.⁶ Ac­know­ledging the in­flu­ence of eco­nom­ic, so­cial and polit­ic­al factors on the ob­ject­ive changes in twen­ti­eth-cen­tury ar­chi­tec­ture, it is im­port­ant to fo­cus on the wider and more pro­found sources of con­tem­por­ary ar­chi­tec­tur­al the­or­ies. Hence it would be help­ful to con­sider the changes in ar­chi­tec­tur­al ideas ly­ing be­hind the real trans­form­a­tions of form, the sources of which were rather philo­soph­ic­al (that same eco­nom­ic de­term­in­ism that was prob­ably, to a large de­gree, in­debted to the philo­soph­ic­al re­volu­tions in Eng­land and Ger­many) and arose above all from a new no­tion of his­tory.

The es­sence of the new per­cep­tion of his­tory is its in­ter­pret­a­tion as an evol­u­tion­ary pro­cess in which vari­ous sys­tems of cul­tur­al mean­ing were of only re­l­at­ive value. In ar­chi­tec­ture, the concept of evol­u­tion, per­ceived in par­al­lel with the idea of his­tor­ic­al re­lativ­ism, pro­duced a new concept of his­tory, which des­troyed a cen­tur­ies-old, un­waver­ing be­lief in ab­so­lute and im­mut­able val­ues, based on the doc­trines of clas­sic­al ar­chi­tec­ture. Alan Colquhoun, there­fore, in his Es­says in Ar­chi­tec­tur­al Cri­ti­cism: Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture and His­tor­ic­al Change, ob­serves:

To­geth­er with the re­viv­al of past styles, a feel­ing began to de­vel­op that, if Goth­ic was the char­ac­ter­ist­ic style of the age of faith, if neo­clas­si­cism was the char­ac­ter­ist­ic style of the En­light­en­ment, then the present age should have its own style, rooted in the tech­nic­al pro­gress that was its own char­ac­ter­ist­ic sign. This grow­ing feel­ing was the co­rol­lary of the fact that re­lativ­ity was only one as­pect of post-Hegel­i­an epi­stem­o­logy. The oth­er as­pect was that his­tory was seen as pro­cess. His­tory pro­gressed dia­lect­ic­ally by tran­scend­ing it­self, each suc­cess­ive peri­od ab­sorb­ing the pre­vi­ous one and pro­du­cing a new syn­thes­is. Wheth­er, as in Hegel, this pro­cess was seen as tele­olo­gic­al — a move­ment to­ward the fu­ture in­carn­a­tion of the Ideal that ex­is­ted out­side time — or, as in Marx, it was seen as dia­lect­ic­ally work­ing it­self out in the class struggle seen ac­cord­ing to the Dar­wini­an mod­el, need not con­cern us. What is im­port­ant is the idea of his­tory as an in­tel­li­gible pro­cess with a pre­dict­able fu­ture.⁷

However, Balzac’s ro­mantic aph­or­ism — “One does not have to go far to prove that the present is su­per­i­or to the past; it is still ne­ces­sary to en­cour­age an­ti­cip­a­tion of a fu­ture, which is bet­ter than our present” — takes on the char­ac­ter of a con­crete plan of ac­tion for at­tain­ing the fu­ture. Sim­il­arly, The Com­mun­ist Mani­festo writ­ten by Karl Marx and Friedrich En­gels in 1848 (which Reyn­er Ban­ham con­siders the first fu­tur­ist mani­festo) starts out with a mys­tic­al pre­lude about a ghost wan­der­ing throughout Europe and con­cludes with an out­right re­volu­tion­ary ex­horta­tion.

As Ban­ham ex­plains in The­ory and Design in the First Ma­chine Age, there are three strands to the struc­ture of artist­ic mani­festos at the be­gin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury which em­body the paradig­mat­ic nature of these type of pro­gram­mat­ic an­nounce­ments: the past — “we re­ject”; the present — is the spir­it of the time or the epoch; the fu­ture — “we af­firm.”⁶ In this his­tor­ic­al-lin­guist­ic struc­ture, the me­di­um ele­ment, the spir­it of the times — the Zeit­geist — has an im­port­ant meth­od­o­lo­gic­al sig­ni­fic­ance for un­der­stand­ing the sources of mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture. Hein­rich Wölfflin’s as­ser­tion that “style is an ex­pres­sion of the epoch” sug­ges­ted the pos­sib­il­ity that ar­chi­tec­ture as well as art con­tains with­in it­self the symp­tom or trace of a def­in­ite stage or peri­od of his­tor­ic­al de­vel­op­ment. The spir­it of the times or the style of the mod­ern epoch de­man­ded an ab­so­lutely new ar­chi­tec­ture.

But what is par­tic­u­larly im­port­ant for the present dis­cus­sion is the idea that “the spir­it of the times” ac­quired an ob­ject­ive ex­ist­ence, was af­firmed as a law of nat­ur­al evol­u­tion, and as a pur­pose­ful change in real­ity, in ac­cord­ance with nat­ur­al-sci­entif­ic or so­cial-eco­nom­ic the­ory. This idea, re­in­forced by the sci­entif­ic and ex­per­i­ment­al ap­proach of pos­it­iv­ism and giv­en the vera­city of ob­ject­ive fact and the epi­stem­o­lo­gic­al force of ob­ject­ive truth, was ex­pressed in the philo­soph­ic­al-ideo­lo­gic­al un­der­stand­ing of ob­ject­ive real­ity as a ma­ter­i­al real­ity that in­cluded ma­ter­i­al ob­jects and their prop­er­ties; space; time; move­ment; laws; so­cial, in­dus­tri­al and eco­nom­ic re­la­tion­ships; the state; cul­ture, etc. — that is, in prac­tice the whole of every­day life, which in this in­ter­pret­a­tion defines con­scious­ness.

The “spir­it of the times,” as a symp­tom and sym­bol of the changes of the epoch in every as­pect of life, was mani­fest in art and ar­chi­tec­ture at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tury and be­gin­ning of the twen­ti­eth in two par­al­lel, but re­l­at­ively in­de­pend­ent, trends. One was re­lated to the artist­ic elite’s re­jec­tion of bour­geois cul­ture, usurp­ing artist­ic polit­ics and as­so­ci­ated with ec­lecticism and aca­dem­ic tra­di­tions in ar­chi­tec­ture. Nev­er­the­less, this re­jec­tion did not in­clude any dir­ect so­cial or polit­ic­al cri­ti­cism. On the oth­er hand, uto­pi­an so­cial­ism, and Marx­ist dia­lect­ic­al and his­tor­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism, as­sisted the emer­gence and de­vel­op­ment of a so­cial-func­tion­al the­ory of ar­chi­tec­ture. Yet even be­fore this, just as these the­or­ies were emer­ging, and at the same time as the de­vel­op­ment of their eth­ic­al and aes­thet­ic premises in the teach­ings of Wil­li­am Mor­ris and fol­low­ers of this new dir­ec­tion in aes­thet­ics, art and ar­chi­tec­ture, there de­veloped “a func­tion­al meth­od” for ar­chi­tec­ture with­in the heart of the aca­dem­ic tra­di­tion it­self. This had de­veloped on the basis of the proto-func­tion­al­ism of Carlo Lodoli, Marc-Ant­oine Laugi­er, Jean-Nic­olas-Louis Dur­and, Eugène Vi­ol­let-le-Duc, Henri Lab­rouste, Au­gus­tus Pu­gin, Au­guste Choisy, Gottfried Sem­per, and Ju­li­en Gaud­et. It paved the way for ab­stract art and its aes­thet­ic found­a­tions.

Mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture, com­bin­ing the ab­stract form­al­ism of the av­ant-garde and the pro­duct­ive sci­entif­ic and tech­nic­al po­ten­tial of the new in­dus­tri­al epoch, de­veloped forms and meth­ods, in­ten­ded not only to re­flect, sym­bol­ize, or im­it­ate the func­tion­ing of a de­vel­op­ing so­ci­ety, but also them­selves to act­ively pro­mote ma­ter­i­al and func­tion­al changes in ob­ject­ive real­ity and every­day life.

Gruntal, V.G. Exterior view of the communal centre of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Partial view of the garden façade of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing the roof garden, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Dedoyard, C. Exterior view of the Narkomfin (People’s Commissariat for Finance) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, September 1932

Gruntal, V.G. Partial view of the garden façade of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Exterior view of the pilotis of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow,, after 1930a

Gruntal, V.G. Exterior view of the pilotis of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Partial view of the lateral façade of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing the elevated walkway, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Narkomfin upon opening in 1930

On the one hand, ar­chi­tec­ture looked to the ra­tion­al lo­gic of func­tion­al­ism and tech­no­lo­gic­al pro­gress. On the oth­er, it re­mained an in­de­pend­ent artist­ic dis­cip­line, sub­ject to the laws of aes­thet­ics in which the au­thor­ity of new per­cep­tu­al and psy­cho­lo­gic­al the­or­ies con­firmed the value of the an­cient cat­egory of beauty. This con­tra­dic­tion, un­der­stood as the dom­in­ance of the new over the old, is re­flec­ted in a type of ar­chi­tec­tur­al concept that treats the func­tion­al and con­struct­ive ele­ment as a ma­ter­i­al ob­ject, as a tech­nic­al and so­cial norm or stand­ard, but un­con­sciously and in­tu­it­ively ex­per­i­ences it as an aes­thet­ic, eth­ic­al and ideo­lo­gic­al im­per­at­ive, as an idea and a con­ven­tion.

As re­gards ty­po­logy, at the same time as the es­sen­tial clas­si­fic­a­tion of build­ings ac­cord­ing to their pur­pose, the lo­gic­al and ra­tion­al ana­lys­is and or­der­ing of the parts or ele­ments of the ar­chi­tec­ton­ic sys­tem, there takes place the struc­tur­ing and de­vel­op­ment of a “pro­gram” for each in­di­vidu­al type. The isol­a­tion, in­vest­ig­a­tion, clas­si­fic­a­tion and or­der­ing of the sep­ar­ate func­tions of a build­ing are ac­com­pan­ied by a striv­ing to­ward their dis­crete design, in ac­cord­ance with the re­quire­ments of the cause-and-ef­fect con­nec­tion between func­tion and form. On the one hand, this leads to the sep­ar­a­tion of the func­tion­al volumes or spaces and their flex­ible and func­tion­al or­gan­iz­a­tion in­to a single whole. On the oth­er, it leads to the idea of a single uni­ver­sal space, the ex­tern­al design of which does not de­pend on the quant­ity or in­ner or­gan­iz­a­tion of the parts or func­tions. In this way, the ab­stract cat­egor­ies of func­tion and space be­come the fun­da­ment­al ele­ments and ty­po­lo­gic­al at­trib­utes of ar­chi­tec­ture.

All these words and cat­egor­ies — type, spe­cies or genre, pro­gram or build­ing, plan, part and ele­ment, func­tion and form — re­late the new meth­od of Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture back to the fam­ous ra­tion­al, struc­tur­al, and ty­po­lo­gic­al meth­od of com­pos­i­tion, for­mu­lated at the be­gin­ning of the nine­teenth cen­tury by Jean-Nic­olas-Louis Dur­and at the Ecole Poly­tech­nique,⁹ and de­veloped in the middle of the same cen­tury by Gottfried Sem­per in his “prac­tic­al aes­thet­ic,” with ref­er­ence to Frédéric Cu­vi­er, Dur­and and a real “Carib­bean hut” — the prim­or­di­al type of all ar­chi­tec­ture — ex­hib­ited at The Great Ex­hib­i­tion of the Works of In­dustry of all Na­tions, in 1851 at the Crys­tal Palace, Lon­don.¹⁰ Even be­fore these ideas al­most lit­er­ally were be­ing bor­rowed and de­veloped at the be­gin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury by the Ger­man Werkbund and the Bauhaus, a struc­tur­al-ty­po­lo­gic­al meth­od of com­pos­i­tion had been per­fec­ted in the work of Ju­li­en Gaud­et, a pro­fess­or at the Ecole des Beaux Arts.¹¹ His stu­dent Tony Garni­er (an­oth­er fam­ous stu­dent was Au­guste Per­ret — also a pre­curs­or of the mod­ern move­ment) trans­lated this meth­od in 1904-1918 from the scale of a single build­ing to the urb­an scale in his project Une cité in­dus­tri­elle, which fol­lowed Al­berti’s pre­cept that a city should be re­garded as a large build­ing.

This meth­od of com­pos­ing form­al, con­struct­ive, func­tion­al and spa­tial ele­ments was em­ployed by the an­cients as well as by the mod­erns, only with dif­fer­ent levels of un­der­stand­ing its mech­an­ism. The con­struct­ive and func­tion­al parts of a build­ing (i.e. the ar­chi­tec­tur­al ele­ments, ac­cord­ing to Dur­and and Gaud­et) formed the func­tion­al and spa­tial volumes, so that the com­pos­i­tion ele­ments, in Dur­and’s ter­min­o­logy, rep­res­en­ted the build­ing it­self or its parts. To ar­range, in a lit­er­al or fig­ur­at­ive sense, meant to com­pose, as­semble and build. It is pre­cisely in this mean­ing of “the as­sembly of house-build­ing” that the aca­dem­ic meth­od of com­pos­i­tion was trans­ferred to mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture, as Ban­ham cor­rectly ob­served: Gin­zburg’s “func­tion­al meth­od,” with all its so­cial and ideo­lo­gic­al con­nota­tions, was fun­da­ment­ally as in­stru­ment­al as the meth­od of Dur­and and Gaud­et. The ad­apt­a­tion of this new and sim­ul­tan­eously old design meth­od and tool to the new in­dus­tri­al and tech­no­lo­gic­al pos­sib­il­it­ies and so­cial and eco­nom­ic re­quire­ments of con­tem­por­ary so­ci­ety pre­dict­ably de­man­ded the im­ple­ment­a­tion of eco­nom­ic and tech­nic­al pro­cesses of ef­fect­ive ra­tion­al­iz­a­tion in the form of pro­ced­ures of typi­fic­a­tion, stand­ard­iz­a­tion, and in­teg­ra­tion of all the lis­ted ele­ments at the scale of both a build­ing — a tra­di­tion­al ty­po­lo­gic­al cat­egory — and a city.

Residential interior of Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’ Narkomfin (1930)

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Moisei Ginzburg’s studio in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing a woman seated at a desk, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building from the upper level, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing the upper level, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930a

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing stairs, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing a corridor, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment showing the built-in kitchen, People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment showing the built-in wall unit in the dining room [?] which opens onto the built-in kitchen, Narkomfin Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building from the upper level showing a built-in cupboard and a desk, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing a communal space [?], 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of an entrance to the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing a bulletin board, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing the upper level, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gin­zburg’s role in de­vel­op­ing new types of build­ing is gen­er­ally re­cog­nized and is con­stantly men­tioned by schol­ars of his work. One only has to refer to the fairly de­tailed ana­lys­is of his work by Se­lim O. Khan-Magomedov in his mono­graph M. Ia. Gin­zburg.¹² The the­or­et­ic­al and prac­tic­al value of these stud­ies can be amp­li­fied by ex­plor­ing sev­er­al artist­ic, philo­soph­ic­al and ideo­lo­gic­al as­pects of Gin­zburg’s ty­po­lo­gic­al con­cep­tions, mainly presen­ted in his book Style and Epoch and in some journ­al art­icles.¹³

Con­sid­er­ing style as a faith­ful re­flec­tion of the epoch, Gin­zburg pro­poses not only a meth­od “of his­tor­ic­al eval­u­ation… in re­la­tion­ship to the en­vir­on­ment that cre­ated it,” but also a “ge­net­ic meth­od… de­fin­ing the value of a phe­nomen­on from the point of view of its re­la­tion­ship to the fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of style and the gen­er­al evol­u­tion­ary pro­cess.”¹⁴ Ac­tu­ally re­turn­ing to the idea of the prim­or­di­al type and cit­ing the hut or dol­men, Gin­zburg re­peats the idea of styl­ist­ic ty­po­logy de­veloped by Ant­oine-Chrysostóme Quatremère de Quincy at the turn of the eight­eenth to the nine­teenth cen­tury in his en­cyc­lo­ped­ic dic­tion­ary, where in the ar­chi­tec­tur­al sec­tion he pro­poses on the bases of a ty­po­logy of style a sin­gu­lar ty­po­logy of prim­or­di­al forms and types, each of which cor­res­ponds to a dif­fer­ent geo­graph­ic­al or cli­mat­ic con­di­tion, and also to the nature of the fun­da­ment­al activ­ity of the re­spect­ive na­tion­al­ity.¹⁵ For in­stance, the cave as the hunter’s shel­ter is the prim­or­di­al type of Egyp­tian ar­chi­tec­ture, the tent as the dwell­ing of the no­mad­ic her­der of cattle is the type for Chinese ar­chi­tec­ture, and fi­nally the hut as the house for a tiller of the soil is the type for Greek ar­chi­tec­ture. For Quatremère de Quincy, each of these types not only ex­plains the gen­es­is and evol­u­tion of the cor­res­pond­ing style, but also helps to de­term­ine the pre­dom­in­ance of one style over an­oth­er. Since the type con­tains the po­ten­tial for its fu­ture de­vel­op­ment, the cave as a prim­or­di­al type for the heavy, massive, dark Egyp­tian temple did not pos­sess the po­ten­tial for fur­ther evol­u­tion, like the light, mo­bile and tem­por­ary struc­ture of the tent — the type of Chinese ar­chi­tec­ture. In con­trast, the wooden con­struc­tion of the hut, trans­lated in­to stone, demon­strated the po­ten­tial for evol­u­tion and pro­gress. Sim­ul­tan­eously light, bright, and dur­able, this con­struc­tion as a prim­or­di­al type was en­dowed with the mean­ing and sig­ni­fic­ance of the eth­ic­al and aes­thet­ic ideal and the im­mut­able and fun­da­ment­al truths for the de­vel­op­ment of ar­chi­tec­ture from its prim­it­ive con­di­tion to the clas­sic­al per­fec­tion of the Greek or­der and temples. For his part, Gin­zburg wrote:

It is pos­sible to dis­tin­guish ge­net­ic styles of a less­er or great­er value in so far as they pos­sess to a less­er or great­er de­gree, fea­tures and po­ten­tial pos­sib­il­it­ies for the cre­ation of the new… Each his­tor­ic­al epoch, or rather each vi­tal cre­at­ive force is char­ac­ter­ized by cer­tain artist­ic or­gan­isms: so each epoch in the plastic arts had its fa­vor­ite type, which is in­trins­ic to it… It is pre­cisely the same in ar­chi­tec­ture: hence the temple with its typ­ic­al fea­tures was most char­ac­ter­ist­ic of Greece, the church and cathed­ral of the Middle Ages, and the palace of the Renais­sance.¹⁶

For Gin­zburg, the ge­net­ic and his­tor­ic­al eval­u­ation is not al­ways re­lated to “the qual­ity of an art­work’s form­al ele­ments,” al­though he re­cog­nized their trans­fer­ence to the struc­tures of one or an­oth­er epoch, but above all to their func­tion­al pur­pose.¹⁷

For Quatremère de Quincy, the char­ac­ter and value of each prim­or­di­al type — cave, tent, or hut — was de­term­ined by the na­tion­al and eth­no­graph­ic cri­ter­ia of man’s activ­it­ies. For Gin­zburg, the ab­stract cat­egory of work, with all its Marx­ist con­nota­tions, be­came the gen­er­al cri­terion — the es­sen­tial pre­requis­ite for the de­tach­ment of man from the an­im­al world, his phys­ic­al ex­ist­ence, his per­fec­tion and the emer­gence of so­ci­ety, class iden­tity, so­cial and eco­nom­ic re­la­tion­ships, and the free and multi-fa­ceted de­vel­op­ment of the in­di­vidu­al as a con­di­tion for the free and multi-fa­ceted de­vel­op­ment of every­one: “The ele­ment of life, moved in­to primary po­s­i­tion in the new act­ive so­cial en­vir­on­ment of con­tem­por­ary real­ity — by the work­ing class — is work, be­cause it is the main con­tent of the life of this so­cial class and its uni­fy­ing char­ac­ter­ist­ic.”¹⁸

Byron

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative Exterior view, side façade with balconies, detail

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative Exterior view, communal center, detail

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative Exterior view, front facade, detail

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative Exterior view, side facade with pilotis, detail

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

This pe­cu­li­ar re­place­ment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “nat­ur­al man” with so­cial­ized “work­ing man” res­ul­ted in “the prim­it­ive hut” be­ing re­placed by “work­ers’ hous­ing,” and the class-ideo­lo­gic­al, so­ci­olo­gic­al prob­lem­at­ic be­ing in­tro­duced in­to ar­chi­tec­ture. On the one hand, this was in total agree­ment with the func­tion­al­ist ap­proach to­ward the ge­net­ic basis of type, as an ele­ment of the new so­cial and eco­nom­ic or­gan­iz­a­tion of so­ci­ety, ex­ist­ence and every­day life (i.e. with the func­tion­al pur­pose of the ob­ject be­ing like that of any oth­er item of every­day life or ele­ment of ob­ject­ive real­ity). On the oth­er hand, the emer­gence and in­tro­duc­tion in­to ar­chi­tec­ture of yet an­oth­er new type, dir­ectly con­nec­ted with that very same cat­egory of work as the func­tion­al pro­cess — the type of the house of labor, fact­ory or mill — so­cially and ideo­lo­gic­ally jus­ti­fied the form­al and artist­ic lan­guage of fu­tur­ist ar­chi­tec­ture. “In this way,” states Gin­zburg, it be­comes the first pri­or­ity, as the fun­da­ment­al prob­lem con­front­ing con­tem­por­ary real­ity, to de­vel­op solu­tions for all those ar­chi­tec­tur­al or­gan­isms that are as­so­ci­ated with the concept of work: work­ers’ hous­ing and the house of labor and the end­less quant­ity of tasks re­lated to them.¹⁹

Though Gin­zburg viewed the prob­lem of the “form­al and typ­ic­al ex­pres­sion” of work­ers’ hous­ing as a task de­mand­ing a fu­ture solu­tion, a paradigm and key for the res­ol­u­tion of this task was provided by the ob­jectiv­ity and ma­ter­i­al­ity of European and Amer­ic­an in­dus­tri­al build­ings or houses of labor (“where the most acutely pen­et­rat­ing key to mod­ern­ity provided solu­tions as­ton­ish­ing in their purely form­al per­fec­tion, un­doubtedly pre­dict­ing the fu­ture”).²⁰

Em­phas­is on act­ive work or hu­man labor — the ele­ment of so­ci­ety’s pro­duct­ive power, defined by Marx­ist philo­sophy as a de­term­in­ant factor in the his­tor­ic­al pro­cess — sys­tem­at­ic­ally led Gin­zburg to an­oth­er cat­egory of his­tor­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism — the means of pro­duc­tion — which al­lowed him to go from the house of work to the ma­chine and tech­no­logy as sources of in­spir­a­tion for the cre­ation of the new ar­chi­tec­ture, now jus­ti­fied from the point of view of his­tor­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism:

Just as we defined the re­la­tion­ship between the ma­chine and in­dus­tri­al struc­tures, we must define the ana­log­ous re­la­tion­ship between the in­dus­tri­al struc­ture and the ar­chi­tec­ture of work­ers’ hous­ing… In­dus­tri­al ar­chi­tec­ture, be­ing close to the sources of a con­tem­por­ary un­der­stand­ing of form, must in­flu­ence even the most tra­di­tion­al and con­ser­vat­ive hous­ing. From in­dus­tri­al ar­chi­tec­ture rather than from any­where else, we can ex­pect a real in­dic­a­tion of what, how, and in what way this can be done. We are talk­ing about adding the fi­nal ar­chi­tec­tur­al ele­ment — ad­equate liv­ing and so­cial build­ings — to an already ex­ist­ing mod­ern en­vir­on­ment: the ma­chine, en­gin­eer­ing and in­dus­tri­al struc­tures.²¹

It is pre­cisely to­ward the solu­tion of this task that the search for new types of build­ing and means of or­gan­iz­ing and form­ing “the new every­day life of mod­ern man” had been dir­ec­ted:

In the con­di­tions of the build­ing of so­cial­ism that we are ex­per­i­en­cing today, every new solu­tion of the ar­chi­tect — a work­ers’ house, club, or fact­ory — is con­sidered by us to be the in­ven­tion of a mod­ern type, an­swer­ing its tasks and suit­able for re­pro­du­cing in any quant­ity, in ac­cord­ance with gov­ern­ment re­quire­ments.²²

Eco­nom­ic de­term­in­ism and ra­tion­al­iz­a­tion, real­ized po­et­ic­ally in tech­nic­al forms, al­lowed the ex­am­in­a­tion of dwell­ing and so­cial func­tions as in­dis­pens­able sup­ple­ments to the pro­duc­tion pro­cess, while hous­ing and so­cial build­ings — the com­ple­ment­ary ele­ments of the in­dus­tri­al en­vir­on­ment — were “the fi­nal ar­chi­tec­tur­al com­pon­ents.” The evol­u­tion­ary view of his­tory as a pro­cess of de­vel­op­ment from lower to high­er forms re­duced the mean­ing of the ar­chi­tec­tur­al type as a prim­or­di­al prin­ciple, rule and idea — so­ci­ety liv­ing to­geth­er around the fire, a prim­it­ive hut or the temple — to the sig­ni­fic­ance of a com­pleted product, an ul­ti­mate res­ult, a ma­ter­i­al ob­ject and per­fec­ted stand­ard.

Re­turn­ing in 1934 to the prob­lem of “the crit­ic­al mas­ter­ing of the en­tire her­it­age of the past, from the prim­it­ive sav­age’s hut to the flight of a stra­tostat,” Gin­zburg did not ap­peal to what would have been nat­ur­al, to one of the defined his­tor­ic­al and tra­di­tion­al types, as for ex­ample to that from which he began to con­sider the ar­chi­tec­tur­al her­it­age. In­stead, he tried to re­define it: “What is a type? A type is the res­ult of work on com­pre­hend­ing new so­cial tasks.”²³ From this defin­i­tion, fol­lowed a cri­ti­cism of the con­di­tion of stand­ard­iz­a­tion and typi­fic­a­tion at that time, and also a pro­pos­al for their im­prove­ment, that clearly, al­though un­wit­tingly, re­vealed the in­ner con­tra­dic­tion between the so­cial task and the struc­ture in re­spect to func­tion and planned or­gan­iz­a­tion of the design and build­ing pro­cess. Ac­cord­ing to the think­ing of the au­thor, however, it “rad­ic­ally changes the char­ac­ter of the work of the mod­ern ar­chi­tect,” who in turn “con­siders his activ­ity not as the ful­fill­ment of spe­cif­ic tasks, but as the es­tab­lish­ment of ar­chi­tec­tur­al stand­ards… as a con­stant per­fec­tion of those stand­ards.”²⁴

Nu­mer­ous designs for com­mun­al hous­ing, hous­ing of a trans­ition­al type, blocks of res­id­ences and hos­tels with cells, flats and houses with one, two, three, 3.5 and 5.5 rooms, work­ers’ clubs, palaces of cul­ture and ser­vice build­ings, which had to “in ad­vance lead the ar­chi­tect’s at­ten­tion away from seek­ing in­di­vidu­al solu­tions to­wards the per­fec­tion of a stand­ard and to­wards the elab­or­a­tion and the max­im­um typi­fic­a­tion of all its de­tails,” on the whole, rep­res­ent more or less ideal mod­els and stand­ards.²⁵ But the pro­gram­mat­ic ex­clu­sion of in­di­vidu­al­ity and ori­gin­al­ity (ex­cept for en­gin­eer­ing) im­plied an un­am­bigu­ous an­swer to that ques­tion, which is fa­mil­i­ar to mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture and was for­mu­lated by Her­mann Muthesi­us in 1911 for the Ger­man Werkbund — “Type or In­di­vidu­al­ity?” — in fa­vor of the type, in its de­formed real­iz­a­tion as an in­dus­tri­al pro­to­type and stand­ard. On the mat­ter of mas­ter­ing the his­tor­ic­al tra­di­tion, Gin­zburg in 1924, had already de­clared:

In this way, every prin­ciple of our clas­sic­al her­it­age must change, at least quant­it­at­ively, in or­der to be suit­able for the present day. But this quant­it­at­ive change is a new ar­chi­tec­tur­al qual­ity, be­cause it en­tails the re­place­ment of old meth­ods by new, and the at­tach­ment of new in­ven­tions to what is still vi­able.²⁶

It was pro­posed (if not a play on words) to use philo­soph­ic­al cat­egor­ies of qual­it­at­ive change at the ex­pense of a re­verse, a qual­it­at­ive change with a minus sign, i.e. a de­duc­tion, re­duc­tion and ex­clu­sion from ar­chi­tec­ture of the clas­sic­al her­it­age, but a quant­it­at­ive change with a plus sign or mul­tiply­ing a thou­sand­fold, in the words of Henry Van de Velde, an in­crease once the per­fect stand­ard that has been at­tained has not dir­ectly led to the de­sired qual­ity. This stopped pleas­ing Gin­zburg him­self:

With us, the type has turned in­to a pat­tern, a series of cri­ter­ia, which the ar­chi­tect must use without fail… the type has turned in­to simple mech­an­ic­al blinkers, re­strict­ing the ar­chi­tect’s think­ing and for­cing him to fol­low the line of least res­ist­ance.²⁷

At the same time, “un­der­stand­ing the prob­lem of the type cor­rectly” con­tin­ued to be con­sidered “one of the most in­ter­est­ing so­cial and ar­chi­tec­tur­al tasks, the solu­tion of which can lead us closest to the form of the new pro­let­ari­an ar­chi­tec­ture.”²⁸

After the peri­od of “mas­ter­ing the clas­sic­al her­it­age,” the suc­ceed­ing stage of stand­ard­iz­a­tion and typi­fic­a­tion in So­viet ar­chi­tec­ture fol­lowed once-pre­scribed trends of con­stantly per­fect­ing stand­ards. End­less in­vest­ig­a­tions in­to the eco­nom­ic­ally ef­fect­ive func­tion­al and con­struc­tion­al solu­tions for a par­tic­u­lar type of build­ing and with­in the lim­its of “con­struc­tion norms and reg­u­la­tions” moved to­ward sim­pli­fic­a­tion and the ac­cept­ance of a single op­tim­um vari­ant. In this pro­cess of “propaga­tion” and sim­ul­tan­eous re­duc­tion, the type, via an in­dus­tri­al and ty­po­lo­gic­al mod­el and stand­ard, ac­quired the prop­er­ties of a norm­at­ive pro­to­type and, as a res­ult of the lo­gic­al com­ple­tion of this se­quence of ty­po­lo­gic­al op­er­a­tions, ma­nip­u­la­tion, trans­form­a­tion and de­form­a­tion, turned in­to a ste­reo­type and cliché.

For Gin­zburg and the ar­chi­tects of his circle and gen­er­a­tion, it seemed that ar­chi­tec­ture as a faith­ful fol­low­er of his­tory ought to de­vel­op ac­cord­ing to the laws of dia­lectics as ap­plied to so­cial de­vel­op­ment.

The struggle and the unity of op­pos­ites (with the em­phas­is on the struggle), re­pu­di­ation for the sake of re­pu­di­ation, and the strategy of in­creas­ing the quant­ity in or­der to achieve a new qual­ity in ar­chi­tec­ture per­fectly agreed with the dom­in­ant philo­soph­ic­al and ideo­lo­gic­al tend­en­cies of the times. But in ar­chi­tec­ture, as in so­ci­ety, the situ­ation that ar­chi­tec­tur­al style should have re­flec­ted, so ap­par­ent in pure the­ory and meth­od, was des­troyed by his­tory it­self.

Ex­amin­ing So­viet con­struct­iv­ism and the ar­chi­tec­ture of the So­viet peri­od with­in the gen­er­al con­text of the mod­ern move­ment, the in­ter­na­tion­al style or func­tion­al­ism demon­strates both the autonomy and in­ter­de­pend­ence of these trends.

Un­doubtedly, Gin­zburg was right when he de­clared that new trends and in­flu­ences (in­clud­ing ty­po­logy and ideo­logy) came to ar­chi­tec­ture from the north. But he was only half or a quarter right if one takes in­to ac­count the four corners of the world, for the greatest in­flu­ences, that he ex­per­i­enced him­self, like many be­fore and at the same time, cir­cu­lated and in­vis­ibly roamed and whirled throughout Europe and Amer­ica and then re­turned from the south, from Italy and Mil­an where, in 1914, Gin­zburg re­ceived his first of­fi­cial ar­chi­tec­tur­al train­ing. In Mil­an, in 1912-1914, the draughtsman Ant­o­nio Sant’Elia cre­ated his ar­chi­tec­tur­al fantas­ies and pub­lished his ideas of city plan­ning, em­bod­ied in the projects for the Città Nuova and Mil­ano 2000. In Mil­an in May 1914, the ex­hib­i­tion Nuove Tenden­ze opened, the cata­logue for which con­tained Sant’Elia’s de­clar­a­tion (Mes­sag­gio). Re­peat­ing the Mes­sag­gio, “The Mani­festo of Fu­tur­ist Ar­chi­tec­ture” was writ­ten and pub­lished on June 11, 1914 (most ca­non­ic­al fu­tur­ist mani­fes­tos were dated the el­ev­enth day of the month). It was also the to­po­graphy of Mil­an that was de­scribed in the pro­logue to “The Found­ing Mani­festo” of Fu­tur­ism, ini­tially writ­ten in French by Fil­ippo Tom­maso Ma­ri­netti, a gradu­ate of the Sor­bonne, and pub­lished in the Parisi­an news­pa­per Le Figaro in Feb­ru­ary 1909.

The fi­nal para­graph of Ma­ri­netti’s mani­festo is not merely dis­tinct­ive for its re­volu­tion­ary mood and new meta­phors. In a po­et­ic form, it es­tab­lishes an in­dis­sol­uble con­nec­tion between tech­no­logy and art, between the ma­chine and ar­chi­tec­ture, with its new ty­po­logy of in­dus­tri­al and en­gin­eer­ing struc­tures:

We will sing of the stir­ring of great crowds — work­ers, pleas­ure-seekers, ri­oters — and the con­fused sea of col­or and sound as re­volu­tion sweeps through a mod­ern met­ro­pol­is. We will sing the mid­night fer­vor of ar­sen­als and shipyards blaz­ing with elec­tric moons; in­sa­ti­able sta­tions swal­low­ing the smoking ser­pents of their trains; factor­ies hung from the clouds by the twis­ted threads of their smoke; bridges flash­ing like knives in the sun; gi­ant gym­nasts that leap over rivers; ad­ven­tur­ous steam­ers that scent the ho­ri­zon; deep-ches­ted lo­co­mot­ives that paw the ground with their wheels, like stal­lions har­nessed with steel tubing; the easy flight of air­planes, their pro­pellers beat­ing the wind like ban­ners, with a sound like the ap­plause of a mighty crowd.²⁹

In the “spir­it of the times,” Sant’Elia went no fur­ther than sum­mar­iz­ing and de­fin­ing the role of ar­chi­tec­ture in a peri­od of tech­nic­al re­volu­tion, while Gin­zburg and the ar­chi­tects of his circle and gen­er­a­tion had to ob­jec­ti­fy, im­ple­ment and ma­ter­i­al­ize these ideas in the con­di­tions of a real so­cial re­volu­tion and the con­struc­tion of a new way of life (Fig­ure 14). Geo­graphy, as well as re­gion­al and cul­tur­al in­flu­ences, it seems, played a sec­ond­ary role in this pro­cess, in­so­far as these ideas were in­teg­ral to and em­bod­ied in tech­no­logy it­self, which was both cause and ef­fect. Gin­zburg was pro­foundly con­vinced that “loc­al and na­tion­al fea­tures in the present con­text are too in­sig­ni­fic­ant in com­par­is­on with the lev­el­ing power of con­tem­por­ary tech­no­logy and eco­nomy.”³⁰ Today, this sounds like an iron­ic, and yet at the same time an op­tim­ist­ic or omin­ous, pre­dic­tion.

Gin­zburg’s ty­po­lo­gic­al con­cepts, which formed the basis for the de­vel­op­ment of the or­tho­dox func­tion­al and in­dus­tri­al ty­po­lo­gic­al the­or­ies in ar­chi­tec­ture of the So­viet peri­od, al­low us to ex­am­ine these the­or­ies with­in the gen­er­al con­text of mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture, but only with­in the lim­its of gen­er­al ideo­logy. In its re­volu­tion­ary spe­cificity, its polit­ic­al, so­cial, eco­nom­ic and his­tor­ic­al con­text, So­viet con­struct­iv­ism re­mains a re­l­at­ively autonom­ous phe­nomen­on, thanks to its spe­cial ideo­lo­gic­al found­a­tion, and com­plex re­la­tion­ship to the gen­er­al philo­soph­ic­al and artist­ic doc­trine of mod­ern­ism. Ex­amin­ing the re­la­tion­ship between ty­po­logy and ideo­logy in Gin­zburg’s ar­chi­tec­tur­al leg­acy would seem to per­mit a more ac­cur­ate de­lin­eation of these bound­ar­ies.

.
Notes

¹ Алек­сан­др Пуш­кин, “…Вновь я по­се­тил …,” in А.С. Пуш­кин, Со­чи­не­ния в трех то­мах. (Моск­ва: Ху­до­жест­вен­ная Ли­те­ра­ту­ра, 1986), 1:574; Eng­lish trans­la­tion, “I Have Vis­ited Again,” by D.M. Thomas.
² Gin­zburg’s re­turn (al­most spir­itu­al­ist in a meta­phor­ic­al sense) in re­sponse to these con­stant and per­sist­ent ref­er­ences — from the point of view of his­tori­ograph­ic in­terest or in his­tor­ic­al and the­or­et­ic­al re­search, con­duc­ted crit­ic­ally or in a po­et­ic and ro­mantic man­ner — is a kind of self-con­sist­ent and per­suas­ive re­mind­er. The his­tor­ic­al memory of one of the pat­ri­archs of So­viet ar­chi­tec­ture, rep­res­en­ted by his designs, build­ing, es­says and pre­cepts, could prob­ably be brought to­geth­er with the Ni­et­z­schean idea of etern­al re­turn as a po­et­ic, an al­most sac­red or mys­tic­al, em­bod­i­ment of sev­er­al mo­ments of every­day life, im­prin­ted with or per­son­i­fy­ing the his­tor­ic­al memory in sym­bol­ic forms, signs, fig­ures, events and ac­tions, which could help to pre­serve the evid­ent, but dif­fi­cult to ex­plain, con­nec­tion between the past, the present and the fu­ture. Des­pite the pro­found philo­soph­ic­al mean­ing of this phe­nomen­on, a phys­ic­al, spec­u­lat­ive or any oth­er type of re­turn pos­sesses sev­er­al nos­tal­gic as­pects, as­so­ci­ated with in­di­vidu­al ex­per­i­ences of the his­tor­ic­al peri­od, mo­ments that can be po­et­ic­ally com­mu­nic­ated by means of meta­phors. In this sense, Gin­zburg’s etern­al re­turn re­calls Al­ex­an­der Pushkin’s fam­ous re­turn to the ham­let of Mikhail­ovskoe after ten years away:
…Where a road, scarred by many rain­falls, climbs
The hill, three pine trees stand – one by it­self,
The oth­ers close to­geth­er. When I rode
On horse­back past them in the moon­lit night,
The friendly rust­ling mur­mur of their crowns
Would wel­come me. Now, I have rid­den out
Upon that road, and seen those trees again.
They have re­mained the same, make the same mur­mur —
But round their aging roots, where all be­fore
was bar­ren and na­ked, a thick­et of young pines
Has sprouted; like green chil­dren around the shad­ows
of the two neigh­bor­ing pines. But in the dis­tance
Their sol­it­ary com­rade stands, mor­ose,
Like some old bach­el­or, and round its root,
All is bar­ren as be­fore.
I greet you, young
and un­known tribe of pine trees! I’ll not see
your mighty up­ward thrust of years to come
When you will over­top these friends of mine
And shield their an­cient sum­mits from the gaze
Of pass­ersby. But may my grand­son hear
Your wel­come mur­mur when, re­turn­ing home
From lively com­pany, and filled with gay
And pleas­ant thoughts, he passes you in the night,
And thinks per­haps of me….
Пушкин, “…Вновь я посетил …”, 1:574; Eng­lish trans­la­tion, “I Have Vis­ited again”, by D. M. Thomas.
³ И.С. Грос­с­ман-Ро­щин, «За­мет­ки Про­фа­на». [“Notes of an Ig­nora­mus”], Со­вре­мен­ная ар­хи­тек­ту­ра [Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture] 2 (1926): 77-8.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Peter Collins, Chan­ging Ideals in Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture 1750–1950 (Lon­don: Faber and Faber, 1965).
⁷ Alan Colquhoun, “His­tor­icism and the Lim­its of Se­mi­ology,” in Es­says in Ar­chi­tec­tur­al Cri­ti­cism: Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture and His­tor­ic­al Change (Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 133.
⁸ Reyn­er Ban­ham, The­ory and Design in the First Ma­chine Age (Lon­don: Ar­chi­tec­tur­al Press, 1960).
⁹ Jean-Ni­co­las-Louis Du­rand, Re­cueil et pa­ral­lèle des édi­fices de tout genre an­ciens et mo­dernes, re­mar­quables par leur beau­té, par leur gran­deur ou par leur sin­gu­la­ri­té, et des­si­nés sur une même échelle (Pa­ris: De l’im­pri­me­rie de Gille fils, 1801).
¹⁰ Gott­fried Sem­per, Der Stil in den tech­ni­schen und tek­to­ni­schen Küns­ten oder prak­ti­sche Äs­the­tik: ein Hand­buch für Tech­ni­ker, Künst­ler und Kunst­freun­de (Band 2): Ke­ra­mik, Tek­to­nik, Ste­reo­to­mie, Me­tal­lo­tech­nik für sich be­trach­tet und in Be­zie­hung zur Bau­kunst (Mün­chen: Fried­rich Bruck­manns Ver­lag, 1863).
¹¹ J. Gaud­et, Élé­ments et théo­rie de l’ar­chi­tec­ture, cours pro­fes­sé à l’école na­tio­nale et spé­cial des beaux–arts (Pa­ris: Li­braire de la construc­tion mo­dern, 1900).
¹² Се­лим О. Хан-Ма­го­ме­дов, М.Я. Гин­з­бург (Моск­ва: Стро­из­дат, 1972).
¹³ М.Я. Гин­з­бург. Стиль и эпо­ха. Про­бле­мы со­вре­мен­ной ар­хи­тек­ту­ры. (Моск­ва: Го­сиз­дат, 1924); Eng­lish trans­la­tion, Moi­sei Gin­zburg, Style and Epoch, trans. Anatole Sen­kevitch, in­tr. Ken­neth Framp­ton (Cam­bridge, MA, and Lon­don: MIT Press, 1982). See also М.Я. Гин­з­бург, «Но­вые ме­то­ды ар­хи­тек­тур­но­го мыш­ле­ния», Со­вре­мен­ная ар­хи­тек­ту­ра 1 (1926): 1-4; М.Я. Гин­з­бург, «Меж­ду­на­род­ный фронт со­вре­мен­ной ар­хи­тек­ту­ры». Со­вре­мен­ная ар­хи­тек­ту­ра 2 (1926): 41-46; М.Я. Гин­з­бург, В.А. Вес­нин, и А.А. Вес­нин. «Твор­чес­кая три­бу­на. Про­бле­мы со­вре­мен­ной ар­хи­тек­ту­ры». Ар­хи­тек­ту­ра СССР 2 (1934): 63-69.
¹⁴ Гин­з­бург, Стиль и эпо­ха, 24.
¹⁵ A. [Ant­oine-Chrysostóme] Quatremère de Quincy, Encyclopédie méthodique, tome 3, Ar­chi­tec­ture (Par­is: Agasse, 1825).
¹⁶ Гин­з­бург, Стиль и эпо­ха, 79.
¹⁷ Idem.
¹⁸ Ibid, 79-80.
¹⁹ Ibid, 80.
²⁰ Idem.
²¹ Ibid, 134.
²² Гин­з­бург, «Но­вые ме­то­ды ар­хи­тек­тур­но­го мыш­ле­ния», 2.
²³ Гин­з­бург, Вес­нин, и Вес­нин, «Твор­чес­кая три­бу­на. Про­бле­мы со­вре­мен­ной ар­хи­тек­ту­ры», 66.
²⁴ Гин­з­бург, «Но­вые ме­то­ды ар­хи­тек­тур­но­го мыш­ле­ния», 2.
²⁵ Ibid.
²⁶ Гинзбург, Стиль и эпоха, 145.
²⁷ Гин­з­бург, Вес­нин, и Вес­нин, «Твор­чес­кая три­бу­на. Про­бле­мы со­вре­мен­ной ар­хи­тек­ту­ры», 67.
²⁸ Ibid.
²⁹ Ban­ham, The­ory and Design, 104.
³⁰ Гинзбург, Стиль и эпоха, 89.