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I’ve posted about Lazar Khidekel before. A few years ago, I met some of his descendants who live here in New York. Regina Khidekel, his daughter-in-law, has written some very interesting articles about Khidekel’s speculative architecture, one of which you can read in this collection. Khidekel was a student of the great suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, and was involved with his group Unovis. Later on, in 1928, he reflected on his path from painting to architecture in a brief “Biography”:

From 1920 to 1922, I participated in the publication of Unovis collections, contributing a series of articles on questions of art and its relationship to production. I spent the last two years at the Vitebsk Artistic and Practical Institute; in addition to coursework assignments, I was engaged with questions concerning the ties between constructive art (cubism, the “relief,” constructivism, suprematism) and architecture. I presented my findings — work that involved not only a painterly but also an architectural content — at the Second Unovis Exhibition in Moscow.

Assuming that my only possible involvement in architecture would occur through the assimilation of the [technical] knowledge on which it is based, in 1922 I enrolled in the Department of Architecture at the Institute of Civil Engineers. I am now a student on the final course. Between the time of my arrival in Leningrad in 1922 and the present, I participated in the Fifth-Year Exhibition at the Academy of Arts in 1923. In 1923, I became a member of the Art and Literature Department of the literary and artistic journal Vulcan [Vulkan], published by Leningrad State University. I served as the head of tours in the Painting Department of the Russian Museum (formerly the Museum of Painterly Culture).

Some images of the Unovis set at Vitebsk and Khidekel from his days in the group appear below.

Over the second half of the twenties, Khidekel became obsessed with the idea of a flying city. Georgii Krutikov’s proposal for a “Flying City” may be more famous, but Khidekel’s fantastic renderings are also worth taking a look at. Recently I came across a cache of images stored on one of my favorite Russian-language websites, Togda Zine, a repository of the heroic Soviet avant-garde. You can view them all below.

Paired with these images is an excerpt from Selim Khan-Magomedov’s encyclopedic account of the Pioneers of Soviet Architecture. I will post the full PDF of that book sometime soon. While not as theoretically ambitious as his student Vladimir Paperny, or the brilliant (if perverse) Boris Groys, Khan-Magomedov was a giant — the ultimate authority of early architectural modernism in the USSR. Enjoy!

Khidekel’s experimental designs

Selim Khan-Magomedov
From Pioneers of Soviet
Architecture (1983)

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A set of interesting experimental town-planning designs produced by Khidekel during the 1920s develop some aspects of the aero-city concept, and also reveal the influence of other experimental town-planning ideas of that period, such as vertical zoning. Taken as a whole, in fact, all these designs represent variations, and developments of the latter concept. As distinct, however, from the proposals by [Anton] Lavinsky, [El] Lissitzky, and [Konstantin] Melnikov, Khidekel’s projects for a vertical zoning of cities involve a global approach to this town-planning concept: insofar as he was concerned, it was not merely a matter of organizing the area of habitation within a city’s boundaries in a rational way, but of the interaction between human settlement and the environment as a whole. This broad approach accounts for the way in which the architectural complexes in his sketches interact with levels below ground, stretches of water, a virgin environmen,t and supraterrestrial space.

In an attempt to preserve nature intact among the city complexes, Khidekel’s project of 1922 relegated main transport lines to tunnels, and allowed them to surface only in cuttings in the vicinity of buildings. In another project dating from the same year, he designed a building floating above ground and only tenuously linked to it. In 1926, he drew a building at a great height above the Earth and wholly detached from it.

Khidekel’s experimental town-planning projects came to revolve around the idea of a city laid out over a communications network sunk into the ground or raised well above it and incorporating a conception of vertical zoning radically different from that of his colleagues. His outlines of architectural complexes in the form of suprematist compositions dating from this time clearly reveal an element of vertical stratification in their spatial organization. Buildings and structural complexes do not simply rest on the ground, but are raised to various levels above it, while their component elements intersect each other at right angles. Clear space, cuttings, canals and pristine nature underlie these structures.

By the mid-1920s, the buildings floating above ground and the stratified complexes which he had designed at the beginning of the decade had led Khidekel to the idea of raising an entire city above ground, without cutting it adrift, by resting it on piers. The surface itself with its contours and vegetation remained untouched, while the entire city was carried absolutely level above the landscape.

Khidekel worked on the idea of a city above ground level for several years, from 1925 to 1929, and produced a number of variants for it, the first of which was close in its conception to his “planing buildings” and stratified complexes, a city consisting of a layered rectangular pattern of horizontal blocks raised above ground on ferro-concrete piers.

In 1926-1927, Khidekel produced a great many vertical compositions, some with several tiers. The horizontal compositions characteristic of Spatial Suprematism were now supplemented with vertical components. The spatial organization of the city on piers also changed in Khidekel’s sketches during 1927-1929. It was no longer simply a matter of a rectangular pattern of horizontal blocks, although this still recurred in some variants, but of an intricate combination of horizontal and vertical blocks, the latter jutting up above the horizontal pattern.

Khidekel’s town on piers represents a novel reinterpretation of the garden-city town-planning concept. The heavy traffic is accommodated in cuttings, or immediately below the horizontal blocks, while the landscape remains unaltered — for rambling and recreation along picturesque paths, and for the general enjoyment of nature.

In 1924-1926, Khidekel produced a design for a town built over water. Its base was a concrete pontoon, double-bottomed for extra strength and with internal cavities for communications such as rail traffic. The pontoon was to carry terraces of one- or two-storey houses separated by shallow inner canals. These were laid out on the surface of the foundation pontoon and connected the city and the individual houses with both the open sea and the shore by the use of boats. The first tier of buildings above the pontoon was mainly intended for industrial and storage purposes. Above this, flat roofs or terraces carried motor roads, pedestrian ways and boulevards, as well as bridges over the canals. The third level — and, to a lesser extent, the second — carried dwellings, above which recreational terraces, gardens, and squares were provided.