Recently I was contacted by Kavel Alpaslan of the paper Gazete Duvar, an independent outlet from Turkey founded in 2016. He was interested in interviewing me about my blog, Soviet architecture, and urban planning. The interview was translated into Turkish, but it was originally conducted in English via email. You can read my original responses below.
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1. First we’d like to talk about your blog, The Charnel House. Can you tell us its story? How it started, how it’s going?
I started The Charnel-House back in 2008, a year or so after I finished my undergraduate degree in history and philosophy at Penn State. So my first few posts were actually just papers I’d written on Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and Hegel. Already at this time I’d begun reading some later theorists as well, for whom German idealism was a touchstone: figures like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, and Slavoj Žižek. But I hadn’t really written anything about them as yet, though they would deepen my engagement with Marxism.
Later, I entered grad school at the University of Chicago. There I took some classes with Moishe Postone and began to study Marx more seriously. I had some familiarity with Marx and Marxism from my involvement in the antiwar movement during the mid-aughts and my exposure to different sectarian soft fronts, primarily Trotskyist organizations. My interest was primarily in early Soviet history, and my sympathies lay with Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle for succession after Lenin’s death. So when I returned to blogging semi-regularly in 2011, I began commenting on contemporary politics as well as historical matters connected to Marxist theory and the Soviet avant-garde.
At UChicago, I was a student of the great historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. She recommended that I read Vladimir Paperny‘s Culture Two: Architecture in the Age of Stalin, which was astonishing. Paperny originally wrote this text in the late seventies, but it was so controversial in the USSR that it really only circulated among samizdat presses in the West. The book is sweeping and grandiose in its claims, not all of which I agree with, but which captivated me. I read Boris Groys‘ Total Art of Stalinism next, but then went back and read books like Anatole Kopp‘s Town and Revolution and then the original publications. When I moved to New York from Chicago, I got in touch with the recently deceased Jean-Louis Cohen, and sat in on some classes with him.
For about six or seven years, I updated the blog fairly frequently, sometimes even multiple times a week. My work situation at the time was a bit more irregular, so I was able to post more often. The content was somewhat varied. At times I wrote off-the-cuff commentary on current events, while other times I posted more formal analysis. Still other times I reposted articles and essays that were rare, but which I felt deserved a broader audience. When it came to updates on art and architecture, including various modernist magazines and publications, I tried to include as many high resolution images as I could. I’d devote some posts to individual thinkers whose work I valued, featuring PDFs of their writings.
In recent years I’ve become a teacher, which is much more demanding on my time. My blog hasn’t been quite as active since then, but I still post occasionally. I continue to do research on topics of interest, and have published a number of articles in outlets like Brooklyn Rail, Situations, Rethinking Marxism, and Datacide, as well as architectural journals like The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis, Calvert Journal, Strelka Magazine, and Archithese. Right now I am working on a large project about the Marxist theory of the family. Still, I hope to return to blogging more at some point.
2. We would like to comment on constructivist, futurist art and architecture in the Soviet Union. Especially the first two or three decades. Many people portray the Soviet architecture as “depressing” and “rough” but is it really like that? What makes people think that?
I’m not sure if cubo-futurist, suprematist, and constructivist art is thought of as bleak. More often it has been dismissed as too abstract, or childishly simple in its rendering of basic shapes. Let’s move on to architecture, though, which is more what I focused on. A number of misperceptions surround the legacy of modern architecture in the former USSR. There were different waves of modernism in the Soviet Union: 1) the “heroic” avant-garde of the early twenties through the early thirties, which built a few iconic workers’ clubs and handful of other structures but largely remained on paper; 2) the Khrushchev-era revival of functional forms, which actually did provide mass housing and produced some notable government buildings; 3) late period Brezhnevian quasi-brutalism, which largely continued the previous trend while integrating stylistic elements from the West.
When people think of drab Soviet блокови, or East German plattenbauten, they generally have the second two waves in mind. And in truth much of this, particularly the хрущёвки, were of notoriously poor quality, even if it was impressive that they managed to house so many people in such a short period of time. I recently contributed a chapter on Soviet modernism of the fifties and sixties to a collection The Visibility of Modern Architecture, edited by Gevork Hartoonian. Here I made use of Marx’s old line, amending Hegel, about how things historically happen twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. Khrushchev was in some ways the last utopian leader of the USSR, despite upholding the Stalinist political edifice. But the architecture of the period, to the extent that it took inspiration from the immediate post-revolutionary years, was but a pale imitation.
The early Soviet architectural avant-garde was more visionary, and arguably on the cutting edge of modern architecture worldwide (especially in the second half of the twenties). It was self-consciously part of the broader European and American movement, translating texts by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier while also exchanging in student exchanges between Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. Early on, many of the structures were fairly fantastical, especially those developed by former painters and sculptors. Tatlin and Lissitzky are exemplary in this respect, though Nikolai Ladovsky and his followers extended it further. Iakov Chernikhov was perhaps the pinnacle of this trend, with his architectural fantasies. Later came more functionalist designs, starting with the Vesnin brothers and Moisei Ginzburg the OSA milieu surrounding the journal Современная архитектура.
Relatively few avant-garde buildings during this period were actually realized, partially owing to the low technological level of the Soviet Union at the time and in part due to the lack of a centralized state mandate that would have taken them up on their more ambitious proposals. Of those that were built, even fewer remain, and many of those that do are in rather poor condition. Konstantin Mel’nikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club, Ilya Golosov’s Zuev Workers’ Club, Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building, Noi Trotsky’s Pravda building, Ivan Nikolaev’s Textile Institute, and Mikhail Barshch’s planetarium. Many modifications were made, as the buildings were often repurposed or overhauled with little regard for the original plan. A few have been renovated with an eye to restore them. But most today are in a sorry state.
As far as these buildings looking depressing, I suppose it’s a matter of taste. Personally, I find them elegant and innovative. Because of the low level of technology in the early Soviet Union, avant-garde architects were unable to build on the mass scale they envisioned. They only succeeded in completing a fairly small number of projects. Given that their buildings were fairly exceptional, then, it’s no wonder that they never became monotonous in the way that Khushchev-era units did. However, the technological limitations they faced meant that they had to be very clever in the way they approached construction. Their range of materials and building methods was constrained, but they often devised very novel solutions.
3. City planning in this decade is also an important issue. Even after that, Soviet cities built a certain form of city planning. What can we say about constructivism/futurism and the city building in Soviets? Can you give us some examples?
The visionary quality of the Soviet architectural avant-garde was nowhere more evident than in its eventual transition to city planning. Here they were not just thinking about individual buildings, or even neighborhoods, but with the configuration and reconfiguration of human settlements. Early on there were scattered ideas about what socialist cities would look like, but around 1928 and 1929 there was a decided shift toward thinking on this grander scale. Part of this was facilitated by the existence of centralized state agencies like Gosplan. Ginzburg remarked on this in October 1928: “The special character of our social organization and the detailed provisions of our legislation provide great possibilities for modern architecture. The nonexistence of private land ownership with its accompanying conflict of private interests creates the conditions for unimpeded city and regional planning.”
However, the question of how to approach city planning precipitated a split within the Soviet avant-garde. Already there was a divergence between the so-called “rationalists” in the group ASNOVA — Ladovsky, Dokuchaev, Lissitzky — and the “constructivists” in the group OSA — Ginzburg, the Vesnin brothers, Barshch, Khiger, and others. Now the constructivists themselves diverged along the lines of “urbanism” and “disurbanism.” The former group, led by the planner Leonid Sabsovich and joined by the Vesnins, favored standardized settlements of roughly 50,000 residents apiece. The latter, led by Mikhail Okhitovich and joined by Ginzburg and Barshch, instead promoted the idea of radically decentralized dwelling units spaced out across the entire territory. The rationalists had their own ideas about city planning as well, which didn’t square neatly with either of these.
All of this was intended to resolve one of the desiderata in Marxist theory: the antithesis between town and country, which communism aimed to abolish. This theme ran from Marx and Engels’ jointly-written Manifesto to Engels’ solo work On the Housing Question. The benefits of modern culture tended to concentrate in industrialized cities, but so too did the detriments. Meanwhile backwardness reigned throughout the countryside, especially in the predominantly peasant economy that still prevailed during the first decade of the Soviet Union’s existence. Though secluded and primitive, there was freer access to nature and a healthy lifestyle. Incidentally, this antithesis remains an issue in capitalism today. Suburbs of capitalist cities combine the worst aspects of urban and rural life.
Some brilliant treatises were written on the subject of city planning up through the early thirties, culminating in Nikolai Miliutin’s Соцгород. But there ended up being very little opportunity to put any of these concepts into practice. The Soviet government invited architects and planners to help redesign parts of Moscow in 1930, and a number of modernists submitted proposals. None of these were ever taken up. Others drew up schemes for Magnitogorsk, which was undergoing rapid expansion during the First Five-Year Plan, and eventually the German planner Ernst May was brought in. Following the Palace of the Soviets competition, which ended up picking a neoclassical design, a Stalinist turn took place in Soviet architecture. This spread to town planning as well, with large and impressive boulevards for parades and demonstrations flanked by historicist façades.
4. We also would like to focus on the relations between the Works of this era and the October Revolution. Why did the Soviet Union give us curious examples of constructivist architecture? What is the relation with the socio-economic system?
As I alluded to before, the unique social conditions of the USSR (or at least their promise) were very attractive to modern architects. Broadly speaking, the modern movement between the wars adhered to what I think of as a kind of “nondenominational socialism.” Lyonel Feininger, one of the great early representatives of the Bauhaus, created a woodcut in 1919 entitled The Cathedral of Socialism. A number of French and German modernists belonged to the Friends of the New Russia societies in their respective countries. André Lurçat was a member of the PCF, and Hannes Meyer belonged to the KPD. When the Soviet Union embarked on broader city and regional planning, they invited figures like Bruno Taut, Erich Mendelssohn, Ernst May, and numerous others to take part. Obviously, the communist commitments of the Soviet architects were even more pronounced.
Though the claim risks oversimplification, I believe there is a broad connection between revolutionary social and political movements and revolutionary artistic and architectural movements. Many have pointed out the way that artistic avant-gardes modeled themselves on political vanguards, and that the former emulated the “manifesto style” of the latter in their various public pronouncements. But the link between the two is more obscure than one might imagine. The social and political upheaval of the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, and even some time leading up to them, threw all traditional certainties into doubt. Combined with rapid technological innovations, these uncertain conditions threw art and architecture into crisis. This was true in philosophy and epistemology no less than in art. I’d say modernity even altered the aesthetic grounds of perception, in the Kantian sense of space and time.
So on an even larger scale than October 1917, stretching back for a century or so prior, the changed sociopolitical coordinates of modernity are what later gave rise to the different poetic and painterly movements. Some theorists speak of a cultural lag, whereby phenomena in the realm of culture only surface sometime after their social and economic counterparts. Architecture lagged even further behind these other media, perhaps because it requires so much more to construct a building in terms of marshaling resources, acquiring permits, hiring laborers, etc. Painters just need paint and a canvas; poets just need pen and paper. Modern architecture usually traces its origins to the late nineteenth century, whereas modern painting and poetry can look back to realism and impressionism or late romanticism and symbolism, several decades before.
But to your point, I do think that the Bolshevik Revolution captured the imagination of modern architects and city planners. The early Soviet Union appealed to them in a way that went beyond other countries during the interwar period, despite its technological backwardness. Of course, many of these architects and planners were ideologically inchoate, and above all opportunistic: Le Corbusier first shopped his ideas to liberal internationalists, proposing a design for the League of Nations in Geneva, before looking to Marxist internationalists, entering the Palace of the Soviets competition in a couple years later; later he worked with the fascist Vichy regime in France. Still, architects from the Soviet Union tended to be convinced communists. Konstantin Mel’nikov chafed under the strictures of Stalinism, as did many others, but most of the constructivists were true believers in the revolution.
Not everyone agrees with my position on this, including some whose opinions I hold in high esteem. When I interviewed Jean-Louis Cohen in late 2019, I tried to get his take on the question. He was skeptical of this idea, telling me, “I don’t think there is a necessary link [between revolutionary social conditions and revolutionary architecture]. For if you look at many of the schemes made right after the revolution in Russia, they were extremely conservative: eclectic, neoclassical. Really it took a while before architecture began engaging in more experimental pursuits.” Later on, however, he did make an interesting argument about the changed client of architecture in modern society. Unlike in previous social formations, where architects design buildings solely for private clientele (powerful political families, wealthy merchants, or religious institutions like the church), modern architecture addresses the masses.
5. Do you think today’s currents in architecture or urban planning in this sense are less attractive and less exciting?
Very little about our current moment interests me in the field of architecture, or art and literature for that matter. Good movies still occasionally come out, but maybe this is because it’s a younger medium that hasn’t yet fully exhausted its possibilities. I don’t think that my distaste for contemporary art and architecture and whatnot is due to conservatism on my part. Rather, I think it’s because history — in the robust Hegelian sense of the progress of human freedom over time — stopped happening more than a century ago. It took a while for this stalling out to be registered in the realm of culture. By the postwar period, however, when “midcentury modern” became ascendant, any revolutionary potential these forms once possessed was long gone.
Nevertheless, there are still some architectural historians and architecture critics producing outstanding work. The best among them are aware of the historical predicament, though, and the grim outlook for meaningful change. Many of the best historians and critics have passed in the last thirty years, starting with Manfredo Tafuri. Two in the last five years, with Michael Sorkin and Jean-Louis Cohen. Kenneth Frampton, whose work was so pioneering in the sixties and seventies, has come out with books in the last few years. Still, writers like Douglas Spencer, Eyal Weizman, Owen Hatherley, Douglas Murphy, Sammy Medina, and Marianela D’Aprile give me a great deal of hope in the future of writing on architecture. More hope than I have in the practice of architecture.
6. Would you like to add something?
Nothing to add. Thanks for the opportunity!