Man and Nature, Part III: An Excursus into the Structuralist Opposition of Nature and Culture

Still from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

The basic distinction between “nature” and “culture” — that fundamental opposition so central to Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology[1] — has been denied, deconstructed, and dissolved countless times by post-structuralist scholars and intellectuals.  But in this respect, it is hardly the only binary to have been so challenged — man/woman, inside/outside, and self/other have all similarly come under attack.  The reality of such distinctions, they say, is far less certain, and far more ambiguous, than the structuralists would have us believe.  An absolute division between any of these pairs, they argue, cannot therefore be established.

And there is undeniably something to the blurring of this distinction: after all, is man (historically associated with culture and civilization) not also an animal? Darwin’s theory of evolution proved definitively man’s derivation from more primitive animal species.  It could thus not be denied that man is simply one species amongst many.  Humanity can claim no special status separate from these other species, by dint of some sort of divine creation or other fantasy.  And so also can humanity not maintain any sort of special dominion over all the rest of nature, as suggested by Judeo-Christian mythology.[2] By what right, then, ask the environmentalists, can mankind dominate and exploit the whole of nature? Humans have no special privilege — at an ethical level — over and above any other sentient animals.  It is unethical, therefore, to live at the expense of other sentient beings, or to intrude upon their natural environment.  Would this not constitute a form of speciesism?

But this argument cuts both ways.  For how is it that the actions of this animal, mankind, be considered so wholly unnatural? After all, it might be justifiably pointed out that all biological organisms exploit their environment, to the extent that they can.  Those species that do not adequately exploit their environment or find their way into an environment in which they can, simply go extinct.  So when environmental activists protest the exploitation of nature by human beings, the argument could be made that we are simply doing what all other organisms do.  We just happen to be especially good at it.  Might it not even be human “nature” to ruthlessly exploit and dominate the rest of nature? In the end, human beings are exceptionally gifted in terms of their ability to think systematically, understand the relationship between means and ends, and contrive complex devices to use as tools to manipulate the environment.  It is as if evolution produced an animal capable of conquering nature in its entirety, and that mankind is merely exercising the gifts bestowed on it by nature.

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Man and Nature, Part II: The Marxist Theory of Man’s Alienation from Nature

Still from Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1979)

When Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, he was likewise concerned with the problem of man’s (specifically, the worker’s) relationship to nature.  It was part of the worker’s fourfold alienation under capitalist modernity: his estrangement from nature, from the products of his labor, from other people, and from himself.  As Marx explained, with respect to nature: “The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world.  It is the material in which his labor realizes itself…”[1] However, as the products of the worker’s labor are expropriated, nature is reduced to a mere means of subsistence.  “In a physical sense man lives only from these natural products, whether in the form of nourishment, heating, clothing, shelter, etc.…Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the human body.”[2] The natural world is further and further removed from the worker, and arrives then only in a relatively processed, mediated form.  The immediacy of nature has been lost, and nature confronts humanity as an alien, unknown entity.  This alienation is exacerbated by the shared estrangement from nature that the individual sees in other men: “Every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested in the relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature.”[3] Or, as the Marxist theorist Max Horkheimer would later put it, echoing Marx, “The history of man’s efforts to subjugate nature is also the history of man’s subjugation by man.”[4]

Clearly, the alienation felt by the Romantics toward nature was a real one, Marx recognized, but he did not see it as the result of some sort of spiritual downfall or fall from grace.  Rather, he understood it to be symptomatic of the rise of a new social formation — namely, capitalism.  That is to say, the alienation from nature that was registered ideologically (in poetry, philosophy, and art) by the Romantics was indicative of a deeper shift in the socioeconomic substructure of their time.

Although humanity’s alienation from nature was clearly a central concern of the young Marx, most of his later work was solely devoted to the analysis of class relations under capitalism and the critique of political economy.  It was thus Engels, rather, who would eventually take up the subject of nature again in his writings.  Not only in his 1883 Dialectics of Nature, a text that remains controversial within the annals of Marxist literature, but even in other works like Anti-Duhring and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels discussed the way in which humanity became further estranged from nature even as science began to discover its innermost workings.  For rather than encountering nature in an organic, holistic fashion, natural science was methodologically microscopic, isolating individual phenomena from their original context and observing their operation in abstraction from the whole.  This entailed, as Bacon had already himself admitted, a certain domination of nature.  And this, in turn, implied an equal degree of alienation from nature.  Engels explained the historical unfolding of this process as follows:

The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life.[5]

Although Engels himself repudiated the French materialists and natural philosophers like Bacon and Locke for their “metaphysical” approach to nature, and considered the mechanistic view of the world to have been superseded by dialectical thought, it was the mechanistic worldview that eventually won out in the field of the natural sciences.  It remains down to the present day — for better or for worse — the predominant mode of thought amongst the disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology.  This is a large reason why Engels’ later Dialectics of Nature has subsequently been so disparaged by scientists and philosophers, despite the fact that some of its content is both salvageable and valuable to Marxist literature.

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Man and Nature, Part I: The Shifting Historical Conceptions of Nature in Society

Caspar David Friedrich, "Sunset" (1835)

History proves again and again

How Nature points out the folly of man…

— Blue Oyster Cult, “Godzilla”

With recent events in Japan and images of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunami still fresh in our minds, it seems appropriate to revisit the old issue of humanity’s relationship to nature.  The proper exposition of the problem would require a great deal of space; therefore, I propose to divide my treatment of the issue into three separate blog entries, each of which builds on the results of those that precede it.  After all, the problem of man’s relation to nature has been conceived in a number of distinct ways over the ages, many of which survive into the present day, in various mutations.

So perhaps it might be useful to begin with an overview, a genealogy of sorts, so that these different conceptions and their relation to one another can be clarified.  The presentation will be dialectical, but not out of any obligation to some artificially preconfigured format.  It will be dialectical because the subject at hand is itself really dialectical, as the various conceptions of nature interweave and overlap in their progress through history.  For man’s orientation to nature has by no means been the same over time; and by that same token are no later conceptions of nature that do not bear the traces of those that came before it.

And so, to begin at the beginning:

At some points, nature was viewed as an adversary to be feared, bringing plague, catastrophe, and famine to ravage mankind.  Often these elemental forces were either animistically, naturalistically, or totemistically embodied as divine powers in themselves,[1] or anthropomorphized as gods who commanded these forces as they saw fit.  When cataclysms occurred, it was because the gods or spirits had somehow been enraged by the misdeeds of men, and thus they unleashed their fury upon the mass of fear-stricken mortals.  In Christian times, this same logic persisted,[2] with periods of plenty seen as signs of God’s providence and grace, while periods of blight were viewed as God’s wrath, brought on by the sinfulness and iniquity of men.

Later, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, nature was reenvisioned as dead matter, abiding by a set of mechanical but unknown laws, which could be discovered and mastered through careful study and observation under controlled conditions.  As the Baconian dictum went, contra Aristotle: “the secrets of nature reveal themselves better through harassments applied by the arts [torture] than when they go on in their own way.”[3] Thus began the “conquest” of nature, the quest to harness its forces so that they may serve the ends of mankind.  Robbed of their mysterious properties, natural objects therefore became “disenchanted,” in the Weberian sense.[4] With the arrival of the Enlightenment, as Hegel recognized, “the intellect will cognize what is intuited as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber.”[5]

Romanticism responded to this alienation from nature with a sense of tragic loss, and sought to regain what they saw as the fractured unity of man and nature.  The Romantics exalted the primitive, celebrating the charming naïveté of the ancient Greeks or their modern-day counterparts, who appeared in the form of “noble savages.”  The playwright Friedrich Schiller even dedicated an essay to the distinction between the “naïve”[6] and “sentimental” in poetry.  For modern man, he asserted, “nature has disappeared from our humanity, and we can reencounter it in its genuineness only outside of humanity in the inanimate world.  Not our greater naturalness [Naturmäßigkeit], but the very opposite, the unnaturalness [Naturwidrigkeit] of our relationships, conditions, and mores forces us to fashion a satisfaction in the physical world that is not to be hoped for in the moral world.”[7] The Romantics thus preferred the bucolic simplicity of the small old village to the sprawling chaos of the modern city.  Vitalistic explanations of nature, like Goethe’s and Schelling’s, were offered as alternatives to the Democritean-Newtonian vision of the universe as composed of dead matter and obeying a changeless set of mechanical laws.

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A Few More Issues of Строительство Москвы

Here are a few more issues of Строительство Москвы:

Строительство Москвы – (1929) – № 5

Строительство Москвы – (1929) – № 6

Строительство Москвы – (1930) – № 6

 

Some Long Overdue Gratitude, Plugs, and Recognition

During my time as author of The Charnel-House I have been the beneficiary of a number of appreciative comments and plugs that have helped to publicize and further spread the word about my blog.  Needless to say, I am deeply grateful to have received these endorsements.  But now it has come time to return their generosity, as well as to include a few plugs of my own.

First of all, I should like to thank the following blogs for their support:

1. Anti-German/Anti-National Translation: A blog with incredible breadth and critical acuity, providing translation work as well as discussions of anti-Semitism on the Left.

2. Nasty, Brutalist, and Short: Perhaps the most original and intriguing architectural critic to be found in the blogosphere, writing from an explicitly Bolshevist and pro-Modernist perspective.

3. Renegade Eye: A blog associated with the Trotskyist International Marxist Tendency (IMT), whose position on Chavez and Venezuela might be a far cry from my own, but which always provides interesting articles and topics for discussion.  The quality of discussion varies from post to post, but the author of the blog himself is quite to-the-point and intellectually honest.

4. Bob From Brockley: Of all the blogs that have linked to mine, I am by far the least acquainted with this one.  From what I understand, the author is a British Leftist who quickly got fed up with all the nonsense floating around on the Left there.  It’s a blog I’d love to explore some more in the coming months.

The list of sites I’d like to plug is too long for a single post, but you’ll find them all in my links on the right-hand side of the page, organized roughly according to their content.  I recommend all of them, with the only reservation being that they do not necessarily reflect my own views.  Nevertheless, I find all of them engaging enough to check out.  Enjoy!

Environmentalism and the So-Called “Green Scare”: An Ideological Critique

The Idea of the Perpetual Forest, 1923

Will Potter, the self-styled alternative journalist and author of the blog Green is the New Red, has recently taken issue with the presentation of environmental activist criminals alongside neo-Nazis and anti-abortion activists.  The blog, whose content usually amounts to little more than accusations of hypocrisy and appeals to common sense, suggests that the reason for this invidious association is corporate interests “polluting” the spirit of democracy through lobbying groups operating in Washington.

It actually shouldn’t come as so much of a surprise, however, that environmentalists should be listed alongside neo-Nazis as prisoners, in terms of their ideology (that is, if they are not grouped according to the crimes they committed).  After all, Nazism and fascism in general promoted a number of policies and philosophical outlooks that are today considered “progressive” by the soft left and mainstream environmentalism.  They introduced the concept of environmental sustainability and often advocated a sort of vitalistic respect for Nature considered in itself, as some sort of untouched wilderness paradise or Dauerwald.  They saw natural sites like the Black Forest as the Ursprung of the Teutonic spirit, uncorrupted by modern society and its economic form of capitalism, which they associated with cosmopolitanism, decadent urbanism, and Jewry.  Of course, a lot of this Germanic naturalist horseshit has been unwittingly “recycled” and reprocessed by the present-day environmentalist movement, which still fancies itself to be extremely forward-thinking and anti-establishment.

It actually makes much less sense that an anti-abortion terrorist would be mentioned in the same breath as a neo-Nazi, ideologically speaking.  Fascism, especially in its NSDAP strain, supported forced sterilization and mandatory abortion procedures as part of its eugenicist program of racial hygiene.  Anti-abortion extremists may be religious lunatics, but they wouldn’t be caught dead with a neo-Nazi.  “Radical” environmentalism is far more compatible with Nazism than the pro-life fringe.

So it would seem that the only legitimate basis for Will Potter’s objection is that the environmentalists are being associated with murderers, not specifically anti-abortion or anti-semitic murderers.  McGowan and the SHAC 7 have been imprisoned for the destruction of property, not the destruction of life, as with Furrow and Waagner.  But the ideologies involved would seem to be irrelevant, since at an ideological level environmentalists would have far more in common with neo-Nazis than anti-abortion fanatics.  I’m not sure why Potter feels it’s even necessary to mention them.

I suspect the point he is trying to get at is that apparently “left-wing” anti-corporate/anti-capitalist activists are being unfairly equated with right-wing terrorists who are guilty of far worse crimes.  The nature of their crimes notwithstanding, however, this takes for granted the idea that animal rights advocates and environmentalists are actually part of the political Left.  From an historical perspective, on the contrary, it would be seen that environmentalism is politically ambiguous and that a great deal of its ideology has been inherited from romantic nationalist currents in the 19th century and more recently from mass right-wing movements like fascism.  A leftist position that was less politically confused would see the goal of society and humanity in general as the self-conscious global mastery of nature, not the dangerously haphazard and chaotic hyperexploitation of the environment, as things currently stand.  But not the flimsy and shallow anti-corporate rhetoric that’s peddled today by most environmentalists.

To close with a reflection on the site’s premise, a few words might be said.  Potter’s main contention on the site is that the Green environmentalist and animal rights movement is suffering persecution akin to that experienced by Communists during the famous “Red Scares” of the 1920s and 1950s.  Besides the obvious point that the parallels Potter sees are exaggerated and overblown, it strikes me as exceptionally ironic that a website whose mission statement insists that “Together, we can stop they cycle of history repeating itself” can be so oblivious of its own movement’s history.

For now, however, we might even grant Potter that this so-called “Green Scare” does constitute a repetition of sorts.  But for this sort of repetition, no observation is more apt than Marx’s when he recalls in his Eighteenth Brumaire that

Hegel remarks somewherethat all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

The Red Scares of the ’20s and ’50s possess a tragic aspect, particularly the former.  By contrast, the “Green Scare” of recent years appears farcical.  The Animal Liberation Front for the Bolsheviks, Daniel McGowan for Leon Trotskii, the Green for the Red.

Строительство Москвы/Building Moscow Explained, Plus Some More Issues

Diagram for the Proposed Reconstruction of Moscow

 Строительство Москвы, pronounced “Stroitel’stvo Moskvy,” was a Soviet journal published from 1924-1941.  In the first couple years of its existence, its focus was primarily on the construction industry and its activities in Moscow, talking about city renovation following the end of the devastating Civil War.  Its articles during this period were of a mostly journalistic nature, reporting recent developments and discussing new building proposals.  One section toward the end was usually reserved for a “Chronicle of Foreign Technology,” in which new technological achievements in the West were detailed.

Around 1927, however, the focus of the journal shifted to more theoretical matters, absorbing some of the avant-garde influences of magazines like SA, which was reflected by some of the more programmatic articles it featured.  The nature of modern architecture was discussed, in a way that was slightly more inclusive than the strictly Constructivist SA, under the editorship of Ginzburg and the Vesnins (and later Khiger).  Nikolai Ladovskii published several articles in Building Moscow, as well as his protégés Krutikov and Krasil’nikov.  Some of the more traditional, academic architects were also able to publish during this period.

Between 1929 and 1931, the subject of greater city planning was introduced to the journal, with a great deal of attention devoted to the plans to reconstruct Moscow, overseen by Stalin’s henchman Kaganovich.  The competition for the design of the Palace of the Soviets, planned for construction right outside the Kremlin, was also a major subject dealt with by Building Moscow.  After 1932 or so, with the results of the competition in, the journal slowly began to drift into a neoclassicist direction, where it would remain until it ceased publication in the leadup to war with Germany in 1941.

Anyway, here are another few issues of the journal, of a more avant-garde and theoretical flavor, talking about urbanism and design:

Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 5

Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 6

Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 8

Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 10

Digitizing Microfiche: Строительство Москвы и другие Советские журналы об архитектуре (Building Moscow and other Soviet Journals about Architecture)

Aleksandr Sil'chenkov's Proposal for the "House of Industry" Project, 1929

Another long overdue update.  My two-month absence can be explained by a series of personal matters to which I’ve had to attend, as well as by an exceedingly laborious part of my research in which I’ve been involved.  This post will share some of the fruits of that labor, however, providing a sneak-peak into some of the subjects I’ve been working on.  I flatter myself to think that I am also hereby contributing to the further democratization of knowledge, freeing long-forgotten documents from their obscurity in old libraries and distant archives.  But the truth is that I have been the beneficiary of so much of the work undertaken by people with similar motives, scanning valuable documents and thereby disseminating their information, that I feel this is the least I could do.

Cutting to the matter at hand, the files attached to this post are just some of the old avant-garde journals which I’ve been carefully converting to a readable PDF format, in full-text versions that include illustrations as well as raw text.  The difference between these files and the ones I digitized from Современная архитектура late last year is that I actually never encountered the physical documents that I was working with.  These rare documents were only accessible to me in microfiche and microfilm format, preserved as part of Columbia University’s and the New York Public Library’s effort to catalogue early Soviet periodicals.  Some of these microform documents were in good condition, with minimal dust and other imperfections.  Others, unfortunately, were not.

To briefly describe the process by which I digitized these journals (for those who might be interested or are perhaps considering similar work), I shall here sketch out the major steps it involved.  First, I had to create a makeshift light-table separate from the actual microform scanners at the library, which tend to produce extremely shoddy and unreadable facsimiles.  I then proceeded to photograph each individual frame of microfilm or microfiche with a digital camera.  I personally do not own a camera with a very high-resolution optical lens (this requires something like a 40-100x zoom), so I instead removed one of the detachable high-zoom lenses from one of the scanners and then shot my own pictures at my camera’s maximum zoom through this second lens.  Anyone who has better equipment than I did can easily bypass this step.

It took a while to get used to taking good shots of each individual frame, but once I had gathered all of them I loaded them onto my computer and began running them through image-processing software.  The number of programs I ended up using, which probably could be simplified by anyone who knows how to work with images better than I, included Aperture, Photoshop, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).  If anyone is interested in the actual adjustments I made to each file to render them more readable, they can inquire in the comments section.  I shall spare my readers these boring details.  Anyway, clarifying the text portions of these journals I found often distorted the images that appeared alongside them, and so I decided to process each page with images twice, once for the images and once for the text.  I then mapped on some cleaned-up versions of the pictures onto the cleaned-up texts and ran the resulting images through the ABBYY FineReader text-recognition program.

The final product of this whole confounded process can be found below.  Enjoy! More will be coming soon.  I’ve catalogued the entire run of Строительство Москвы from 1926-1932, Советская архитектура from 1931-1934, and a number of assorted articles relating to architecture from the journals Советское искусство, Плановое хозяйство, and Революция и культура.  They shall be forthcoming.  Here are some of the ones I’ve finished so far:

Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 9

Строительство Москвы – (1931) – № 8

Строительство Москвы – (1930) – № 1

Строительство Москвы – (1929) – № 1

Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 4

Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 2

Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 3

Николай Докучаев – «Архитектура и планировка городов» – Советское искусство – (1926) – № 6

The Major Works of Iakov Chernikhov

Many thanks to Arch-Grafika.ru/ for making available the following major works of the famed Russian avant-garde architect Iakov Chernikhov, which I have converted into PDF form and rendered searchable:

1. Яков Чернихов — 101 архитектурная фантазия (1927) [101 Architectural Fantasies]

2. Яков Чернихов — Основы Современной Архитектуры (1930) [The Fundamentals of Modern Architecture]

3. Яков Чернихов — Конструкция машинных и архитектурных форм (1933) [The Construction of Machine and Architectural Forms, of which I have recently posted an excellent full-text translation by the late Catherine Cooke]

An additional thank you to Arch-Grafika for crediting my work in uploading Izvestiia ASNOVA.

OSA’s Modern Architecture (Современная архитектура) Free PDF Download/бесплатно скачать

Advertisement on the back of Современная архитектура — (1929) — № 5

This post is dedicated to Owen Hatherley of the blog Nasty, Brutalist, and Short, the Kosmograd newsfeed, Doug Spencer of the Critical Grounds blog, the brilliant Vladimir Paperny (for his help and insight), and anyone else who’s interested in Marxism and modernist architecture:

First, I would like to apologize to everyone who follows my blog for the long absence.  The reason I’ve been gone the last two weeks is that I’ve been meticulously putting together some PDFs of the early Soviet architectural journal Modern Architecture, the main periodical published by the Constructivists in OSA.  Needless to say, this was an extraordinarily time-consuming process.  Nevertheless, I am hoping to return to posting fairly regularly, and to write a long-delayed contribution to Renegade Eye.

Modern Architecture was edited by Moisei Ginzburg and the Vesnin brothers, until Roman Khiger took over in 1928, and was throughout the leading architectural avant-garde journal in the USSR.  From February 1926 to the end of 1930, six issues of the journal were published annually.  It provided an outlet for architectural theory and design for both Soviet and Western European architects, pursuing a distinctly internationalist program of design.  The journal was unfortunately shut down toward the beginning of 1931, replaced by the All-Union journal Soviet Architecture, which gradually shifted in the direction of neoclassicism.

The following are nearly full-text PDF versions of some of the journal’s most outstanding issues, capturing almost its entire run.  As the gaps will suggest, the following issues are missing: 1926, № 2; 1927, № 4/5; 1928 №  2 & 5.  In addition, I mostly just included those pages which have sizable blocks of text in them, or which form part of an article in the journal.  Many of the pages that were solely devoted to illustration have been omitted.  This is because the focus of my research is centered on the writings of the modernist architects more so than their designs.  Still, Modern Architecture was fairly text-heavy, and most of the time at least two-thirds of each issue are reproduced, along with images.

The images comprising the pages of each PDF were gathered from photos I took of the various issues, which I then edited and rearranged.  The quality of the images varies, though they get notably clearer toward the end.  Part of this owes to my own lack of skill as a photographer, and the other part to the notoriously poor quality of early Soviet print.  Every page has been cropped, rescaled, and clarified as much as possible, before finally being run through some Cyrillic text-recognition software.  Some sections remain difficult to read, however, and are not quite as reliable.  Even for those who don’t read Russian, they still are worth taking a look at, if only for the masterful layout designed by Aleksei Gan.

And so, without further ado:

1926

Современная архитектура — (1926) — № 1

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 2 (missing)

Современная архитектура — (1926) — № 3

Современная архитектура — (1926) — № 4

Современная архитектура — (1926) — № 5/6

1927

Современная архитектура — (1927) — № 1

Современная архитектура — (1927) — № 2

Современная архитектура — (1927) — № 3

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 4/5 (missing)

Современная архитектура — (1927) — № 6

1928

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 1

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 2 (missing)

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 3

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 4

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 5 (missing)

Современная архитектура — (1928) — № 6

1929

Современная архитектура — (1929) — № 1

Современная архитектура — (1929) — № 2

Современная архитектура — (1929) — № 3

Современная архитектура — (1929) — № 4

Современная архитектура — (1929) — № 5

Современная архитектура — (1929) — № 6

1930

Современная архитектура — (1930) — № 1/2

Современная архитектура — (1930) — № 3

Современная архитектура — (1930) — № 4

Современная архитектура — (1930) — № 5

Современная архитектура — (1930) — № 6

Enjoy!