Parallelepiped, cylinder,
complex configuration
Finding the form of a blunt massive volume, VKhUTEMAS 1920-1926
Parallelepiped, cylinder,
avant-garde
Lissitzky, Wolkenbügel (1924)
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El Lissitzky’s skyscrapers stood on great elevated piers above intersections of radial and ring-rods in Moscow. These piers with their open-faced lift-shafts, support the horizontally cantilevered building. Beneath them are metro stations and bus-stops. The building is supposed to be made of steel and glass, all the parts being standardized so that no scaffolding is needed for its erection.
Emil Roth, the Swiss architect, also helped in working out this design. He, as well as Mart Stam, were extraterritorial members of the Society of New Architects (ASNOVA) founded in Moscow in 1923. This society consisted mostly of architects connected with the VKhUTEMAS school in Moscow. The work of Ladovskii’s pupils from that school was published in the journal ABC.
Click any of the images below to enlarge them.
The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union (1929)
Old cities — New buildings
The future and utopia
El Lissitzky (1929)
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The creation of an office complex that would respond to the demands of the new times within the context of the old Moscow urban fabric was the basic idea leading to the concept of the so-called “sky-hook.” Moscow is a centralized city, characterized by a number of concentric ring boulevards connected by radial main streets emanating from the Kremlin. The proposal intends to place these structures at the intersections of the radials and the boulevards, where the most intense traffic is generated. Everything delivered to the building by horizontal traffic is subsequently transported vertically by elevator and then redistributed in a horizontal direction.
Compared to the prevalent American high-rise system the innovation consists in the fact that the horizontal (the useful) is clearly separated from the vertical (the support, the necessary). This in turn allows for clarity in the interior layout, which is essential for office structures and is usually predicated by the structural system. The resulting external building volume achieves elementary diversity in all six visual directions.
The problems connected with the development of these building types, including the scientific organization of work and business, are being dealt with on an international level. In this field, as in others, reconstruction will pose new demands.
In these times we must be very objective, very practical, and totally unromantic, so that we can catch up with the rest of the world and overtake it. But we also know that even the best “business” will not of itself advance us to a higher level of culture. The next stage of cultural development will encompass all aspects of life: human productivity and creativity, the most precious faculties of man. And not in order to accumulate profits for individuals, but to produce works that belong to everybody. If we just consider all the accomplishments of our own generation, we are certainly justified in taking for granted a technology capable of solving all the tasks mentioned earlier. One of our utopian ideas is the desire to overcome the limitations of the substructure, of the earthbound. We have developed this idea in a series of proposals (sky-hooks, stadium grandstands, Paris garage).
It is the task of technology to make sure that all these elementary volumes that produce new relationships and tensions in space will be structurally safe.
The idea of the conquest of the substructure, the earthbound, can be extended even further and calls for the conquest of gravity as such. It demands floating structures, a physical-dynamic architecture.
“For Oud”
The decantation chamber of Soviet modernism: VKhUTEMAS projects from the 1920s
Academic Conferences in the VKhUTEMAS
Iakov A. Kornfel’d
Sovremennaia arkhitektura
No. 5-6, 1926. Pgs. 135-137
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In November each faculty in the VKhUTEMAS had a conference and set itself the following aims:
- to establish direct links between the school and its main “consumers,” i.e. the state economic organizations and soviet society;
- to sort out the faculty’s own program;
- to take note of practical shortcomings in their training of specialists and to discuss proposals for correcting the teaching program appropriately, and to look at the ideological make-up of their curriculum.
The conference in the Architecture Faculty took place on Thursday 18 November. The first session attracted 70 percent of those invited. VKhUTEMAS Rector P.I. Novitskii was elected chairman and spoke on the change taking place in the social context of our lives, with its requirement that we give form to the new way of life and solve architectural tasks of a vast scale in the fields of social, industrial, and housing construction.
Dean of the Architecture Faculty I.V. Rylskii then reported on the academic life of the faculty and on the structure of the curriculum. He noted that of the 70 students who have left the school in the three graduating classes completing the whole course since the Revolution, only one has remained on the unemployment list at the Labor Exchange — which shows that architects emerging from here really are being trained to meet today’s practical requirements. Continue reading
Details from Lissitzky’s “Pressa” catalogue, 1928
Click to enlarge.
Train stations, bread factories, and the “New City”
Student projects at VKhUTEMAS
and VKhUTEIN from the studios
of Vesnin & Ladovskii, 1925–1929
.Train stations
Suvorov, studio of Nikolai Ladovskii, perspective view of a train station in Saratov, 1929
N. Sokolov, studio of Aleksandr Vesnin, fragments of the facade for a train station in Saratov, 1929
Author unknown, axonometric view of a train station in Saratov, 1929
D. Kantorovich, perspective view of a train station in Saratov, 1929
Zuev workers’ club in Moscow (1928-1931), by Il’ia Golosov
The famed glass cylinder encasing the stairs, bisected by a right angle as its belt.
Il’ia Golosov, competition entry for the Leningrad Pravda (1924). Already Golosov’s fascination with towers is manifest
Il’ia Golosov, Elektrobank project in Moscow (1926), similar to the plan realized in Zuev
Il’ia Golosov, Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931)
Il’ia Golosov, Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931)
Il’ia Golosov, Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), colorized photo taken 1931
Il’ia Golosov, Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), photo 1932
Il’ia Golosov, Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), postcard early 1930s
Il’ia Golosov, interior of the Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), photo 1933
Zuev Club in Moscow, photo by Anatole Kopp, 1964
Il’ia Golosov, Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931)
Il’ia Golosov, Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), photo 1950s
Il’ia Golosov, Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), photo 1986
Il’ia Golosov, interior of the Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), photo 2012
Il’ia Golosov, interior of the Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), photo by Natalia Melikova of the Constructivist Project in 2011
Il’ia Golosov, interior of the Zuev workers club in Moscow (1928-1931), photo by Natalia Melikova of the Constructivist Project in 2011
The tasks of criticism
Manfredo Tafuri on
architecture criticism
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Image: Still from Marcel L’Herbier’s
silent film classic L’Inhumaine (1924)
Introduction
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This post follows up on the recent series that gave advice to critics and sketched out criticism after utopian politics. Since these were more or less confined to art criticism, and did not cover the peculiar situation of architecture critics and historians, I’m posting Manfredo Tafuri’s excellent 1967 essay “The Tasks of Criticism.”
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The tasks of criticism
Manfredo Tafuri
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In trying to clarify the function of some instruments of critical and historiographical analysis, we have intentionally avoided the problem of outlining a theory of architectural syntax and grammar. In defining the architectural codes as a bundle of relationships linking a complex series of “systems,” we were attempting to stress something that seems to us typical of architecture as compared with other means of visual communication: the fact, that is, that the typologies, the techniques, the production relations, the relations with nature and with the city, can in the architectural context, assume symbolic dimensions, charge themselves with meaning and force the limits within which every one of these components plays its own role in the historical context.
Clearly, then, architectural language is polysemic: and not only as an analogy with painting, but in the specific sense. When EI Lissitzky on the one hand and Van Doesburg on the other theorized the experimental function of the new linguistic systems within the field of art, and established the constructive use in industrial production as the specific task of visual art, they had very much in mind the close link between artistic communications, the new methods of production, and the new systems of reception of the communications themselves.
The only way to describe the structures of architectural language seems to be through historical synthesis. All the naïve attempts to single out a component from the complex heap of architecture and elect it as a parameter of architectural language, are bound to fail before the impossibility of outlining a complete history of architecture in this way. Neither the functions nor the space of the tectonic elements can beat the base of a semiological analysis of planning. In the very moment in which we stress the term project in order to designate architecture, it becomes clear that, each time, we should evaluate which new materials have become part of the universe of discourse of architecture itself, what are the new relations between the traditional materials, and which of these materials has a prominent role.
A younger Manfredo Tafuri, early 1960s, before the beard
One cannot evaluate Laon Cathedral, the Pazzi Chapel, and Berlin’s Siemensstadt within the same linguistic parameters: if one chose purely formal criteria, the symbolic dimension of the first two works would escape completely, while one would miss the intimate contradiction of the third; if one chose the traditional iconological method, one would have to remain mute before Berlin’s Siedlungen; and if one were to trust the analysis of space, one would find no terms of comparison between the spatial narrative of the first, the anti-narrative rigor of the second and the leaving behind of the concept of “space” itself on the part of the third.
The language of architecture is formed, defined and left behind in history, together with the very idea of architecture. In this sense the establishment of a “general grammar” of architecture is a utopia. Continue reading
Modernity for penguins — modernity for all!
Berthold Lubetkin’s celebrated
Penguin Pool in London (1934)
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Image: A penguin pauses
midway down the ramp
of Lubetkin’s pool (1934)
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Aviary, London zoological garden
Reyner Banham
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From The Architectural Review.
(№ 138: Sept. 1965). Pg. 186.
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Collapsed goal-posts among the trees — this, undoubtedly, is the first impression of the North Aviary from Primrose Hill, and equally undoubtedly it is a very belated contribution to the Arcadian tradition in British architecture. But, within that tradition, it does not belong to the gimcrack wing that gave us so many fake ruins and other collapsed objects among trees; rather, it belongs to the tough-minded stream whose triumphs are the palm stove at Kew Gardens, or Paxton’s Victoria Regia house at Chatsworth.
Lubetkin and Tecton’s Penguin Pool (built 1934)
In common with these great temples of acquisitive botany, the aviary is a walk-through exhibition-environment. This is not a total innovation at Regent’s Park Zoo, because one is also permitted to share the same physical space as the humming-birds, for instance. But to build on this scale and in the open is a very different problem from the creation of the small, totally artificial environment in which the humming-birds enjoy a manufactured climate secured by double-doored light-trap entrances. In the North Aviary the problem was more that of taming a piece of the existing topography and covering it with an enclosure high enough and broad enough for large birds to fly convincingly — and yet keep the public close enough to avoid the “Whipsnade effect” of sheer distance and natural surroundings making the exhibits invisible. With very little ingenuity, the form and levels of the present site would probably have made for better-than-average visibility even with an enclosure that permitted observation only from the outside. The creation of an internal observation route, by means as complex as a dog-leg bridge without intermediate supports, therefore proposes a significant improvement over outside viewing — and if the design failed to deliver this, then it would fail as architecture however handsome the covering structure. But quite obviously (though not so obviously that one does not have to explain it, alas) the bridge offers a bird’s-eye-type view of the cliff-face that no rearrangement of the solid topography could afford, except by making an equally high cliff directly opposite, and cliff-nesting birds do not nest on the sides of trenches. The other views, of birds washing and wading in the cascades for instance, are supernumerary benefits by comparison, though their sum-total is a substantial additional justification for the bridge. Continue reading
Walter Benjamin and architectural modernism
Never realized before just how plugged-in Walter Benjamin was with the avant-garde architectural scene in Germany, France, and Austria during his day. Seriously, even just skimming through the convolutes of his unfinished Arcades Project, the text is teeming with references to Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme (1925), Adolf Behne’s Neues Wohnen — Neues Bauen (1927), Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928), and Emil Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier, Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen Architektur (1933). An acquaintance pointed out to me that he corresponded with Erich Auerbach, later author of Mimesis, as well.
Surprisingly prescient, too. Corbu was already an established figure by then, but Giedion and Kaufmann were relatively unknown. Auerbach wasn’t even on the radar.
Over the next few posts will be spread out some of Benjamin’s notes quoting and discussing some of these figures.
Theater at the Bauhaus (1925)
Oskar Schlemmer
Image: Walter Gropius, design for the
“total theater” at the Bauhaus (1926)
From a lecture-demonstration at the Bauhaus by Oskar Schlemmer to the Circle of Friends of the Bauhaus (March 16, 1927).
Before speaking about theater proper at the Bauhaus, we should first take a brief look at the way in which it came about, consider the justification for its existence, and observe its path and its goals. In short, we should review its primary endeavor, which is to approach all our material from a basic and elementary standpoint. It is because of this endeavor that the stage here has became an organic link in the total chain of Bauhaus activity.
It is natural that the aims of the Bauhaus — to seek the union of the artistic-ideal with the craftsmanlike-practical by thoroughly investigating the creative elements, and to understand in all its ramifications the essence of der Bau, creative construction — have valid application to the field of the theater. For, like the concept of Bau itself, the stage is an orchestral complex which comes about only through the cooperation of many different forces. It is the union of the most heterogeneous assortment of creative elements. Not the least of its functions is to serve the metaphysical needs of man by constructing a world of illusion and by creating the transcendental on the basis of the rational.
Cover to a more recent edition of Oskar
Schlemmer’s writings on the theater
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From the first day of its existence, the Bauhaus sensed the impulse for creative theater; for from that first day the play instinct [der Spieltrieb] was present. The play instinct, which Schiller in his wonderful and endur ing Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen [Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, (1795)] calls the source of man’s real creative values, is the un-self-conscious and naIve pleasure in shaping and pro ducing, without asking questions about use or uselessness, sense or non sense, good or bad. This pleasure through creation was especially strong at the beginning (not to say the infancy) of the Bauhaus
…….in Weimar
and was expressed in our exuberant parties, in improvisations, and in the imaginative masks and costumes which we made.
We might say that during the course of its development, this state of naïveté, which is the womb of the play instinct, is generally followed by a period of reflection, doubt, and criticism, something that in turn can easily bring about the destruction of the original state, unless a second and, as it were, skeptical kind of naIvete tempers this critical phase. Today we have become much more aware of ourselves. A sense for standards and constants has arisen out of the unconscious and the chaotic. This, together with concepts such as norm, type, and synthesis, points the way to creative form [Gestaltung].
Costumes
Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus masks. Photo by Erich Consemüller.
Oskar Schlemmer, Stair Joke: A pantomime. Photo by Erich Consemüller.
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Illustration 14: Scene from the Triadic Ballet. Photo by Karl Grill.
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costumes, 1920s
Bauhaus costume, 1920s
Bauhaus costumes, 1920s
Bauhaus costumes, 1920s
Bauhaus costumes, 1920s
Oskar Schlemmer, Spiral costume (1920s)
Schlemmer, costumes for the Triadic Ballet (1924)
Golden Sphere Costume
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It was due only to intense skepticism, for example, that in 1922 Lothar Schreyer’s plan to form a Bauhaus theater failed; at the time there was practically no climate for strong philosophical points of view (Weltanschauungstendenzen), none at least which could be found in the sacral garb of Expressionism. On the other hand, there was a distinct feeling for satire and parody. It was probably a legacy of the Dadaists to ridicule automatically everything that smacked of solemnity or ethical precepts. And so the grotesque flourished again. It found its nourishment in travesty and in mocking the antiquated forms of the contemporary theater. Though its tendency was fundamentally negative, its evident recognition of the origin, conditions, and laws of theatrical play was a positive feature.
The dance, however, stayed alive throughout this period. During the course of our growth it changed from the crude country dancing of our “youth hostelers” [Rüpeltanz der Wandervögel] to the full-dress fox trot. The same thing happened in music: our concertina metamorphosed into our jazz band (A. Weininger). Group dancing found its image reflected on the stage in the dance of the individual. And from this developed our formalized use of color [das Farbig-Formale], and the Mechanical Ballet (K. Schmidt, Bogler, Teltscher). Experimentation with colored light and shadows became the “Reflectory Light Play” (Schwertfeger and L. Hirschfeld Mack). A marionette theater was begun.
While we had no stage of our own in Weimar and had to give our productions on a sort of dubious suburban podium there, since the move
…….to Dessau
we have been in the enviable position of having a “house-stage” of our own in the new Bauhaus building. Although it was originally meant to be a platform for lectures as well as a stage for performances on a limited scale, it is nevertheless well equipped for a serious approach to stage problems.
Architecture
Design for a total theater by Walter Gropius. Drawing by Stefan Sebök (1926-27). Never realized.
Design for a total theater by Walter Gropius (1926).
Design for a total theater by Walter Gropius (1926).
Interior to the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility design by Gropius and outfitted with Breuer chairs (1926). Photo by Erich Consemuller.
Inside the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility, designed by Walter Gropius (1926). Photo by Erich Consemüller.
Interior to the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility design by Gropius and outfitted with Breuer chairs (1926).
Interior to the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility design by Gropius and outfitted with Breuer chairs (1926). Photo by Erich Consemüller.
The building as stage (1927). Photograph by T. Lux Feininger (1925).
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For us these problems and their solution lie in fundamentals, in elementary matters, in discovering literally the primary meaning of Stage. We are concerned with what makes things typical, with type, with number and measure, with basic law. • • • I scarcely need to say that these concerns have been active, if not necessarily dominant, during all periods of great art; but they could be active only when preconditioned by a state of hypersensitive alertness and tension, that is, when functioning as the regulators of a real feeling of involvement with the world and life. Of many memorable statements which have been made about number, measure, and law in art, I cite only one sentence from Philipp Otto Runge: “It is precisely in the case of those works of art which most truly arise from the imagination and the mystique of our soul, unhampered by externals and unburdened by history, that the strictest regularity is necessary.” Continue reading