Nikolai Krasil’nikov’s terrifying planar urbanism (1928)

Nikolai Krasil’nikov
Sovremennaia arkhitektura
Vol. 3, № 6: 1928, 170-176
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Problems of modern architecture
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……Final diploma project for Aleksandr
……Vesnin’s studio at VKhUTEIN

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In order to really know an object, it is necessary to comprehend, to study all sides of it, all its internal and external connectivities.

— Lenin

It is necessary to pursue and elaborate the implications of this proposition in every specialized field.

Central tower to Nikolai Krasil'nikov's "New City" (1928)

Nikolai Krasil’nikov’s “New City” (1928)

My initial premises:

  1. The environment in which an organic body exists has an influence upon its form.
  2. The forms of the various parts of the organic body are determined by their functions. Thus in a tree the forms of the root, the trunk, and the leaves are determined by the purposes they serve.
  3. To put it mathematically, the form of every body is a complex function of many variables (and the concept of form embraces the internal structure of the body matter).
  4. A scientific theory of the design of form can be developed through the dialectical method of thinking, with the application of mathematical methods of analysis; analysis, that is, which uses the infinitesimal quantities of analytical geometry along with both differential and integral calculus, and the theory of probability and mathematical statistics.
  5. A theory of the design of architectural form must be based on the physical, mechanical, chemical, and biological laws of nature.
  6. Socialist construction is unthinkable without the solution of economic aspects of the problem such as would yield the maximum economic effect in the very broadest sense.  So the constructional economics of a building for human work or habitation must be measured in terms of:
  • the material resources expended in erecting and running it;
  • wear (amortization) and repair of the building;
  • the time expended by people on all forms of movement in and around it;
  • impairment of the health of individuals, which depends on the extent to which the sanitary-technical norms and laws on safety at work and leisure are observed; and
  • the working conditions which would promote an improvement in the productivity of labor in general and mental work in particular, or in the conditions for leisure.

7. Under present Soviet circumstances [destvitel’nosti], the
……achievement of maximum constructional economics in
……architecture is also a vital necessity for the successful
……realization of socialism.

Continue reading

“What would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?” (Guest post by Paul Brennan)

El Lissitzky - Sketch for PROUN 6B

by Paul Brennan

Like revolution, socialism, communism, and Marxism, like any conception that would have it that there is an alternative to capitalist ontology, today the avant-garde is as extinct as the proverbial dodo. The age of militant artistic publicity seems a long, long century ago. Back then there was still a future, one that could be determined by the productive, social imagination. The historical avant-gardes, pitting themselves against the demarcation that separated the creative from the social and political, were natural allies of revolution. Not always the right kind of revolution, of course, as the example of Italian Futurism, with its militarism and misogyny, and later fascism, shows. And not always, or even often, without a large quantity of crankery and self-indulgence to go with the inspiration. Still, surveying the early twentieth century scene, it is striking how different was the conception and practice of art compared to today. True, there were painters and writers and composers for whom art remained a trade, a form of petty commodity production, but there were others, many others, at work on projects which they pursued with an idealism that would make them a laughing stock today. These could be those like Breton or Maiakovskii, for whom the creative was inseparable from the idea of a new society, or those like Joyce or Pound, politically equivocal or even downright reactionary, but who made it so intensely new that to imagine proper readers for their works was to imagine an entirely different order. Today, figures like Joyce and Pound seem to belong to an entirely different world.

Last year Penguin Books published 100 Artists’ Manifestoes: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. It is an enthralling read, at least initially; after the excerpts from Situationist writings — and surely Situationism is the moment when the avant-garde achieves its most fully realized conception of the need to erase the boundary between life and art — the sad truth begins to sink in that the avant-garde has become a joke. The movements that define the boundaries of the text tell a story. Marinetti’s Futurists represent the Ur-form of the avant-garde — the moment when it was possible to declare that “time and space died yesterday” on the front page of Figaro and not only become a subject of mockery. By the time of the Stuckists any mockery one can imagine the artist’s tracts receiving seems completely justified. It is avant-gardism — or at least an avant-garde gesture — against the avant-garde, a silly, merely reactive whinge against conceptualism and a call for a return to figuration in painting.

One reviewer of 100 Artists’ Manifestoes suggested that Alex Danchev could have improved his book by including a selection of the documents published by a group that appeared in 1999, the International Necronautical Society, which threw down its marker by publishing its first manifesto, in an homage to Marinetti, on the front page of the London Times (http://necronauts.net/manifestos/1999_times_manifesto.html). The INS deserves attention; not at all because it has rekindled the true flame of the avant-garde, impossible anyway, but because it at least evinces some ambition and does represent a focused, immersed response to the historical avant-gardes and their place in modern cultural and political history.

The INS is a “parodic” or “ironic” avant-garde, indeed it styles itself a “semi-fictitious avant-garde network,” but it is not the self-consciousness of this organization that distinguishes it from the historical avant-gardes. Self-consciousness was a built-in, preconditional quality of those movements. The classic account of this may be Peter Bürger’s, in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1972). In this now somewhat derided text (it flatters no one and is hostile to any claim that there can be a valid “tradition” of the avant-garde) Bürger charts the history of modern art as a story of autonomy achieved (in the moment of the bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth century) and then relinquished, when artistic self-consciousness, by the time of the late nineteenth century found itself dissatisfied with the available alternatives of artistic practice as either petty commodity production or aestheticism. The avant-gardes, for Bürger, wished to surrender their autonomy in return for an art rejuvenated by social relevance — hence the radical politicizations of art of the early twentieth century.

The self-consciousness, the reflexivity, of the INS is different. It is a organization that at once holds itself aloof from the narrowness of (particularly) contemporary British art and literature, but seems equally incapable of taking seriously the utopian projects of the historical avant-gardes. For this reason it presents itself as a kind of parody of a totalitarian state or party, merged with the attributes of movements like Surrealism and Situationism. Members can be expelled for the slightest infraction, if not shot. There are committees and sub-committees, communiques, and “agents.” The military aspect of the avant-garde is maintained, but with acknowledgment that it is more appropriate today, in our society of spectacular capitalism, to think of such activity as a kind of espionage. All of this with tongue firmly in cheek.

More striking is the death-obsession of the INS. Its members conceive of themselves as “necronauts,” travels or voyagers into death. This seems to me symptomatic of the place that the avant-garde has arrived at. It is no longer possible to think of an expansive, adventurous artistic activity, one outside of the Culture Industry, other than as life placed in a relation of perpetual adjacency to death. Its “General Secretary,” the now well-known novelist Tom McCarthy (http://www.surplusmatter.com/) gives special importance to the Freud of the Death Drive, to Heidegger, Bataille, and to Blanchot. The philosophical stance of the group (Simon Critchley is the INS “Philosopher in Chief”) is decidedly anti-humanist, with a particular hostility to Hegel and Marx. The emphasis falls on the post-structuralist “textual” author, on literature and art as networks, and on technology.

If the near-corpse of the Left is to be revived, then art will have to be revived with it. In the past leftists argued over what a healthy form for a radical art might be. In the age of great realistic fiction, Engels criticized novelists too quick to believe that they had to sacrifice verisimilitude for the sake of propaganda. Trotskii, in Literature and Revolution (1924) endorsed the idea of the avant-garde, but had many cogent criticisms to make of the artistic and cultural schools of this day. Lukács provided a defense of the realist novel against modernism in The Historical Novel (1937). In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno conducted a seminal discussion over the questions raised in the former’s “Artwork” essay (1936). Benjamin argued for an art appropriate to the “environment” which was “being prepared for us by technology” and advocated a practice that would seek to hurry along the extinction of the “aura” and that would be, at the very least, “completely useless” to fascism and its “aestheticization of politics.” Radical art would be a marriage of technology and tendency. Adorno responded by insisting on the value of artistic autonomy, emphasizing artistic technique over technology, as a last-line resistance to the onslaught of commodification. Examples could be multiplied, for Marxism has a rich legacy of aesthetic debate and discussion. (One place to look is the Fredric Jameson-edited anthology, Aesthetics and Politics, which contains writings by and exchanges between Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, and Sartre.)

Today art and literature mostly seem to be a business. One could be forgiven for characterizing them as merely a niche industry supplying a rather snooty form of entertainment commodity. The situation visàvis the critical understanding of art is little better. Who cares, you may say, there are other priorities. But the idea of art is inseparable from the idea of the imagination and the imagination is in turn inseparable from the idea of another world, and so I ask, what would (or should) a Leftist, revolutionary art and critical practice look like today?

The spatiotemporal dimensions of abstract art and the genesis of modern architecture

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Read Ross Wolfe’s “The Graveyard of Utopia: Soviet Urbanism and the Fate of the International Avant-Garde”

Modernist Architecture — Positive Bases

The theory and practice of modernist architecture were positively based on two primary phenomena that developed under capitalism: the abstract sense of space and time created by the internal dynamic of capitalism, and the more concrete process of industrialization that took place in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. The former of these developments, the abstract side of capitalism’s spatiotemporal dialectic, first manifested itself spatially in the medium of Cubist and post-Cubist abstract painting (Neo-plasticism, Purism, Suprematism) and temporally in the simultaneous representation of motion and light by movements such as Futurism and Rayonism. This abstract temporal dimension was deepened and refined by the avant-garde’s appropriation of Taylorism, the system of “scientific management” in industry founded in America just prior to the First World War.[211] A discussion of Taylorization’s impact on modernist architecture will lead into a more general discussion of the inescapable influence that European industrialization had on its overall development. Specifically, it will examine the modernists’ fascination with machine technologies, efficiency, and the principle of standardization. All these aspects of modern society had been brought into existence by nineteenth-century capitalism in the shift from more primitive manufacturing techniques to full-blown industrialism. In this way, modernist architecture can be seen in its positive connection to the forces and logic unfolding out of capitalist modernity, in addition to its negative bases that were outlined in the previous subsection. Modernism captured in its architecture the greater project of “rationalization” that was taking place throughout the Western world during this time, as theorized by thinkers such as Weber, Adorno, and Horkheimer.

A tertiary influence may be cited alongside these two main positive bases of avant-garde architecture: the working class. In some sense, the modernists’ identification with the European proletariat can be traced to their general disgust with bourgeois society, coupled with the widespread leftist idea that the working class could play a revolutionary role in the construction of a new and more rational society. But in another sense, the modernists’ valorization of working class must have stemmed from its association with industrial production, which held an obvious positive appeal for avant-garde architects. Though this affirmation of the laboring masses of Europe thus had its sources in both positive and negative aspects of modern society, its general character should be seen as positive. Either way, the avant-garde expressed its solidarity with workers in its quest to provide them with adequate dwelling conditions, and, more broadly, to overcome the chronic shortage of urban housing. The modernists’ efforts to this end can be seen in their commitment to the creation of a standard Existenzminimuml’habitation minimum, Kleinstwohnung,or “minimum dwelling.”[212]

DIALECTICS OF CAPITALISM

General

Rational

Systematic

Universal

Irrational

Anarchic

Particular

Temporal

Abstract

Homogeneous

Cyclical

Scientific

Mechanical

Concrete

Heterogeneous

Linear

Historical

Dialectical

Spatial

Abstract

Homogeneous

Global/International

Decentralized/Dispersed

Egalitarian

Expansion

Concrete

Heterogeneous

Local/National

Centralized/Concentrated

Hierarchical

Contraction

Architectural

Modernism

Traditionalism

FIGURE 1: The Spatiotemporal Dialectic of Capitalism and Architecture

Before detailing this more social component of modernist architectural ideology, it is proper to examine the formal properties imparted to it by the abstract spatiotemporal dimension of capitalism. Referring back to the characteristics established beforehand as belonging to the abstract forms of space and time manifested under capitalism,[213] the extent to which these qualities were expressed by modernist art and architecture will be made clear. The scientific, cyclical, and synchronous character of its temporality; the geometric, centrifugal, and global/international character of its spatiality; their mutual homogeneity — all these categories will be important to bear in mind moving through the following analysis. For these traits, generated by the inherent dynamism of modern society, would embed themselves in the artistic unconscious of a generation of painters and architects. These then would bubble to the surface in the works of the modernists, which expressed the new spatiotemporal sensibility of their age. Such expressions of this new aesthetic orientation should be seen as manifestations of the latent social dynamic of capitalism, however, mediated perhaps by the genius of individual artists.[214]

Ivan Kudriashev’s “Construction of a Rectilinear Motion” (1925)

Iakov Chernikhov’s “Architectural Fantasy 11” (1925-1931)

In his groundbreaking 1938 lectures on Space, Time, and Architecture, the modernist and insider historian of the avant-garde movement Sigfried Giedion credited the rise of the new architecture to a newfound sense of “space-time” that congealed around the turn of the twentieth century. According to Giedion, this modern aesthetic[215] sensibility described an abstract, four-dimensional unity of temporalized spatiality, much like the kind outlined in physics by Albert Einstein in 1905. This placed a heavy emphasis on the notion of “simultaneity.”[216] Giedion could have easily added the work that was taking place in philosophy in the writings of Henri Bergson around the same time.[217] In either case, he claimed that explicit awareness of this new sense of space and time appeared first in the works of abstract art, years before the artists’ insights were later taken up and applied by modernist architects. In the first decade of the century, Giedion asserted, “[p]ainters very different in type but sharing a common isolation from the public worked steadily toward a new conception of space. And no one can understand contemporary architecture, become aware of the feelings hidden behind it, unless he has grasped the spirit animating this painting.”[218] Continue reading

“The Graveyard of Utopia: Soviet Urbanism and the Fate of the International Avant-Garde,” Complete Introduction with PDF

Ernst May and Collaborators, “The General Plan of Magnitogorsk — a Settlement of 150,000 Inhabitants Attached to the Magnitogorsk Industrial Complex” (1931)

Download Ross Wolfe’s “The Graveyard of Utopia: Soviet Urbanism and the Fate of the International Avant-Garde”

Comrades!

The twin fires of war and revolution have devastated both our souls and our cities.  The palaces of yesterday’s grandeur stand as burnt-out skeletons.  The ruined cities await new builders[…]

To you who accept the legacy of Russia, to you who will (I believe!) tomorrow become masters of the whole world, I address the question: with what fantastic structures will you cover the fires of yesterday?

— Vladimir Maiakovskii, “An Open Letter to the Workers”[1]

Utopia transforms itself into actuality. The fairy tale becomes a reality. The contours of socialism will become overgrown with iron flesh, filled with electric blood, and begin to dwell full of life. The speed of socialist building outstrips the most audacious daring. In this lies the distinctive character and essence of the epoch.

— I. Chernia, “The Cities of Socialism”[2]

Between 1928 and 1937, the world witnessed the convergence of some of the premier representatives of European architectural modernism in Moscow, Leningrad, and other cities throughout the Soviet Union.  Never before had there been such a concentration of visionary architectural talent in one place, devoting its energy to a single cause.  Both at home and abroad, the most brilliant avant-garde minds of a generation gathered in Russia to put forth their proposals for the construction of a radically new society.  Never before had the stakes seemed so high.  For it was out of the blueprints for this new society that a potentially international architecture and urbanism could finally be born, the likes of which might then alter the face of the entire globe.  And from this new built environment, it was believed, would emerge the outlines of the New Man, as both the outcome of the new social order and the archetype of an emancipated humanity.  With such apparently broad and sweeping implications, it is therefore little wonder that its prospective realization might have then attracted the leading lights of modernist architecture, both within the Soviet Union and without.  By that same account, it is hardly surprising that the architectural aspect of engineering a postcapitalist society would prove such a captivating subject of discussion to such extra-architectural discourses as politics, sociology, and economics. Continue reading

Karel Teige’s The Minimum Dwelling (1932), Printer’s Copy PDF Download

Karel Teige

Karel Teige, the Czech communist, avant-garde artist, and architectural critic, was known for many insightful works.  The Minimum Dwelling, finished in 1932, attempted to take stock of the International Congress of Modern Architects’ (CIAM’s) plan to create comfortable, livable standardized dwellings for the working masses of Europe and the world.  It was meant as an answer to the housing crisis that had pervaded Europe for decades, about which the late Engels had composed his popular polemic, The Housing Question.  Yet at the same time it was an attempt to elaborate an international program for architecture, based in the Constructivist/Functionalist style developed by Moisei Ginzburg and others, with explicitly socialist implications in its proposed implementation.  Yet he was writing as the reality in the Soviet Union was turning deeply reactionary on the artistic, architectural, and cultural fronts, and so his work can be seen as capturing the last flickering of hope of revolutionary modernism.  Teige unwittingly invokes Stalin and Kaganovich in support of his radical proposals, yet little did he know that it was precisely these figures who closed the books on the architectural avant-garde in the USSR for decades.  After Czechoslovakia became integrated into the Eastern Bloc after the Second World War, Teige remained optimistic.  Yet soon thereafter he was publicly accused of being a Trotskyist, and he died in 1952, after suffering several nervous breakdowns.

The perfect printer’s copy of the PDF, complete with searchable text and illustrations, can be downloaded here:

Karel Teige – The Minimum Dwelling (1932)

«Москва «историческая» и социалистическая (Николай Ладовский)»/“Moscow, ‘Historical’ and Socialist” (Nikolai Ladovskii)

Nikolai Ladovskii

Из Строительство Москвы — (1930) — № 1

From Building Moscow — (1930) — № 1

[Pg. 17]

Москва — столица СССР — стихийно растет и вопрос о необходимости уяснения сути этого роста и его организации для планировки Москвы является основным вопросом ее жизни. Понятие роста города не может быть сведено к простому механическому увеличению территории, ширины проездов, этажности и т. д. Рост надо понимать как органический, на разных этапах своего развития, представляющий различный не только количественно, но и качественно организм. Между тем, все имеющиеся до настоящего времени проекты «Большой Москвы» рассматривают вопрос исключительно с количественной стороны и потому страдают основным пороком — «механистичностью».

В журнальной статье нельзя дать полного анализа сути гор. Москвы, как столицы СССР, и представить подробный проект ее реорганизации, здесь имеется в виду лишь указать на те ошибки, которые, на мой взгляд, имеются во всех проектах «Большой Москвы» а сделать предложение, относящееся к основной планировочио-конструктивной схеме «Новой Москвы».

За 12 лет, после революции было сделано несколько проектов: а) проект коллектива архитекторов под руководством акад. Жолтовского, б) проект акад. Щусева, в) проект инж. Шестакова, г) проект Земельно-планировочного отдела МКХ. Все эти проекты исходили из основного положения, что радиально-кольцевая система планировки Москвы является, вообще, рациональной планировочной системой, обеспечивающей нормальный рост (наслоением колец) и правильную организацию движения и транспорта. Кроме того, во всех проектах подчеркивалась мысль о необходимости сохранения исторического облика Москвы, что, как-будто, обеспечивалось сохранением кольцевой системы.

Кольцевая система планировки имеет много сторонников в мировой литературе по градостроительству.  Поэтому на разборе ее необходимо подробнее остановиться.  Средневековый город-крепость, город-сад Говарда.  Сателлитных городов Унвинам предложение по перепланировке Парижа Корбюзье, — все эти планировочные [18] конструкции, несмотря на их кажущееся различие по форме и назначению, можно отнести к одному и тому же разряду статических форм, характеризующих отсталый метод мышления их творцов. Прививка этих систем к растущим и жизнедеятельным городам неминуемо должна вызвать болезненные явления при их росте.

Специфическим признаком их механистичности является то положение, что эти системы могут иметь смысл лишь на мгновенный отрезок времени, при условии их целостного осуществления, в следующее же мгновение роста их необходимо будет начать разрушать — короче, они не предусматривают роста из «клеточки» в систему из низшей системы в другую, высшую и т. д.  Если во времена средневековья при преобладании «статических» моментов над динамическими, т.-е. при относительно. Медленном жизненном темпе и недостаточном учете координаты времени, кольцевая система еще могла в планировка некоторое время держаться, — то с развитием капитализма, с ростом городов она всюду была сломлена.

Кольцевая система Говарда (рис. 1) при постройке его городов-садов никогда не применялась; жизненной оказалась лишь его социально-бытовая установка на определенную общественную прослойку в буржуазном обществе.

Сателлитная система городов Унвина (рис 2) как бы возвращает средневековой, кольцевой системе права на жизнь. Но это лишь так кажется при поверхностном взгляде. На деле эта система есть ни что иное, как перенесение методов колониальной политики в градостроительство. Сателлиты — это «колонии», образовавшиеся вследствие плохой организации города-«метрополин». Недаром эта система зародилась в Англии (стране колоний). В результате роста «колоний» они образуют замкнутое кольцо, ничем не отличающееся от конструкции средневекового кольцевого города, — следовательно, в процессе роста система движется назад к менее совершенным организационным формам.

Корбюзье (рис. 4) предлагает создать два города: город труда и город отдыха. Он дает лишь идею конструкции первого и эта идея ничем не отличается от идеи средневекового кольцевого города: три замкнутые, не могущие развиваться, статические пояса, стилизованные в прямоугольники.

Как уже указывалось, с ростом городов, при развитии капитализма, кольцевая система потерпела поражение, на смену ей пришла сетчатая планировка, как выражение текучести, — своеобразный, непрерывный территориальный «конвейер», более отвечающий потребностям капиталистического, более механического нарастания, а не организационного роста. Крайним выражением этой текучести являются идеи городов-линий. Являясь выражением максимальной динамичности, эти планировочные конструкции неминуемо окажутся слабыми организмами, так как низводят трехмерное пространство к «одномерному», ставя ударение на линейность. Вся же современная материальная культура и техника дает возможность решать градостроительные задачи в трехмерности, ставя ударение на «горизонтальную двухмерность».

Обратимся теперь к проектам «Большой Москвы». По всем этим проектам Москва представлена в виде центрального ядра, окруженного двумя кольцами, а с ростом пригородов, которые ни одним из проектов не увязаны в систему, естественно, в ближайшем будущем образуется и третье кольцо.

В центре предполагаются правительственные и общественные сооружения государственного и местного значения. Территории, колец по организационному содержанию представляют расплывчатый, не связанный с формою колец, конгломерат, рост которого вообще не предусмотрен и не связан с общей формой кольца. Такая несвязанность естественна, так как геометрическая природа кольцевой территории предопределяет ее пространственную статичность, физическая же природа ее строительства в лучшем случае допускает лишь уплотнение. А поэтому [Pg. 19] проектировщик чувствовал, что бесполезно связываться с формою колец. Секториальная же система роста, казалось бы, возможная в радиально-кольцевой планировке, но динамо-геометрической сути находится в противоречии с ней, должна ее исказить, а потому и невозможна. Все проекты «Большой Москвы» исходили в основе своей из положения прироста населения и, как следствие, прироста территории. Но этот рост ими принимается без анализа отдельных, составляющих и взаимодействующих сил, а лишь формально, как округление, в общем анархично растущих органов города, в геометрически оформленную территорию. Ведь снеговой ком, катящийся и увеличивающийся в своем объеме, мы не вправе считать органически растущим. Таким же приростом является по всем проектам «Большой Москвы» и увеличение ее площади. Органическим же ростом города нужно признать такой, который при росте целого, обеспечивает рост отдельных его, различно действующих, частей-органов, объединенных в пространственно-временную экономическую систему. Этого-то как раз момента не предусматривает ни один из проектов.

Если представить себе полное согласование по форме, т.-е., если кольца будут означать различные органы, различного назначения территории, — то рост одного из них будет происходить за счет гибели другого.  Если же отбросить различную функциональную значимость каждого кольца, а принять их функциовнувд однообразность, то в силу экономики динамо-геометрического принципа при всех прочих равных условиях разовьется центростремительная сила, которую можно себе представить, как давление колец друг на друга в направлении центра, в то время как центральный круг, стремясь расти, наталкивается таким образом на огромное и непреодолимое сопротивление колец (рис. 3). Это и имеет место в современной Москве.

Сумма расстояний точек, образующих плоскость (рис. 4), до определенной точки Д на той же плоскости тем больше, чем точки ближе к периферии. Этот принцип оказывает влияние на всякую планировочную конструкцию — сетчатую, концентрическую, радиальную и всякую другую, определяя организационные и экономические преимущества центральных и серединных — осевых — и т. д. районов.

Влияние вышеописанных факторов, которые имеют одновременное действие, можно условно выразить рис. 3.

Картина, данная рисунком 3, говорит о том, что при кольцевой планировке Москвы центр, стремясь к естественному развитию в горизонтальной проекции, встречает трудно преодолимое сопротивление колец, и разрешение самого основного момента жизни города — диалектического процесса его роста.

Экономика динамо-геометрического принципа планировкой плоско выражается, в следующем: не предусмотрено данной конструкцией плана, так как рост без сокрушэнин соседних (надо полагать тоже жизненных органов города) невозможен. И, действительно, эту картину мы уже наблюдаем в действительности в столице СССР в настоящее время.

При выборе участков под крупное строительство, в центре Москвы возникают огромные организационные и экономические затруднения и радикальный выход из положения возможен при кольцевой системе, лишь в сплошной сломке [sic — сломе] старого и возведении на его месте нового.

Таким образом, жизненное по существу проявление роста центра, в силу неправильной конструкции этого центра, вредно отзывается на городе в целом и, прежде всего, на его нормальном росте.

Но помимо интенсификации застройки, рост города влияет также и на движение по артериям-улицам. Улицы оказываются тесны и требуют также расширения. Решение этого вопроса по всем имеющимся проектам планировки «Большой Москвы» особенно наглядно доказывает неправильность кольцевой системы и тех остро-болезненных явлений в жизни города, которые она порождает.

Идея реорганизации Старой Москвы и перерождение ее в новую «Большую Москву» по всем проектам кольцевой системы осуществляется в настоящее время методом так называемых «красных линий», своеобразного врастания Новой Москвы в старую. Как этот метод тяжело отражается на жизни города и его строительстве, хорошо известно всем, кто с этим строительством сталкивается. Задача, которую система «красных линий» в ее теперешнем виде пытается разрешить, оказывается неразрешимой, так как, ставя вопрос в плоскости пространственной, эта система не ставит его в плоскости временной. Без календарных сроков реорганизуемые улицы города будут представлять вообще и всегда изъеденную ломаную линию, имеющую расширения лишь на небольших и случайных протяжениях и, следовательно, пропускная способность улицы будет оставаться всегда на старом уровне. Если же в некоторых небольших протяжениях положение улучшится, то в общем положение все же останется тяжелым.

Вторым тяжелым последствием системы «красных линий» в нынешней их трактовке и методах осуществления является понижение ценности большинства участков, или вследствие того, что от них отрезаются части, уходящие под мифически уширенные улицы, или из-за того, что эти мифические улицы их перерезают и делают невозможными для застройки.

В общем же эта система приводит старую путаную Москву к полной дезорганизации. И если болезнь центра города при кольцевой планировке можно сравнить с болезнью сердца, то принятая система «красных линий» является ничем иным, как «склерозом» в системе кровообращения города.

Могут возразить, что это — болезни роста, что то же происходит и на Западе и т. п. Однако, с этим согласиться нельзя. Скорей все это происходит потому, что наши проектировщики мыслят еще статическими категориями, не рассматривая город, как растущий организм. Короче, — они не мыслят диалектически.

Можно было бы привести значительно больше доводов в доказательство тех болезненных явлений, которые вытекают из неправильной планировочно-конструктивной схемы города и необходимости пересмотра ее в первую очередь. Но и тех соображений, которые уже высказаны выше, думаю, вполне достаточно.

Каков же выход из положения, что можно предложить?

Мы предлагаем, прежде всего:

1. Разорвать кольцевую систему в одном из участков и дать тем возможность центру свободно расти (рис. 5). Центр в виде планировочной точки, хотя бы и диаметра кольца «А», как теоретически, так и практически вообще недопустим. Центр города должен иметь возможность расти не только по третьему измерению, вверх, но и в горизонтальной проекции поступательно вперед. Следовательно, центром города должна быть не статическая точна, а динамическая линия — ось. Разорвав кольца и отогнув их в виде подковы, мы дадим возможность центру, а также и соответствующим ему ветвям бывших колец расти. Центр города приобретет форму веера. Эта форма наиболее соответствует функции центра, так как по мере роста города и нарастания его динамики и усложнения организация центр не остается зажатым, а свободно разворачивается за счет площади веера. Весь город и центр представляют по этой конструкции как бы поток, постепенно расширяющийся.

2. Сосредоточить все новое строительство в одном секторе, который должен стать начальным сектором нового, социалистического строительства столицы СССР.

Такая строительная политика города будет, прежде всего, наиболее экономической политикой, потому что сосредоточит капитальные затраты на благоустройство, главным образом, в одном секторе, вместо того, чтобы разбрасывать их равномерно во многих направлениях. Она создает также целостное впечатление строительства нового города. Начавшись у старого центра Москвы и проходя наслоения его, новый город будет, таким образом, как бы лишь частично наложен на старый город.

3. Для выявления равнодействующей роста города, необходимо создать новый центр тяготения на оси Тверская-Ленинградское шоссе, забежав со строительством немного вперед. По обеим сторонам этой предполагаемой оси нового города, на освободных территориях Ходынки и Останкино может начаться рационализированное социалистическое строительство. Выбор этого сектора для нового строительства предопределяется главным образом тем, что его незастроенные свободные пространства наиболее близко расположены к центру теперешнего города, а на пути развития в целом он меньше, чем другие окраины, встречает природные или искусственные препятствия.

4. Рассматривать весь остальной город лишь как материальную среду, благоприятствующую росту его новой части и со временем образующую «город-музей». Такой принцип роста нового за счет материала и организации старого весьма распространен в природе.

5. Реорганизовать транспорт, перенеся центральный вокзал на место Белорусско-Балтийского, а остальные районные вокзалы расположив по кольцу Окружной жел. дор. Отнесение вокзалов на Окружную ж.д. разгрузит Мясницкую магистраль и создаст более равномерные условия жизни во всех районах города. Борьба ж.-д. узла с городом за территорию для товарных станций представляет обычное явление в крупных городах Запада и особенно Америки. В интересах удешевления жизни города, желательно ввозить потребляемые городом товары как можно глубже внутрь. В организации же городского транспорта товарные станции внутри города представляют трудно преодолимое препятствие. В Москве в предлагаемом участке это противоречие может быть легко разрешено, так как естественный рельеф в вышеуказанном месте дает возможность легко расчленить различные по функции движения в двух или нескольких уровнях.

Связь всех железных дорог может быть осуществлена через Окружною ж. д. Точно также легко разрешается вопросе вводе железной дороги вдоль оси новой Москвы, в виде ли открытой траншеи, или туннеля, с устройством станций в любой точке нового города.

6. Систему «красных линий» сохранить лишь для нового, социалистического сектора, но проводить ее решительнее и в порядке календарного полна.

7. Перепланировну остальной части города не производить.

Вопрос о составлении плана новой, социалистической Москвы должен быть поставлен во всей своей полноте в порядок дня.


Students in Ladovskii's architectural form class with models (VKhUTEMAS 1923)

[Pg. 17]

Moscow, the capital of the USSR, grows spontaneously, and the question of the need to clarify the essence of this growth and its organization for the planning of Moscow is a major issue in its life. The concept of the growth of the city cannot be reduced to the simple mechanical increase of its territory, the width of its thoroughfares, its height in stories, etc.  The growth must be understood as organic, at various stages of development, representing difference not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. Meanwhile, everything available in the project for “Greater Moscow” to date only accounts for the issue on the quantitative side, and therefore suffer the major flaw of being “mechanistic.”

In a single journal article one cannot give a complete analysis of the essence of the city of Moscow, as the capital of the USSR, and submit a detailed draft for its reorganization.  Here is meant only to point out the mistakes that, in my opinion, exist in all the projects for “Greater Moscow,” and to make suggestions regarding the main planning-constructive scheme of “New Moscow.”

In the twelve years since the revolutions several projects have been done: a) the project by the architects’ collective led by the academic Zholtovskii, b) the project of the academic Shchusev, c) the project by the engineer Shestakov, and d) the Land-Planning project of the MKKh.  All these projects have proceeded from the basic proposition that the radial-ring planning system for Moscow is generally a rational planning system to ensure normal growth (the layering of the rings) and the correct organization of traffic and transport.  Additionally, all the projects so far have stressed the idea that we need to preserve the historic image of Moscow, which as it were would ensure the preservation of that ring system.

Figure 1: Howard's Garden-City

The ring system of planning has many supporters in the world literature on urban planning.  Therefore, in an analysis it must be parsed in detail.  The medieval walled city, the garden-city of Howard, the satellite cities of Unwin, and Le Corbusier’s redevelopment proposal for Paris — all these planning [18] designs [konstruktsii], despite their apparent differences in form and purpose, can be treated as belonging to the same category of static forms that characterizes the backward method of their creators’ thinking. The inoculation of these systems to the expansion and the buzzing life [zhisnedeiatel’nym] of the city inevitably causes painful developments during their growth.

Figure 2: Unwin's Satellite Scheme

A specific feature of the mechanistic position is that these systems can be meaningful only for a momentary span of time, providing for their integral implementation, for following that same moment their growth will necessarily begin to break down — in short, they do not provide for the growth of the “cell” into the system, from a lower into another, higher system, etc.  If this were medieval times, with the prevalence of “static” moments over the dynamic, i.e. with respect to the slow pace of life and the inadequate tracking of the coordinates of time, the ring system may still be able to hold on for a while — but with the development of capitalism and the growth of cities, everywhere it broke down.

Howard’s ring-system (figure 1) for the construction of his garden-cities has never been applied; living in his socio-domestic [sotsial’no-bytovaia] installations only turned out to be for a definite social stratum in bourgeois society.

Figure 3

Unwin’s satellite system of cities (figure 2) gives back to the old medieval ring system its lease on life, as it were.  But this is only so because this is how it appears at a superficial glance.  In fact, this system is nothing other than the transfer of the methods of colonial policy to urban planning. The satellites are this “colony,” formed as a result of the poor management of the city, the “metropole.”  Not for nothing did this system originate in England (the country of the colonies).  As a result the growth of the “colonies,” they form a closed ring that is no different from the construction of a ring of the medieval town — and, consequently, in the process of growth the system regresses to an even less perfect organizational form.

Le Corbusier (figure 4) proposes to create two cities: a city of labor and a city of rest.  He only gives an idea for construction for the first, and this idea is no different from the idea of ​​the medieval ring of a city: three sections are secluded and incapable of develop development, static zones stylized into rectangles.

Figure 4: Le Corbusier's Radiant City

As was already mentioned, with the growth of the cities and the development of capitalism, the ring system has failed, and in its place has come reticulated planning, as an expression of fluidity.  The original, continuous territorial “conveyer” more than meets the needs of the capitalist, a more mechanical accumulation, rather than organizational growth.  An extreme expression of this fluidity is the idea of linear cities [gorodov-linii]. As an expression of maximum dynamism, these construction plans will inevitably prove to be weak organisms, as if to relegate three-dimensional space to the “one-dimensional,” placing an emphasis on linearity [Ladovskii is here referring to the proposals of Ginzburg, Okhitovich, and the disurbanists — RW].  Nevertheless, modern material culture and technology make it possible to solve urban-planning problems in three dimensions, placing the emphasis on “horizontal two-dimensionality.”

We now turn to the draft of “Greater Moscow.”  For in all of these projects Moscow is presented  in terms of a central core surrounded by two rings, and with the growth of suburbs, which in none of the projects are linked to the system.  Naturally, a third ring is formed in the immediate future.

In the center there are assumed to be governmental and public structures for both the state and local levels.  The territory of the ring appears blurry in its organizational content, unrelated to the form of rings, a conglomerate, the growth of which is generally not provided for and is not associated with the overall shape of the ring. This incoherence is natural, since the annular territory’s geometric properties determine its spatially static nature, the physical character of its construction at best only allows for its condensation. And therefore [Pg. 19] the designer felt that it was useless to connect to the form of the rings.  Sectoral growth within the same system one would think, would be possible in the radial-circular layout.  But its dynamo-geometric essence necessarily puts it into contradiction, such that it must be disfigured, and therefore makes it impossible.  All the projects for “Greater Moscow” basically proceeded from the position of population growth and, consequently, territorial growth. But this growth they accepted without an analysis of its separate components and interacting forces — only formally, as in general the rounded, anarchically sprouting organs of the city, in a geometrically structured territory.  Indeed, this “snowball,” rolling and growing in scale, cannot be assumed to grow organically.  The same increase is there in all projects for “Greater Moscow,” and increase its area.  The organic growth of the city must recognize that the growth of the whole, which ensures the growth of its various separate functions and parts of organs, is incorporated into the spatio-temporal economic system.  None of the projects provide so much as one moment for this consideration.

If we imagine a total coordination of form, that is, if the ring will mean different organs for different territorial purposes — the growth of one of them will occur due to the death of another. If, however, we reject the different functional significance of each ring, but accept their functional monotony, then by the economic dynamo-geometric principle (all other things being equal) will develop a centripetal force so that one can imagine the rings pressuring each other in the direction of the center, while the central circle, in trying to grow, thus encounters the enormous and insurmountable resistance of the outer rings (Fig. 3).  This is what takes place in modern Moscow.

Figure 5: Ladovskii's dynamo-"parabolic" vision of "New Moscow"

The sum of the distances of the points form a plane (Fig. 4) up to a certain point D on the same plane, as the point closer to the periphery.  This principle has an impact on every plan’s design — reticulated, concentric, radial, and all others, determine the organizational and economic advantages of the central, the middle, the axial regions, and so on. The influence of the above factors, which together have a simultaneous effect, can be provisionally conveyed by Fig. 3.

The picture, given in figure 3, indicates that the ring layout of the Moscow center, tending toward the natural development in a horizontal projection, meets the insurmountable resistance of the rings, and permits for the most basic point of city life — the dialectical process of its growth.

The economy of the dynamo-geometric principle of planar design is expressed as follows: it has not provided a set design plan, since growth without the crushing of the neighboring (and presumably also vital) organs of the city is impossible.  And indeed, this is the picture we see in reality at present in the capital of the Soviet Union.

In selecting sites for major construction in the center of Moscow there are enormous economic and organizational difficulties, and radical way out of the ring system is possible only with the continuous smashing of the old and erecting in its place the new.

Thus, the spirit is essentially a manifestation of the growth of the center, and because of the improper design of this center, it responds adversely to the city as a whole and, above all, to its normal growth.

But in addition to the intensification of building, the growth of the city and also influences the traffic of the street-arteries [arteriiam-ulitsam].  The streets prove to be too narrow and so also require expansion.  The resolution of this issue through all available planning projects for “Greater Moscow” very clearly demonstrates the incorrectness of the ring system as well as those acutely unhealthy conditions in the life of the city that it generates.

Figure 6

The idea of ​​reorganizing the Old Moscow and its degeneration into a new “Greater Moscow” in all projects of the ring system is presently being implemented by the method of the so-called “red lines,” a peculiar ingrowth of the new Moscow into the old one.  Just how this method is deeply reflected in the life of the city and its construction, is well known to all who are confronted with this construction.  The task that the system of “red lines” in its present form is trying to solve, proves to be unsolvable, since, raising the question only on the spatial plane, this system does not pose the question on the temporal plane.  Without calendar dates, the reorganized city streets will generally always be represented by a corroded, broken line, having expansion only on a small scale with aleatoric extension and, therefore, the street’s capacity will always remain at the old level.  If to some small extent the situation generally improves, the situation will still remain severe.

A second serious consequence of the system of “red lines” in their present interpretation and methods of implementation is the falling value of the majority of the construction sites, or due to the fact that they are cut off from parts that go under the mythically broadened streets, or as the result of these mythical streets sever them and make it impossible for construction.

In general, this system reduces muddled old Moscow to complete disorganization.  And if the illness of the city’s center in the ring layout can be compared to heart disease, then adopting a system of “red lines” would turn out to be nothing other than a “sclerosis” in the circulatory system of the city.

One could argue that these are just growing pains, the same that take place in the West, etc. However, with this we cannot agree.  Soon all this is happening because our designers [proektirovshchiki] still think in static categories, without considering the city as a growing organism.  In short, they do not think dialectically.

We could give significantly more reasons as proof of these painful developments that result from an improper constructive-planning scheme for the city, and for the necessity to revise it beforehand.  But these considerations have already been expressed above, so I think that that is enough.

But just which way out of this situation is there, that one could propose?

We propose, first of all:

1. Breaking the ring system into one of the sites and providing the opportunity to freely grow from the center (Fig. 5).  Seeing the center in terms of a planning point, even though it is also the diameter of the ring “A,” is both theoretically and practically entirely valid.  The downtown [tsentr goroda] should have the opportunity to grow not only in the third dimension — upward — but also in a horizontal projection growing progressively forward.  Consequently, the center of the city should not be a static point, but rather a dynamic line — the axis.  By breaking the rings and bending them into the form of a horseshoe, we will enable the center, as well as its corresponding branches in the former rings, to grow.  The downtown will acquire the shape of a fan.  This form best conforms to the function of the center, since in the measure of the city’s growth and the crescendo of its dynamics and organizational sophistication the center does not remain boxed-in, but rather freely unfolds by means of the squares of the fan. The entire city and center provide for this construction as a stream, gradually expanding.

2. Concentrate all new building into one sector, which should become the starting sector for the new socialist construction of the capital of the Soviet Union.

Such a building policy for the city will be, above all, the most economical policy, because the focus of capital expenditures for municipal improvements will be mainly in one sector, instead of scattering them evenly in many directions.  It also produces an holistic impression of the new city.  Starting from the old center of Moscow, and passing over its layers, the new city will be as if it were partially superimposed over the old city.

3. To reveal the resultant growth of the city, one must create a new center of gravity on the axis of Tver-Leningrad highway, anticipating the construction a little further.  On both sides of this proposed axis for the new city, in the freed territories of Khodynka and Ostankino, one can begin the rationalized construction of socialism.  The choice of this sector for new construction is predicated primarily on its undeveloped open spaces, which are situated closest to the center of the present city and the path of development in general, it is smaller than the other outskirts, and meets natural or artificial obstacles.

4. Consider the rest of the city only as a material medium favoring the growth of its new section, and in time forming a “museum city.”  Such a principle of growth through new material and old organization is very common in nature.

5. Reorganize transport, moving the central train station to the place of the Belarus-Baltic and other regional stations located on the ring of the District railway.  The assignment of the District railway stations will be to relieve the Myasnitskaya thoroughfare and create more uniform conditions of life in all the city districts.  The struggle of the railroads for the center of the city over territory for commercial stations is common in large cities of the West, and especially in America.  In order to reduce the cost of city life, it is desirable to import the goods consumed by the city inside as deeply as possible.  In the organization of this urban transport, the freight terminals within the city represent an obstacle that is difficult to overcome.  In Moscow, on the proposed site, this contradiction can be easily permitted, because the natural topography above the site allows one to easily divide different functions of its motion into two or more levels.

The communication of all the railroads can be accomplished through the District railway.  Similarly, the issue is easily resolved by the addition of a railroad along the new Moscow — whether in the form of an open trench or a tunnel — onto the established stations anywhere else in the new city.

6.  Keep the system of “red lines” only for the new, socialist sector, but develop it decisively in accordance with the calendrical totality.

7. Redevelop the rest of the city that does not produce.

The establishment of a plan for the new socialist Moscow should be placed in its entirety as the order of the day.

Free PDFs of the German Avant-Garde Architectural Journal Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau (1926-1931)

Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau's Coverage of Ivan Leonidov's Proposal for the Lenin Institute

 The modernist movement was alive and well in interwar Germany.  Not only at the Bauhaus, which stood at the forefront of the avant-garde, under the leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, but all over the country.  László Moholy-Nagy and Gropius published their famous Bauhausbücher series, El Lissitzky established his journal ABC: Beitrage zum Bauen, and Theo van Doesburg transplanted his Dutch De Stijl magazine to Germany. Continue reading

Another Batch of Soviet Avant-Garde Architectural Journals (Free PDFs)

Plan for "New Moscow" (April 1929)

Here’s another batch of early Soviet avant-garde architectural journals, from between 1929-1930.  The 1929 one is the one I most recently worked on; the others were converted into PDFs back before I had perfected the method of separating out the text from the rest of the page.  As a result, these are all in grayscale, though they remain very readable.  The image quality is a little lower than on my more recent uploads.  But here they are, so enjoy!

  1. Строительство Москвы – (1929) – № 4
  2. Строительство Москвы – (1930) – № 7
  3. Строительство Москвы – (1930) – № 8/9
  4. Строительство Москвы – (1930) – № 10
  5. Строительство Москвы – (1930) – № 12

Down with Art!: The Age of Manifestoes

El Lissitzky's "New Man" (1923)

Note from the blogger: I tend to agree with the Marxist architectural critic Manfredo Tafuri’s assessment of the various strains of the avant-garde as all aspiring to enact a Weberian “rationalization” of society, whether in it’s negative, nihilistic form (Dada, Absurdism) or in its positive, constructive form (Futurism, Functionalism, Constructivism).  But Eagleton quite rightly points out the politicization of modern art, as it appropriated and took on the form of political literature: the tract, and the manifesto.  He also notes the avant-garde’s tendency to associate with various anti-capitalist movements (Bolshevism, Trotskyism, and even Fascism).  All this corresponded to, after the death of the avant-garde in the 1960s (see Arthur Danto on this), post-modern art’s seeming apoliticism.  Just as modern art was heavily political, post-modern art is largely post-political, in the sense that the ideology of the “post-ideological age” took on in the 1980s and 1990s.  The following piece is by the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, whose work I occasionally enjoy and at other times find problematic.  This particular work is a review of an upcoming book by Aleksei Danchev, though Eagleton’s article takes on something of a life of its own:

In the world of polite letters, literature is the enemy of programmes, polemics, sectarian rancour, the sour stink of doctrinal orthodoxies. It is the home of the unique particular, the provisional and exploratory, of everything that resists being reduced to a scheme or an agenda. This, one might note, is a fairly recent point of view. That literature should be free of doctrinal orthodoxy would have come as a surprise to Dante and Milton. Swift is a great writer full of sectarian rancour. Terms like “provisional” and “exploratory” do not best characterize Samuel Johnson’s literary views.

Nor do they best describe the views of the various twentieth-century avant-gardes, which set out to demolish this whole conception of art. From the Futurists and Constructivists to the Surrealists and Situationists, art became militant, partisan and programmatic. It was to be liberated from the libraries and museums and integrated with everyday life. In time, the distinction between art and life, the playful and the pragmatic, would be erased. There were to be no more professional artists, just common citizens who occasionally wrote a poem or made a piece of sculpture. The summons rang out to abandon one’s easel and design useful objects for working people, as some of the Russian Constructivists did. Poets were to read their poetry through megaphones in factory yards, or scribble their verses on the shirt-fronts of passing strangers. A moustache was appended to the Mona Lisa. A Soviet theatre director took over a whole naval port for several days, battleships and all, and commandeered its 300,000 citizens for his cast.

Theatre audiences might be asked to vote at the end of the play, or march en masse on the local town hall. From agitprop to poster design, art was an instrument in the service of political revolution. For some avant-gardists, there were to be no more permanent art objects, since they would only suffer the indignity of becoming commodities. Instead, one should create gestures, happenings, situations, stray intensities, events which consumed themselves in the act of production. “To the electric chair with Chopin!”, fulminated the founder of Mexican Stridentism. “The Venus de Milo is a graphic example of decline”, declares Kasimir Malevich in his lengthy Suprematist Manifesto of 1916, reproduced here. The most obscene word of all was “academic”.

In this cultural revolution, two broad currents can be distinguished. The more positive strain of avant-gardism sought to transform human perceptions in order to adapt them to the new technological age. Avant-gardes tend to take root in societies still in the first flush of modernization, when the oppressive aspects of the new technologies are less obvious than the exhilarating ones. History is now skidding by so fast that the only image of the present is the future. Nothing is more typical of these activists than a mindless celebration of novelty – a brash conviction that an absolutely new epoch is breaking around them, that twentieth-century humanity is on the brink of greater, more rapid change than at any time in the past (they were to be proved right about that), and that everything that happened up to ten minutes ago is ancient history. How one would set about identifying absolute novelty is a logical problem that did not detain them.

This fetishism of the future crops up on almost every page of 100 Artists’ Manifestos, deftly selected and stylishly introduced by Alex Danchev. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which as Danchev points out founded not only Futurism but the very idea of the artistic manifesto, celebrates “the beauty of speed”. “A racing car, its bonnet decked with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath . . . is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” A later Futurist proclamation incites the brethren to destroy all “passéist” clothes (“tight-fitting,colourless, funereal, decadent”) and invent futurist clothes instead, “daring clothes with brilliant colours and dynamic lines”. Like Romanticism, the revolutionary avant-garde was staffed by the young, full of contempt for their experimentally challenged elders. In its more flamboyant moments, of which it had more than a few, it raised adolescence to an ideology.

Revolutionaries singing the praises of technological progress is rather like archbishops recommending adultery. These cultural experimenters seem to have overlooked the fact that no social system in history has been more innovative and dynamic than capitalism, and that a credulous trust in progress was a stock belief of the very middle classes they sought to outrage. It is true that this faith was coming badly unstuck in the early twentieth century, and would finally lie bleeding on the battlefields of the First World War. Even so, turning the middle classes’ belief in technological progress against their own cultural conservatism was always a perilous tactic.

Scandalizing the bourgeoisie, whose grandchildren were to be charged fancy prices for the very works of art that did so, meant more than rejecting this or that convention. It involved an assault on the idea of men and women as autonomous individuals with rich interior lives. That ripe, Proustian interiority was to be ripped apart by an art that was externalizing, mechanistic and deconstructive. For the first time in the history of aesthetics, fragmentation and dislocation ousted the impulse to unify. The Old Man (private, spiritual, contemplative) was to be taken apart, and the New Man (active, collectivist, mobile, anonymous) was to be constructed in his place. This meant waging an unpleasantly macho campaign against moralism, realism and Romanticism, all of which were soggy with feminine feeling. The Futurist Manifesto ditches feminism along with libraries, museums and academies. The avant-garde was a robustly masculine affair; its hymns to lust and Deleuze-like cult of desire boded ill for anyone furnished with a uterus. A Manifesto of Futurist Woman encourages woman “to find once more her cruelty and her violence that make her attack the vanquished because they are vanquished”. There is a good deal of such sub-Nietzschean swagger in the current as a whole. The decadent values of pity and compassion – mere fronts for the predatory bourgeoisie – must give way to a certain spiritual brutalism.

Alongside the more positive strand of avant-garde revolt, with its complex relations to Bolshevism, Trotskyism and (in the case of Marinetti) Fascism, flourished a more negative, even nihilistic strain, which held that the cultural establishment could absorb attacks on this or that meaning; what it could not withstand was an assault on meaning as such. It followed that the most lethal revolutionary weapon was absurdity. In a period of savage irrationalism stretching from the Somme to the rise of Hitler, only the lunatic could be said to be sane. Reason itself was an oppressive force, and the title of madman was one to be cherished. Logic was the preserve of those incapable of creation. Since manifestos made a kind of sense, they, too, were to be junked. “No more manifestos”, demanded a Dadaist manifesto. “DADA MEANS NOTHING”, announced another.

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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