Frederick Kiesler, City of space (1925)

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Frederick (then Friedrich) Kiesler’s City of Space [Raumstadt] debuted at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, 1925. Along with Melnikov’s legendary Soviet pavilion, it was one of only two new explorations of spatial form that Theo van Doesburg actually appreciated from the whole exhibition. (Doesburg didn’t even care for Le Corbuser’s Swiss pavilion). Soon thereafter, noticing a clear affinity between his own architectural ambitions and Kiesler’s — both were inspired by Mondrian, after all — Doesburg got the Austrian designer to publish his Manifesto in the 10/11 issue of De Stijl, Vol. 6.

The text, fully translated, is reproduced below.

Friedrich Kiesler with a crowd of visitors to his Raumstadt display, 1925

Friedrich Kiesler with a crowd of visitors to his Raumstadt display, 1925

Manifesto

Frederick Kiesler
De Stijl (1925)

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Living buildings — city of space [Raumstadt] — functional architecture.

The new form of the city arises from necessity:

  • the country-city, because the separation of country and town has been abolished
  • the time-city, because time is the dimension of its spatial organization
  • the space-city, because it hovers freely in space, is decentralized into parts according to the terrain
  • the automatic city, because the daily routine of life is mechanized.

What more are our houses than stone coffins towering up from the ground into the sky? One storey high, two storeys — three hundred storeys high. Masonry rectangles and decagons? Entrenched coffins of stone, or wood, or clay, or concrete — with air-holes. Continue reading

Architecture and social structure

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Originally published as part of MAS Context‘s “In Context” section. You can read the full piece over at Iker Gil’s elegantly designed website for the journal, including some pieces I curated from its back issues along new narrative lines.

Architecture today is, first and foremost, a social product. Not just in the sense that it’s constructed by means of a complex, global division of labor (though this also), but at an even more basic level — it both embodies and envisions certain relations between men, as well. Make no mistake of it, however. In no way should this be taken to imply that architecture is produced for the sake of society. Quite the opposite. Like any other commodity, a building comes about socially, through the productive agency of groups and individuals working together. But this work is directed toward ends fundamentally alien to itself; its purpose is not to benefit society or edify mankind but rather serve as a site for the accumulation of capital. Either that, or the built object merely rematerializes that which already floated up from the base, ideological figments and fragments that have outlived the historical conditions from which they arose. These now nestle into mortar, stone, and brick. All that melted into air is made solid once more.

Of course, none of this is to say that great architecture can’t be produced under capitalism. Hardly anything could be further from the truth. The architectural legacy of the modern age is at least as impressive as that which preceded it — whether one begins, as Kaufmann did, with the French revolutionary architects of the eighteenth century, or reaches further back, like Tafuri, to the city-states of the Italian Renaissance. Modernism itself was nothing but the self-conscious attempt to take hold of the forms and forces unleashed by modernity, as the spirit of the times comprehended in concrete. Continue reading

Train stations, bread factories, and the “New City”

Student projects at VKhUTEMAS
and VKhUTEIN from the studios
of Vesnin & Ladovskii, 19251929

.Train stations

Continue reading

The Architecture for the Palace of the Soviets/Архитектура Дворца Советов (1939) – Free PDF Download

The Archetype of Stalinist Architecture - The Palace of the Soviets

Continuing our theme of the decline of architecture, literature, and the visual arts under Stalin, it is perhaps appropriate to post here a document that was printed in order to educate the public on the proposed architectural design of  the building.  The Architecture of the Palace of the Soviets (Архитектура Дворца Советов) was intended to accomplish this task.  In it, numerous architects, some of them having formerly belonged to the now-vanquished Soviet avant-garde, sing the praises of this bizarre, wedding-cake blend of monumentalist gigantism and neoclassical stylization (the columns and lavishly-decorated façades).  Some, like Vladimir Paperny, have suggested that Stalin himself might have had a hand in its design, personally stepping in to oversee the realization of Iofan, Fomin, and Shchuko’s abominable vision.  Considering the sheer monstrosity of the final structure, it is not too unlikely that this might have been the case.  Either way, below you can download a free .pdf file copy of the 1939 text, which sadly includes a declaration from the once-great architectural modernist Nikolai Miliutin written in in support of the final proposal:

Архитектура Дворца Советов (1939)

And the following is a Stalinist propaganda film made a year before this text, in 1938, called New Moscow (Новая Москва), which features both the interior and exterior of the proposed building:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYvFy-2tB3w]