Richard Stites’ chapter “Utopia in Space: City and Building” from his book Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life (1981)

Cover to Stites' book on utopianism

If there is truly a proletarian concept, it is the word “We.”

— Anatoly Lunacharsky

The Soviet government in the 1920s was the first in modern history to possess such mammoth power to design living quarters for its population; to determine the number, size, and style of buildings; to plot the density of the population on the land and within each structure; to decide where to place such structures; to plan future cities and variants of the city; to shape the balance of the population between town and countryside — in other words to proclaim the layout and location of all human services — factories, offices, schools, hospitals, and homes.  Town planning in a planning state — which is what Soviet Russia became in 1928 — was not simply a minor occupation; it was in fact “nation planning,” macro-community design — in other words, Utopia building on the ground and on the grandest possible scale.  Faced with such possibilities for the expression of their talents and imaginations, what planner, architect, economist, sociologist, or geographer would not have become breathless with anticipation?

City planning and the design of future living space requires a mentality and an imagination closely resembling the concoction of science fiction and Utopia.  As S. Frederick Starr has written, “the architect could leap into the future even more easily than the novelist.  Sitting at his drafting table, he could simply obliterate present reality with a few strokes of the pen and create a new world with a few more strokes.” ‘ Even in “normal” times and in developed nonrevolutionary milieux, city planning is a blueprint for living in the very near future.  In the Russian Revolution, architects and town planners had visions of reshaping an entire nation, of aligning the structures and anti-structures with high-speed economic development plans, of providing “social condensers” for the nurturing of a new socialist race of people.  Soviet architects, bound by material limitations and political considerations, could not match the global fantasies of the all-world cities of science fiction.  They had to design for real people and for the imminent future.  Yet the architectural imagination in Soviet Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s often verged upon the fantastic, and its treatment of space, privacy, interaction, mobility, social harmony and community, work, family life, and domestic labor intersected continuously with the major themes and issues of Utopian speculation of the revolutionary period.

Since socialism in all its variants, including the Marxist one, implies community — some sense of sharing life, residence, and work in a spirit of harmonious and fraternal interaction — socialist architects and town planners had to pose certain questions.  What measure of social distance or popular density is required to achieve it? How far apart can people live and still be called a community? How much private space (and time [191] within that space) does the individual require without violating a sense of community? These questions remain pressing ones in the contemporary world of development, dispersion, town and regional planning, and ordinary edificial architecture, and they shaped the vivid debates, blueprints, and presentations made by Soviet architects of the Russian Revolution.

The Antiurban Impulse

The history of the Russian city as a social organism and as a public concept reveals that many Russians were possessed of a vague “antiurban” sense.  The fear of what the Germans called the menace of “civilization” or “Kultur” lay at the heart of intellectual and moralizing anxiety over the steady growth of urbanization.  Since the Bolshevik Revolution was suffused by an urban mystique — unmistakable in the force of its rhetoric and its poetics — conflict was inevitable.  Indeed the birth of Utopian town planning in the 1920s grew directly and self-consciously out of a strong distaste for the current city, a distaste with a long tradition and deep roots in Russian society.

Marx’s comment about “the idiocy of rural life” was not sufficiently potent to resolve such an issue as the future of cities.  Against it, town planners of the 1920s often cited Engels’ equally suggestive remark on “the disappearance of the big cities” and Lenin’s comment to H.G. Wells that “the towns will get very much smaller” and that “they will be different.” These feelings resembled the recurrent malaise among Western intellectuals and statesmen of the nineteenth century — Jefferson, Schiller, Carlyle, the French romantics among them — who saw the city as the home base of industry, crime, capitalism, and glut.  The city became a metaphor of the discomfort with noise, “the fever of the world,” ugliness, machine-like rhythms of life, clocks, railroads, hustle and bustle, mobility, and restless change — in short, a naked menace to a real or fanciful pastoral world.  In the nineteenth century, the big city no longer remained a spatial concept, but an emblem for immense transformational, subversive, and destructive power.

Like some early American urbophobes, Russian public figures were pulled into antiurbanism not by hatred of towns or industry as such — but by repugnance for such foreign cities as Lyons and Manchester, perceived as festering centers of vice and crime, populous headquarters of dangerous ideas, and flashpoints of social disorder.  The attitude of Nicholas I to industrial growth was ambivalent.  Russian officials who pondered the agglomeration of the proletariat in the West worried about its appearance in Russia.  Because of this, the tsar sought to “halt the further aggregation of factory people in Moscow.”

Nicholas’ finance minister, E.F. Kankrin, on the other hand, believed that even with urban and industrial growth (which he by no means pushed) the Russian worker would not become a proletarian of the European type because of his strong and permanent roots in the village and his habit of returning there periodically.  This keen comment by Kankrin is highly suggestive of things to come: it was a vision of the city as a shell, not a living organism.  He wished not to destroy Russian cities but rather to retain them as static places that workers visited seasonally in order to work and to keep them from becoming those dreadful sewers of anarchy that festered in the West and bred a “spirit of coalition.” The odd-sounding concept of a “part-time” city was central to many science fiction Utopias and — in variant form — to the Disurbanist school of Soviet city planning.

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Conservative anti-urbanism acquired another dimension in the years of industrialization (c.  1890-1914): rightwing anti-modernism.  Economic motivations certainly drove the mechanism of the Russian Right, and its main social focus was the Jews.  But its geographical target was the city.  As in many societies of that time — Germany in particular — industry, city, and Jew were blended into a dreamy and myopic vision contrasted to a pure pastorale of Russia-of-the-Russians, a fairyland disrupted by the energies and schemes of urban interlopers.  This was a kind of perverted Slavophilism and “Muscovite nostalgia.”

In the radical response to the city, we detect another kind of repugnance.  The “first Russian radical,” Alexander Radishchev, in the Journey from St.  Petersburg to Moscow (1790) displayed frank hostility to urban life as unhealthy and immoral.  Mid-century Russian Populism, as we have seen, emerged with a strong anti-urban sensibility.  To extremists like Bakunin, modern cities deserved nothing less than violent destruction in an act of sweeping vandalism.  More moderate Populists were ambivalent about cities in their futuristic programs and Utopias.  Most of them believed that the new society would grow out of village communes.  The theorist of Populism, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, taught that only rural life allowed for full and free development of human faculties since capitalist cities required the dehumanizing division of labor.  Sofia Perovskaya, a major terrorist figure in the People’s Will, complained that the premature sexuality of the young (before the age of thirty) was attributable “to the artificial stimuli of urban life,” and a later Populist writer, N.N. Zlatovratsky, called the city “the incarnation of sinister forces.” A curious anticipation of things to come was the little known Utopian tract, Communist States of the Future (1879) by the leftist but non-revolutionary lawyer, V.I. Taneev (1840-1921), brother of the composer Sergei.  In his sketch of a future Europe, Taneev depicts self-governing agrarian communes organized into states and federations, each commune composed of 2,000 adults and covering one square mile.  In this semi-socialist and semi-technocratic world, cities — capitals, administrative centers, and ports — contained no permanent residents, the population continuously rotating in and out.  As in many Soviet science fiction works of the 1920s, children were kept out of the cities altogether.

In the generation before the collapse of the monarchy, a whole chorus of liberal, socialist, neo-populist, and Tolstoyan publicists joined the Right in a moral assault on cities as bastions of decadence, prostitution, faceless anomie, and raging vice.  The Russian flood of “sin city” literature was of course a local version of the antiurban moral crusading that appeared in many places at the turn of the century, but its edge was very sharp.  The outcry over “decadence” (anything from free love to sex clubs and perversion through violence and child seduction) was a major thread in the intelligentsia’s discourse in the years after the 1905 Revolution.  Its connection with general culture and political climate has never been fully explored.  Elements of city hatred sometimes combined with a latent and tortured sexual envy as in the anguished book by P. Dneprov, The Cruel City (1907), portraying Petersburg as a mass of icy stone and at the same time in inferno of lust.  A revealing piece of evidence from the world of popular culture is the fact that urban song as a genre was widely known as zhestokii romans (cruel song).  A wide variety of opinions, divergent and even mutually contradictory, seemed to reflect a readiness to change drastically, at the very least, the character of Russian cities.

The wars and revolutions of 1914-21 uncovered new levels of antiurbanism: peasant hostility to towns and urban flight from the cities in search of security and survival. [193] Odious depictions of the city as such found expression in two literary schools that arose early in the Revolution: the muzhik socialists and the Scythian poets.  The former were a half-dozen or so peasant-born poets who spoke with an urbanized voice in the Proletcult movement and other forums, decried (and confounded) the city, the West, and government and reached out for a romanticized idyll of the countryside.  Among them, though not quite of them, Sergei Esenin called the city “a labyrinth where men lose their souls,” a familiar graphic demonology of city space itself.  The Scythians and others (Blok, Bely, Pilnyak, and Ivanov-Razumnik) projected a negative image of the city — a chillingly rational world of atomization, lack of community, and isolation (all in spite of the supposed density of population).

Literary currents and the peasant Utopias provided a vivid link between the deep layers of city fear and the architects’ practical concerns about what to do with existing cities.  In literary works, towns were destroyed, abandoned, emptied, gutted, or transformed in various ways into administrative centers or temporary camps or visiting sites.  In the urbanist science fiction of the twenties, where big cities did exist independent of a single world-city complex or a megacity, the old ones had been torn down, allowed to rot, blown up in the wars, or — in part — preserved as picturesque ruins and archeological sites.  Rare was the literary visionary who remained content to reform Moscow or Leningrad, or simply let them grow organically.  The revolutionary city planners, educated, well-trained, and socially alert people, were alive to the Utopian traditions of Europe and Russia, to the deep anti-urban currents of its past, to the German Marxist urban schemes of the turn-of-the-century, and to Russia’s own pre-revolutionary garden city movement.  The question was: what would they do with these legacies?

The Greening of Russia: The Disurbanists

The major schools of Utopian city planning came to be known as the Urbanists and the Disurbanists, yet both grew out of anti-urban sentiments and traditions.  Both the European socialist movement and the international garden city movement — with occasional but not extensive overlap — fed revolutionary Russian town planning.  Socialists glorified the city and its productive capacities but lamented its capitalist social evils; they scorned the countryside, but envisioned a world without the contradiction between town and country — a vague formula.  In Spain where the linear city was conceived (in the 1880s) and in England where a spate of novels and Utopias preceded the garden city movement of 1900-14, social reformers and architects sought to create new communities to illustrate the possibility of planned living in defiance of the historical growth of medieval towns, fortuitous anarchic industrial patterns, and the resultant nexus with the surrounding hinterland.  E.P. Howard’s Tomorrow (1898) — a scheme for an anti-city town in the midst of natural greenery (variously called “green city” and “garden city”) dominated this tradition for about twenty years.  Russian “gardenists” were discussing these town plans in the years before the Revolution, and their ideas attracted socialists, Tolstoyans, religious groups, and even vegetarians who linked healthy diet with healthy environment, open space, and modified residence patterns.

The Soviet Disurbanists and Urbanists of the 1920s took Marxist writings as their avowed texts but were clearly touched by deeper currents.  Some had direct links with the garden city movement of the pre-revolutionary period.  But their models were also shaped by social concerns, plans for “organizing the psyche of the masses,” technical [194] limitations, esthetic impulses, the need for personal expression, professionalism, and ideological considerations.  Since “ideology” — though Marxist in name — was in a state of flux and still uncodified, this allowed considerable latitude in urban planning for the future.  The Disurbanists in particular disdained modern cities as museums of eclectic styles, haphazard reminders of uneven growth, “irrational” accretions created by ignorant power, and clusters of concretized social evil.  Their anti-urbanism went beyond Marxism.  They believed that Moscow was a dying city and they wanted to hasten the process; they believed in their “utopian” schemes for creating a new spatial world of work and residence.  And in the brief era of their prominence (c.  1928-32), they believed in and worked for the immediate and complete realization of their designs.  In this they were for a time supported by the authorities.

Who were the Disurbanists? Not all were architects; their ranks included sociologists, social theorists, journalists, political figures, economists, and professional planners from the Soviet central planning organ (Gosplan).  The “ideologist” of the group, Mikhail Okhitovich (1896-1937; died of natural causes), a sociologist, wrote regularly for the main Disurbanist organ, Contemporary Architecture, the journal of the Society of Contemporary Architects to which most Disurbanist architects belonged.  His associate Mikhail Barshch was a practicing architect and a member of that organization.  Moisei Ginzburg, (1892-1946), one of the most influential builders and theorists of the late 1920s, joined them in 1928.  Leonid Puzis of Gosplan added his own designs to the main Disurbanist schemes, and the independent and fertile Nikolai Milyutin (1889- 1942), though not properly speaking a Disurbanist, provided a “linear” variant to their visions.  According to Puzis, they enjoyed wide support in Soviet official circles, including the Commissar of Health Semashko, the housing specialist N.L. Meshcheryakov, and the influential party figure, Yury Larin.

In its most irreducible form, Disurbanism meant the nonurban redistribution of the population.  Okhitovich conjured up “a destationed world” meaning a land not only without cities but also without capitals, without a “center,” that magic word which then and now in Russian denoted not only geographical situation but also concentration of power, communication, and culture.  To Okhitovich, the converse was openness, motion, freedom.  In arguing against the Urbanist notion of big cities and buildings as the pathway to communal life, he asserted the then not-so-obvious fact that form did not guarantee content; that a dormitory remained a dormitory whether in a barracks, in a sector of an apartment building, or in a separate communal dwelling; and that a patriarchal izba (peasant family home), with all its sociological overtones, could be found in a skyscraper as well as in a village — an acute observation whose truth would become apparent in the communal apartments of the Stalin era.

Okhitovich opposed oppressive and unnatural “collectivism” as much as he did excessive individualism.  “Personal property, personal needs, personal initiative, personal development, personal hands, feet, head, and brain not only do not disappear [under socialism] but will be for the first time accessible.” Economy of scale, he argued, becomes dysfunctional in life as well as in production when taken to extremes.  In a graphic refutation of some classical Utopian formulations, he made it quite clear that twenty-five laundries serving about a thousand people apiece were superior to a single laundry for 25,000 people.  Collective services, therefore, had to be reasonable and manageable in scale — and not the product of a mathematical mentality.  By engaging in oblique debate with Urbanists and science fiction writers, Okhitovich was exhibiting [195] the utility of Utopian discourse once again.  Unnatural or “social” division of labor — between capital and labor, between men and women, between town and country, between mental and physical labor, between nation and nation (or metropolis and colony) must be abolished — but not the natural and functional division of labor essential to all human life.

Under the slogan “down with the city,” Okhitovich called for the depopulation of Moscow and other cities and their regreening as parks.  The new locus of population was to be linear — an endless road of habitation flanked by individual dwelling places.  His own preference was for prefabricated, portable or mobile, collapsible homes that could be set up anywhere along the “magistral,” or line of communication and service points.  Some of his colleagues preferred homes on stilts, or adjoining rows of what we would now call “town homes,” consisting of one spacious room per person.  The service points, easily accessible to residents, were the key element of communalism: shopping, culture centers, and communal gathering points.  Their mechanism and administration did not come under Okhitovich’s scrutiny, a curious lapse for a professional sociologist interested in human dynamics and not just employment of space.  There are diagrams (see Fig. 33) suggesting what the Disurbanists had in mind.  But they are aerial views — often misleading to the layman attempting “real” visualization.

If we wish to transport ourselves to the Disurbanists’ world, we must look in our minds down a broad and straight paved road heading into spatial infinity (the Russian milieu certainly allowing for such a perspective).  Instead of towns or super-cities every 40-50 miles, we see an endless and uninterrupted stretch of dwellings on either side of the road — rows of individual apartment cells, mobile homes on wheels, or boxes on sturdy columns stuck in the ground.  Beyond the roads are fields and forests, perhaps farms, industrial sites hidden away along the route.  We stop and plant our house; in time we acquire a spouse and plant another box beside our own and attach it; with the coming of children comes the attachment of more boxes.  Work and goods are within easy distance (public transport, personal auto, or foot, depending on the scheme).  The world beyond the roadside boxes is organized (in a vaguely specified way) along socialist economic lines.  At the service points and the workplace occur the moments of communal interaction or spiritual community so important to other prophets of Utopian experiment in these years.  But it is never described, much less analyzed: space and structure alone seem to possess the power to “communalize” people, an implication quite at odds with Okhitovich’s original point.

Other scenarios simply altered the details of the major vision.  The “Green City” of Barshch and Ginzburg, for example, stressed row houses as the ideal (not the separate boxes or little houses).  They are flanked front and rear by a green world but on the sides by neighbors — endlessly in both directions.  Only in the collective of space, argue the architects, can the individual come into full play.  The nearby “bases” enrich this semi-private, semi-communal life: bus stops that are also reading stations, autoparks, cafeterias serving 250 citizens, and nearby centers of sport, culture, education, and communal utilities (kindergarten, laundries, etc.).  The world is brought in via nearby production centers, radio, T.V., and telephone.  As with Okhitovich, marriage, divorce, and family growth are made possible by the constant switching of adjoining rooms with lockable doors.  All the planners were extraordinarily sensitive to personal quarters for women and the possibility of divorce, a sensible notion at a moment in Soviet history when divorce was reaching mammoth proportions after the 1926-27 family reforms.  [196] Barshch and Ginzburg put more emphasis on air, light, drenching sunshine, and greenery than did Okhitovich, but no more on the actual problems and dynamics of residential interaction or communal living.

In later years, Barshch called Disurbanism “our futurological fantasy,” based on a perception of the decay and self-destruction of the then existing cities and a vision of the reign of the automobile.  In retrospect the Disurbanist planners occupied a peculiar place in Utopian thinking.  They did not share the basically “rural” sensibilities of the Russian anti-urbanists in poetry or science fiction or of the peasants themselves.  But they are akin to those Utopian writers such as Shelonsky (see Chapter 1) before the Revolution and Belyaev at the end of the 1920s who saw privacy as the only means to true community.  The characters in Belyaev’s Struggle in the Atmosphere are constantly on the move, almost permanently separated from each other.  Parents, relatives, friends, and loved ones never actually visit each other, yet they converse constantly by means of what we might someday call “conference video” (or satellite interview) — a device that apparently provided the same kind of satisfaction for Belyaev’s people as does ordinary close-up “company” for present-day mortals in Russia and elsewhere on the globe.  The proximity of housing and “service points” are pathetic attempts to compensate for the missing “street life” of the old city.  Today’s dwellers in and visitors to suburban “communities,” forest condominiums, town home developments, and the gallerias and malls that “service” them might offer a different testimony about the communal utility of such visions.

Apparently no one noticed at the time that Disurbanism seemed to herald the end of architecture as a profession — or at least a major branch of it: residential design.  The portable boxes or adjoining cells were standardized, leaving the ensembles of service center or communal points as the only foci of constructive genius.  Some of the existing designs remind us of present day American shopping centers along the major strips, or “modern” universities built on podiums and pods.  In some sense Disurbanism resembles Frank Lloyd Wright’s scheme for a Broad Acres — a dispersionist design for America that would individualize living by blending the structures into the contours of nature.  What we have gotten instead in Russia is the continuation of the cubic block of apartments marching outward from the city lines.

Disurbanism highlighted in a very dramatic way the eternal conflict in modern, urban society between the yearning for community, sociability, conviviality, the animation of crowds, and neighborliness on the one hand and the need for privacy, family life, individual space on the other.  The Disurbanists, for all their claims about synthesizing and reconciling these needs, clearly leaned in the direction of individualism.  The extreme dispersionism, the yearning to cover all the Russian land with criss-crossing magistrals of residence, the insistence on separate living units, and the hollowness and blandness of their visions of communitarian interaction at loosely conceived bus stops and cultural-shopping points all point to this and underline their highly developed aversion to the city life they knew as well as to the massive and grandiose schemes of their rivals, the Urbanists and Superurbanists, whose dream would cluster millions of people together in unheard of communal density.

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Supercity: The Urbanists

Although both Urbanists and Disurbanists were inspired by the antiurban impulse in Russian history and fueled by hostility to the “rotting” cities they saw around them, they divided on whether cities as such would replace the current ones or be wholly eliminated from the socialist landscape.  Lenin in 1913 had written that “cities are the centers of economic, political, and intellectual or spiritual life of a people and constitute the chief promoters of progress.” The notion of the city remained very strong in the Bolshevik vision of the future.  Trotsky in the 1920s was quite emphatic: “The city lives and leads.  If you give up the city, that is if you let it be torn to pieces economically by the kulak and artistically by Pilnyak, there will remain no Revolution, but a violent and bloody process of retrogression.  Peasant Russia, deprived of the leadership of the city, not only will never get to Socialism, but will not be able to maintain itself for two months, and will become the manure and peat of world imperialism.” A Bolshevik economist, arguing with leftover “Populists” of the 1920s, wrote in 1927 of “the leading role of the city in modern history” as “the bearer of the most advanced economic forms.” Men and women of power, culture, and economic weight — however much they allowed for “reshaping” the city — seemed unable to dispense with it altogether.  It was their base, their camp, their headquarters — as well as the locus of putative progress.

This explains why there was so much furor in the discussion of the city, so much fear and hostility to an antiurbanism that threatened to become a reality and make Chayanov’s dream of detonation come true.  It also explains the eventual decisiveness of the Stalinists in reaffirming the city — even in its present form.  For ruling circles and responsible administrators, the city was a practical necessity — without it they might float through the void of a vast countryside without power and influence, their voices echoless.

For some intellectuals, however, the attraction of the city was positive — like that of the machine.  A humble rank-and-file communist, Lev Kopelev, used to dream that Moscow, Kharkov, and Kiev would be as big and as well built as Berlin, Hamburg, and New York, with giant skyscrapers, autos, bikes, fine clothes, and lots of watches, planes and dirigibles.  Mayakovsky, Meyerhold, the Futurists, and the factory poets made a regular fetish out of the shape and dynamic quality of the big city.  One ought not to see this as a Marxist-urban vs.  Russian-rural dichotomy.  Superurban fantasy was just as “Russian” in its appeal as was antiurbanism.  Architects, science fiction writers, poets, and artists of every sort dreamed up numerous visions of futuristic cities before and after the Revolution.  The Anarchists, who were viscerally opposed to most Bolshevik programs and style, projected more than their share of “Free Cities” and “Giant Urban Communes” filled with millions of workers.  “We shall build,” wrote the Anarcho-Syndicalist Grachev, “as yet unheard of giants from concrete, glass, and steel.”

The earliest years of the Revolution evoked a strange mix of architectural fantasy and social vision.  The school sketches and projects of the period — especially in the famous avant-garde academy V.Kh.U.T.E.M.A.S — show a variety of abstract, Constructivist projections of hanging, floating, flying, and jutting structures, fantastic temples, mausoleums, crematoria, and monuments.  Out of it emerged the victorious principle of “rationalism” in architecture whose main spokesman, Ginzburg, drew on the ideas of the father of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, to prove that the correct appearance of buildings had a healthy civic-minded effect upon the viewer and that simple geometric forms required less physical energy to perceive.  Apparently influenced [198] by Ford, Taylor, and Gastev, he stressed symmetry and geometric precision, and the honesty of showing the function of the structure openly.  A major Constructivist architect, Alexei Gan, designed a kiosk that would speak to the peasants and help mold in them an urban mentality.  A still minor current was early monumentalism.  The competition for a Palace of Labor (unrealized) in 1922 brought forth an oft-quoted reverie of Sergei Kirov:

On this new, magnificent, splendid and revolutionary earth, we the workers born in miserable hovels, will leave those hovels in comradely ranks to enter our enchanted palaces to the strain of the great ‘Internationale’…[We] are capable of embellishing this wretched earth with monuments such as our enemies could never imagine, even in their dreams.

This was another rhetorical link between fantasy, architectural discourse, and prominent policymakers.  The various “Red City” projects of the early 1920s encased both these tendencies, but were almost never built.

Like the Disurbanists, the Urbanist school of town planning was a child of the Society of Contemporary Architects — O.S.A.  It adhered to the view, voiced by R. Khiger in 1928, that the city was a “social condenser,” and that the architect’s mission was to “alter radically the structure of human life — productive, social, and personal.” By merging Western technology with Russian revolutionary notions of cooperation and communalism, O.S.A. designers hoped to change the texture of life in the U.S.S.R.  and create the New Soviet Person.  Furthermore, O.S.A. believed — and said so openly — that this was the responsibility of professional planners and designers, not party officials, and that it should be done not by dogmatic fiat or administrative order, but by a process of experience and experiment — building, inhabiting, testing, and revising.  It was the perfect example of the fusion of Utopia and experiment directly inspired by the October Revolution.

The O.S.A. planners’ decision that big new urban formations would replace the towns of the present produced two ironies: they were widely imitated by other schools, of town planning — including some of their enemies — and, after several years of Urbanist speculation, some of them shifted suddenly to Disurbanism.  As early as 1926, B. Korsunov printed in O.S.A.’s journal a project for a city of skyscrapers surrounded by open space and green parks (in the manner of Le Corbusier) and ringed by seven-story workers’ dwellings in the form of House Communes.  Grounding their argument on cost as well as sociability, O.S.A. writers promoted concentration, density, planning, and mammoth city-forms.  In 1928, N.  Krasilnikov’s city plan required a population density of three quarters of a million persons per square mile — more than double that of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1890s! Cities would contain clusters of half-million people housed vertically in tall buildings with helicopters serving as elevators.  Varentsov’s “City of the Future” was a dream of immense Y-shaped communal buildings linked to a circular community service center — all surrounded by greenery.  N. Ladovsky’s 1929 “Dynamic City” plan placed a giant arrow-shaped residence building (with administrative offices at one wing) inside a horseshoe of industrial establishments — for density and ease of access to workplace.  The group of proletarian architects who came out to assault O.S.A. in the late twenties hardly differed from its opponents in proposing huge house commune cities — with enormous residential structures resembling airplanes and ocean liners.

The ultimate Urbanist scheme was launched dramatically by L.M. Sabsovich, a [199] high official of Soviet Russia’s central state planning organ (Gosplan), in the very heat of the first five-year plan.  In a burst of arrogant optimism, he called his prospectus The U.S.S.R.  in Ten Years.  In comprehensiveness, detail, and ambitiousness it outstripped all previous urban plans and openly invoked “the great projects” of Bogdanov’s Red Star.  It was widely circulated and discussed in the Soviet Union and translated into foreign languages.  Though written by an economist, it was the most extravagant of all city planning exercises produced in the Revolution and a codification of major themes from the whole realm of utopianism and experimental life.

The Soviet Union in 1939 — and one must recall the actual condition of the country in that fateful year in order to appreciate the irony — will be a land where the “material and social base of socialism” is already laid down by the complete abolition of private property in the means of production, the disappearance of classes, and the industrial and agricultural transformation of the economy.  There will be no great cities, unnatural and inhuman hazards to physical and mental health.  Industries and citizens will have been dispersed across the length and breadth of the nation into “agglomerations” of 50,000-75,000 people, the optimum for sane and comfortable living.  Creation of new enterprises in the old cities will have ceased, small operations will have been combined into complexes, and both will have been transplanted.  The village world will have been eliminated, together with the muzhik mentality (in 5-8 years!); collective and state farms will have been unified around agro-towns on geographically and demographically equal territorial units.  Eventually the new industrial cities and the agro-towns would combine into Industrial-Agrarian Cities serving a given geographical unit.  This would “drastically change the face” of Russia, destroy “rural barbarism and isolation,” and end abnormal urban concentration.

In Sabsovich’s vision, communal life replaces the wasteful and deadening private household, a “scourge that deforms the lives of adults and children alike” (p.  123).  The aims of communalism? To free all workers (especially women) from responsibility for the provision of daily needs and from the private obligation of childrearing and education, to make woman equal to man by opening the doors of her domestic jail, to release energies for the fulfillment of individual needs and collective life, to enhance the health of children, to raise the cultural level of all people, and to end the distinction between hand and brain labor.  The means? The “industrialization” of all tasks previously performed, separately and wastefully, inside the “petty bourgeois” home.

Building on the whole tradition of socialist dreams of household collect!visim, Sabsovich imagined the coordination of all food producing operations in order to transform raw food products into complete meals, deliverable to the population in urban cafeterias, communal dining rooms, and the workplace in ready-to-eat form by means of thermos containers.  No food shopping, no cooking, no home meals, no kitchens.  Similar industrialization of laundering, tailoring, repair, and even house cleaning (with electrical appliances) would allow each person a sleeping-living room, free of all maintenance cares.  Russia would in fact become a vast free-of-charge hotel chain.  In his cities of 50,000-70,000, Sabsovich suggested that 25-50 large residence buildings would accommodate the entire population — meaning 1,400-2,000 persons per building (children being housed nearby) — or about the size of Fourier’s phalanstery (1,700).

Sabsovich’s New City would service its inhabitants culturally at three levels: reading rooms, halls, and galleries within each building; larger and more elaborate culture centers in the city; and higher courses, studios, and laboratories in every workplace and factory.  The work week would fall to three days (two of work, one of rest) and then to [200] five days (three of work, two of rest) — and all workers would retire at age forty-nine.  The nation’s health would be protected by athletic and medical facilities, the short work regime, and acres of greenery surrounding the cities.  Sabsovich’s mammoth “social condenser” would serve as the physical shell of social being which in turn would shape consciousness.  Thus the cultural and spiritual level of all would actually be transformed in a few years.

One is left breathless by the scope and grandeur of Sabsovich’s predictions.  So outlandish did they seem that he revised his schedule a bit later to project fifteen instead of ten years into the future and reduced some of his exorbitant figures.  But if one stands back from any version of the scheme and adds other technological details contained in it (transport, efficiency, sheer output levels), one gazes upon a land utterly refashioned, enveloped in Utopian themes — a land of ultramodern medium-sized cities whose population is bursting with productivity and at the same time speeding across the land in large passenger planes or personal aviettes and living happy communal lives in the midst of utmost comfort and convenience.  One could cut away the statistical tables and economic prognostications, add some laughter, a few characters, and any feeble plot to build from it a typical science fiction novel of the 1920s.  Larri’s Land of the Happy, written at about the same time, though projecting several decades further, hardly differs from it in the majestic scope of its fantasy.

Socialism in One Building: The House Commune

The word “commune” (kommuna) became a regular part of the Soviet lexicon right after the October Revolution.  “House Commune” or Communal Dwelling (dom-kommuna) designated a structure or cluster of them designed for collective and communal life.  Radical architects freely and often uncritically plundered the works of the nineteenth century Utopian socialists, especially Fourier, though often without discussion of social meaning.  The earliest on record, called “Phalanstery” and designed by the architect Venderov in 1918, was exactly that: a Fourierist project for thirty-eight families — never built.  Indeed very few were ever built; most remained on paper, and the bulk of communal experimentation was done in already existing houses, apartments, or dormitories.  Yet the communal house was one of the most crucial elements in architectural experimentation for a new life: the concretized rendering of a hundred Utopian dreams.

In the relatively serene years after the Civil War, designers began to combine their colorful fantasies with practical considerations about buildings and their future occupants.  The first examples were extremely eclectic and much too lavish to be the models for a general pattern of construction.  The 1921 Phalanstery of Tverskoi and Buryshkin, for example, looked like a classical palace from one angle — although its modern outward curving wings place it in the tradition of the American motel also (see Fig. 34).  It was a prize-winning entry for a project to be built in the suburbs of Petrograd for thirty proletarian families with common dining room, kitchen, reading room, and daycare center built around a courtyard, and with residence rooms above and in the wings.  Leonid Vesnin’s Moscow housing ensemble of 1922 was more ambitious: a dozen buildings, including club, bath-house, technical shack, daycare and kindergartens, and residential buildings, with a large play area between them.  It was in fact what we call a “garden court apartment complex,” spacious and self-sufficient, with common services including a place for socializing.  Other projects from this period display the same [201] attractiveness and common sense — but without elaboration on how the inhabitants would achieve communal sensibilities.  Though strikingly modern in form, the projects had little ideological content.  They seemed to reflect the comfort level of professionals rather than factory workers.

With the formation of O.S.A. and its doctrine of “social condenser,” the House Commune came into its own as the central ingredient in town planning of the future among the Urbanists.  Recognizing the indisputable fact of overcrowding in Moscow, invoking the wastefulness of repetitive individual living units (homes or separate, fully equipped apartments), O.S.A. leaders saw the House Commune as the only solution: it would cut costs by communalizing services, release women (and men) from repetitive domestic housework and thereby raise national labor productivity, promote a spirit of communism through collective living, and allow some privacy as well.  The ideological portion of the campaign announced a “collectivist-social” psychology and the elimination of the “petty bourgeois” and “individualistic” habits of the past — meaning the excessive privatization, hoarding, inwardness, egoism, and coziness that some foes of the family accused it of.  The first big O.S.A. scheme for a house commune within the supercity was that of Barshch and V.M. Vladimirov in 1929: two intersecting buildings with 1,000 adults in one, 360 preschoolers in the left intersector, and 320 schoolchildren in the right (see Fig. 35).  The adult wing had four communal and six sleeping floors and a communal dining room equipped with a conveyor-belt table.  Adults dined with the older children and paid regular visits via a corridor to the little ones.  Similar schemes sprouted in 1928 — 29, with a crossed nest of boxes, a tooth-roofed H-shaped house for students, and an eight-spoked wheel of buildings — the essential combination of communal buildings easily accessible to sleeping space, the separation of adults and children, and available privacy of single rooms for all.  The most interesting social issue to emerge out of these plans was that of the kitchen and the family.  It is a singular fact that to this day the individual kitchen is the strongest symbol of a nuclear family (as it once was its main meeting place).  Classical House Commune theory had always made the collectivized kitchen its central tenet: to save costs, promote eating together, and rescue housewives from the slavery of kitchen life.

The “women question” and the family, hotly debated in the first decade of the Revolution, had informed home planning discourse from the beginning.  All Bolsheviks were verbally committed to ending the drudgery of housework for wives, though the question of separation of children from parents — even in a nearby building — evoked considerable division.  The most extreme advocate of “de-familization” within the House Commune by means of mandatory communal dining and separation of children from parents, V. Kuzmin, codified his appeals in 1930 in a famous piece entitled “Problems of the Scientific Organization of Everyday Life.” To his rigid arguments on the abolition of the known family within the precincts of the commune, he added more than a touch of Gastevism: organized and scheduled efficiency for every moment of the day.  Kuzmin’s system of “supercollectivism” (his own term) deserves comment precisely because it has sometimes been seen to epitomize the architectural utopianism of the 1920s, even though in fact the opposite is true.

Kuzmin believed that the architect’s mission was to frame the expressive side of people’s life, how they “suffer, enjoy, rejoice, and lament” as well as work and eat.  This could not be done, he argued, by the “hammer and sickle” — in other words by symbol and ritual.  Here Kuzmin seems to be filling the void left in science fiction Utopias about the nature and quality of communal life, recognizing that symbolic and [202] ritual assemblies of masses did not provide this.  It must arise where men and women live, through the “scientific organization of material life” — living space, light, color, ventilation, and the total environment in inner space.  The main realms of life — rest, eating, sex, parenting, sanitation, decent medical and cultural levels — were too rich to be satisfied within the realm of the sleeping space alone.  Kuzmin offered a “graph of life” — not as an enforceable regulation (“man is not an automaton”) but as a guide for joining architectural design with the daily life in a communal situation.

  1. Lights out.  10:00 P.M.
  2. Eight hours of sleep.  Reveille.  6:00 A.M.
  3. Calisthenics — 5 min.  6:05 A.M.
  4. Toilet — 10 min.  6:15 A.M.
  5. Shower (optional — 5 min.) 6:20 A.M.
  6. Dress — 5 min.  6:25 A.M.
  7. To the dining room — 3 min.  6:28 A.M.
  8. Breakfast — 15 min.  6:43 A.M.
  9. To the cloakrooms — 2 min.  6:45 A.M.
  10. Put on outdoor clothing — 5 min.  6:50 A.M.
  11. To the mine — 10 min.  7:00 A.M.
  12. Work in the mine — 8 hours.  3:00 P.M.
  13. To the commune — 10 min.  3:10 P.M.
  14. Take off outdoor clothing — 7 min.  3:17 P.M.
  15. Wash — 8 min.  3:25 P.M.
  16. Dinner — 30 min.  3:55 P.M.
  17. To the rest room for free hour — 3 min.  3:58 P.M.
  18. Free time.  Those who wish may nap.  In this case they retire to 4:58 P.M.
  19. the bedrooms.
  20. Toilet and change — 10 min.  5:08 P.M.
  21. To the dining room — 2 min.  5:10 P.M.
  22. Tea — 15 min.  5:25 P.M.
  23. To the club.  Recreation.  Cultural development.  Gymnastics.  9:25 P.M.
  24. Perhaps a bath or swim.  Here it is life itself that will determine how time is spent, that will draw up the plan.  Alloted time: four hours.
  25. To dining room, supper, eat, and to bedrooms — 25 min.  9:50 P.M.
  26. Prepare to retire (a shower may be taken) — 10 min.  10:00 P.M.

Kuzmin — in a way that reminds us of Gastev and the Table of Hours in We — is meticulous in timing and arranging the “normal,” repetitive and noncontroversial side of the daily round right down to electrified cloakrooms for outer garments (a very crucial aspect of Russian life — thus the many minutes allowed for it).  Radio is enlisted to assist the communards in keeping to this suggested rhythm.  But sex and leisure remain in a mist.  Kuzmin hopes to sleep the unmarried, by gender, in rooms of six (without describing how their sex lives will operate) and “couples” in adjoining rooms whose connecting door is locked when divorce occurs.  The family as such evaporates, since the children are housed apart, though, as always, parents have access to them.  Everything else in life is assumed to be communal — work, motion, dining, leisure.  But the big block of playtime at night is left vacant so that “life itself” will decide what kind of things will be done, and at what level of participation.  As in many such projects, a familiar aspect [203] of life is taken away — sitting around the kitchen table, talking, eating with one’s own family, lounging with them or tinkering in the evening.  Yet the new conviviality is not plotted.  The big leisure room of public space remains an empty church.

Most of the O.S.A. architects winced at the prospect of designing away the family at once and forever.  They reached compromise instead.  Although opposing the oppression of women and the old family that enslaved her, O.S.A. leaders designed a so-called F-Unit of one-room efficiency apartments for couples, complete with kitchens that could be removed in the future when occupants advanced to the level of full communal life and began to cook and eat in common rooms.  Children would, however, be segregated.  Thus, from the old family hearth was preserved at least a companionate couple with ample arrangement for dining together in privacy.  It was far more than many real couples could ever enjoy in the crowded buildings of Moscow and other big cities.  It was, in a way, a prelude to the system of small “separate” apartments (otdelnye kvartiry) that have replaced the “communal” flats of Stalin’s time in the last thirty years [Stites was writing in the early 1980s].  The reasonableness of the O.S.A. architects was apparently conditioned by the response they received to a 1926 questionnaire sent out to workers about their preferences in matters of communal life.  Important independent architects such as Milyutin and Leonidov also opted for transitional stages from family unit to family-less communes.

But, aside from the organization of space, time, and daily life, how was one to achieve “socialism in one building” or communalism in the social and spiritual sense that everyone spoke of so glibly and sincerely? The most common answers were through the mechanism of common space and passageways to encourage interaction, communal dining — a mode of enlarging a family custom — and variants of the workers’ club.  A typical example was Leonidov’s 1929 project for a club that contained labs, lecture halls, sports facilities, game rooms, space for military drill, a museum, gardens, playgrounds, libraries, parks, a gymnasium, rooms for radio, T.V. and film, and a planetarium — in order words, a city within a city.  Obviously not all communal dwellings could afford such facilities.  And where they would exist, their very vastness and variety would hardly make for community — but rather for much specialization and pluralism.  Indeed the more one examines architectural notions of community, the more one sees a replication of already existing urban life, but on a smaller scale in a place called communal.  Judging from the kinds of rituals and ceremonies conducted in workers’ clubs in the 1920s, not much in the way of developing an emotional sense of community could be accomplished by such activity.

The most outlandish communitarian project to come out of the architectural experimentalism of this era was Konstantin Melnikov’s 1929 entry in a competition for a Green City (the winner was Ladovsky, but the city was never built).  Although meant as a rest town or resort for workers, Melnikov’s Green City vividly illustrates how much a practical and talented architect was drawn into the Utopian atmosphere that dominated town planning and community design in those years.  The main buildings were commodious transient hotels with private rooms.  And what did Melnikov offer by way of communal intercourse? A mammoth railroad station to welcome the travelers and surround them by spacious arenas for interaction, galleries and pathways and recreational opportunity — mostly nature trails.  Crowning the establishment was the famous Laboratory of Sleep — a double winged structure with sloping floors, multiple sleep chambers, and an elaborate set of controls by which the sleep-inducers could bathe the restin workers in delicious aromas, sweet fresh air, soothing sounds of nature and music, and [204] gently rocking beds (see Fig. 36).  Inspired by discussions of sleep therapy that were in the air at the time, Melnikov was also indirectly indebted to science fiction: not, ironically, Soviet works but a 1911 story by the father of American science fiction, Hugo Gernsback, called Ralph-124-C41 +.

Architectural Utopia, like science fiction Utopia, was clearly a product of the intelligentsia — that element in Russian history which had always displayed the greatest extravagance, variety, and richness of fantasy.  In the case of science fiction, the state had played a negligible role, the peasants were oblivious to it, and its urban readership consumed it.  Town planning and architecture possessed an altogether different political dimension.  Its impact was immediate, it made claims on labor resources, it pointed to radical changes in the social landscape, it demanded power and freedom to destroy and rebuild — on the ground and in the present or near future.  The state could not be indifferent to such pretensions.  But the state, embodied in the party, was ambivalent.  Prior to 1928, it paid little attention to the emerging schemes.  During the five-year plan, especially 1928-30, the Utopian town visions seemed to mesh with the economic designs of the plan.  Frederick Starr has shown in meticulous detail how the combination of haste, euphoria, partial delusion, and lack of clarity led both sides to see convergence and compatibility between visionary dispersion and the new projected industrial complexes already underway, between visionary house communes and barracks-like collectives already sprouting up all over the industrial sites, between Okhitovich’s Disurbanism and the extreme mobility of the population in these years, and between the social-familial dimensions of house commune schemes and the realities of an immense upsurge in female labor.

The fragile symbiosis of visions collapsed in 1931 in the face of economic realities, revival plans for the older cities, competing transportation networks, the sudden deluge of peasants into already established towns, and the painful realization of Russia’s backwardness in the midst of transformation.  Reinforcing this collapse were the attitudes and behavior patterns of the rural population who flooded the towns, of workers who were expected to occupy the planned towns and ideal buildings, a people thoroughly unprepared psychologically and culturally for the kind of communal living — Urbanist or Disurbanist — that the Utopian blueprints had conjured up as an imminent possibility.  Science fiction and visionary town planning both offered visions of a new world.  Ironically their convergence came in the year 1931, when both were repudiated.

Pod-people: Soviet disurbanism and individual housing units

There actually were socialist proposals for something like the Futuro. Though he initially worked on a number of plans for communal housing, Moisei Ginzburg, along with Mikhail Okhitovich, Aleksandr Zelenko, and Aleksandr Pasternak (Boris’ brother), came close to this in their plans for “disurbanism” in late 1929 and early 1930. They opposed the existence of the traditional, centralized city as they viewed it as bound up with the capitalist social formation. Ginzburg, Okhitovich, & co. were much more interested in the development of personality and the free individual under socialism, rather than in the creation of vast collectivist dwellings. This was a welcome corrective to Leonid Sabsovich and others for whom communism meant merely the abstract negation of capitalism, and who wanted to substitute collectivism for individualism, which they associated with capitalism.

Anyway, the Disurbanists proposed small but accommodating individual housing units, or “pods,” which would moreover be mobile and collapsible. These spaces would aid in the cultivation of the individual personality, and would moreover allow each person the freedom to associate with others as he would like. If someone got married, he could “link” his pod to another’s. If the couple would then have children, they could “plant” more pods for each child to live in. Moreover, the Disurbanists believed that this would help solve the problem of divorce, housing space, and property, since a divorced couple would no longer have to fight over the space they shared or other proprietary issues. The two divorcees could simply uncouple their pod-houses from each other and go their separate ways.

Communal dwelling for comrades [товарищеская коммуна] № 17, Modern Architecture (1930)

Communal dwelling for comrades [товарищеская коммуна] № 17, Modern Architecture (1930)

The Disurbanists thus also hoped that this would help dissolve the traditional social unit of the family and more broadly “socialize” them. Like Sabsovich and the Urbanists, Ginzburg and his allies believed that the care of children in their upbringing should be primarily provided for by institutions established by society. But while familial bonds and affection would doubtless remain in many cases, one would not be forced by his involuntary association with his family to remain attached to it. Once a child would reach the age of maturity, it would be his right to dissociate himself from the rest of his natural family. Continue reading

Mikhail Okhitovich, 1930

«Отчего гибнет город?» (Михаил Охитович)/”Why is the City Dying?” (Mikhail Okhitovich))

Строительство Москвы – (1930) – № 1

(Pg. 9)

Как это так? Города растут, это — факт, который наблюдают повсюду, и вдруг—город гибнет.

Конечно, города растут. Но все дело в том именно и заключается, что город растет так, что он уничтожает сам себя. Это, быть может, и не согласуется с элементами формальной логики, но это так.

Рассмотрим, как растет город.

Возьмем первый город современного общества — бург. Он — продукт выделения, под влиянием товаризации отношений, из крестьянского хозяйства элементов так называемой домашней промышленности. То, что было этой домашней промышленностью, стало теперь бургом, городом простого товарного производства, городом свободного ремесла, а крестьянин остался теперь лишь «возделывателем».

Так произошло отделение города от деревни и оно будет сопровождать человеческое общество через развитие затем крупного города до самого конца капитализма. Препятствие этому процессу было бы препятствием развитию производительных сил, препятствием самому капиталистическому способу производства. Горе стоящим на пути капиталистического города! Он их сокрушит, проглотит.  Рост города — это расцвет, а ослабление города — это «захирей» не производительных сил современного общества.

Мы наблюдаем разложение капитализма — в области политической, экономической, технической. Рушится ли и его способ расселения — крупный (не говоря уж о мелком) город? Как подготовляется процесс соединения города и деревни? Да, гибель города является одним из пока-зательнейшнх признаков современного города, да элементы соединения города и деревни в этом рааложении города имеются.

Город разрушается противоречием, всегда возрастающим между способом расселения и способом передвижения.

Всякому способу производства и сопутствующему ему способу передвижения соответствует и свой способ расселения. В современном обществе, при существовании город и деревни, зависимость этих последних от способа передвижения выражается в следующем. Расселение деревни идет вдаль дороги в один ряд — этого требует необходимость максимальной близости земледельца к производству, которое лежит за пределами деревни. Связь осуществляется животной тягой (лошадь, осел, мул, вол и т. д.), которая тут одновременно представляет собой и орудие производства, и орудие передвижения. Та же потребность в максимальной близости к месту производства обусловливает максимальную плотность домов, скученность их. Сообщение между домами пешеходное.

Домашняя промышленность, выделившаяся в город в виде свободного ремесла, не нуждается в животной тяге. Как только город становится городом, нагоняя за черту свою остатки леревенокой жизни, в этот момент лошадь, мул исчезают из города вместо с этими остатками. Структура домов и улиц бурга • идеальна именно в том смысле, что не требуется вовсе движения лошадей, ослов, мулов.

(Pg. 10)

Лошадь, осел, мул, вступают в город уже в качестве представителя торгового капитала (без которого, впрочем, а не может совершиться отделение города от деревни). «Улицы ослов», т.-е. торговые улицы, широки по сравнению с темными, кривыми, узкими переулками пешеходов, т.-г. улицами ремесла.

Уничтожение цехов разрушает эти «идиллии переулков» и тут рождается первое противоречие «вежду старым способом расселения и новым способом передвижения.

Пешеход садится в омнибус, нанимает фаакр, едет «на извозчике».

Почему это является противоречием? Да потому, что ежели бы все, всегда пользовались бы для движения по улицам не собственными ногами (как в деревне), а пользовались бы услугами экипажа, тогда бы противоречия никакого не было. Бург, в противоположность деревне, вызвал потребность в передвижении с помощью животной тяги, потребность возрастающую с каждым часом его развития.

Допустим даже, что все жители до одного имели бы собственную лошадь. Город значительно расширился бы в зависимости от числа конюшен. Расстояния бы увеличились, потребность в лошади усилилась бы, значит — увеличилась бы и потребность в быстроте движения, но последняя уменьшалась бы от увеличения расстояний с одной стороны, а главное — от увеличения числа экипажей, следующих не по своим пустынным переулкам — местам проживания хозяина, но в места общих связей. Эти примитивные «магистрали» были бы переполнены медленно движущимися экипажами. Вот в чем противоречие в начальной своей стадии.

Промышленность вслед за машиной, станком создала и механический транспорт. Подобно животной тяге, механическая тяга создалась не как средство внутригородского или внутридеревенского передвижения, а как средство сношений между городом и деревней, между городами, между странами. Железнодорожный поезд доходит до города, проходит мимо города, власть поезда в городе кончается. Почему? Быстрота поезда зависит от редкости остановок. В городе средство общего передвижении тем удобней, чем чаще оно останавливается, – иными словами, тем удобнее, чем медленнее, т,-?. просто-напросто неудобно. Посадите всех рабочих и служащих на поезда, они будут следовать один за другим. Когда остановится передний — станут все. Скорость поода в городе медленнее скорости пешехода.

Легче вопрос разрешить, уменьшив длину поезда — остановок будет меньше, — движение быстрее. Так возникает паровичен, памятный питерским рабочим, живущим за Невской заставой и неизвестный рабочим Ленинграда…Сила его полностью не используется, район его передвижения скорее пригородный, чем городской.

Такая же судьба электропоезда. Мощность его меньше, чем у паровоза (т. е. междугородного орудия передвижения) п больше чем у омнибуса (т. е. внутригородского). Электропоезд остается пригородным орудием передвижения.

И лишь трамвай — этот электропоезд без поезда — этот локомобиль без паровоза проникает в город, вытесняя омнибусы, конки.

В Москве мы задыхаемся в трамвае. Может быть, их мало? Может быть, мы бедны, чтоб их приобретать? Увы, их слишком много, увы, мы слишком богаты — трамвай работает с хорошей прибылью.

Нью-Йорк • богаче нас, Нью-Йорк богаче трамваем, потому Нью-Йорк задыхается в трамвае больше нас. Чтобы попасть в наш трамвай, надо быть немного цепким, немного сильным. Там, в Нью-Йорке, надо быть боксером, там надо быть акробатом. В трамвае ведь «можно не быть джентльменом» — говорит современный янки.

Итак, насытим же московскую сеть трамвая. Что получится? Получится поезд, т. е. стоит, например, на углу Мясницкой ул. и пл. Дзержинского, пли на углу Моховой ул. и Воздвиженка остановиться одному вагону и остановятся все следующие вагоны.

Вот почему трамвай вытесняется городом, и чем он выше как город, тем реже он там встречается. Хороший трамвай — самый медленный способ передвижения.

Идеальный трамвай, т.-е. трамвай, удовлеторяющий всю потребность в нем городского жителя сполна, это — тот, который вместо движения имеет сплошную остановку. Идеальный трамвай — отсутствие трамвая.

Он умирает, но не сдается. Subway, metró, tub, Untergrundbahn, надземка и т. п.—все это судорожные попытки разрешить проблему все возрастающего движения, все возрастающей быстроты на все уменьшающемся пространстве.

Город требует все большего движения — город уменьшает площадь движения; город требует все большей быстроты движении — город папрэщает быстроту движения. Что такое регулирование движения? Это — ограничение, запрещение движения.

Впрочем, его нечего запрещать. Оно объективно помимо волп милиции, помимо ухищрений рационализаторов движения прокрашаетсисимо. Город — ототсоздатель величайшей техники передвижения — строит ее против себя…Те, кто это понимают — их пе так уж много — и среди них едва ли не самым интересным является Генри Джорж Уэллс, ищут кардинального разрешения вопроса в дальнейшем развитии городом его городских свойств. Г. Уэллс — величайший урбанист современности — не собирается уменьшить размеры города, ибо это смешно, а главное — невозможно. • Права т. Н. К. Крупская, цитирующая строку Ленина по поводу неизбежности крупного города (полемика со Сисмонди). Уэллс — за город. Вы знаете его идею одной крыши над целым городом, а главное (в данном случае) его идею передвижных улиц. Город превращается в совокупность неких, как бы мы теперь выразились, — конвейеров, с помощью которых в максимально короткое время преодолевается максимально длинное пространство, передвигается максимальное число лиц. Всякий проект требует времени, технических п экономических средств, чтобы быть претворенным в действительность. Несмотря на острую потребность в таком способа передвижения, логически вытекающего из условия современной городской жизни, до сих пор ни человеческая техника, ни экономика не смогли поднять идею Уэллса, сделать передвижные улицы, единый городской поток движущихся улиц фактом, материализовать ее.

Между тем, в город врывается новое орудие передвижения (об авиации мы не говорим, она не успеет ворваться в город, когда его уже не будет…). Подлинное значение авто в том, что оно на основе метода массового производства обещает и технически и экономически вытеснить пешеходов как средство передвижения человека.

Суждение о том, что авто—это-де урбаническое орудие, явно заимствовано ив оперетки. Статистика самой «автомоторной» страны С.-А.С.Ш. показывает как раз обратное, — авто развивается главным образом вне города, хотя авто-катастрофы и происходят, главным образом, в городе. Многочисленные работы, касающиеся развития автомоторизма в С.-А.С.Ш., блестяще демонстрируют это на ряде фактов.

Так, на протяжении, примерно, двух часов ходьбы в центре Нью-Йорка в деловые часы столько народа, что нн один экипаж не может проехать; далее следуют, наоборот, одни экипажи (т.-е. авто), — люди пешими не ходят. Масса авто остается у города, не вступая в него.

(Pg. 11)

Вся автомоторная техника растет в направлении уснорения движения, усиления подвижности и все меньшей зависимости от путей. И вся эта техника в городе — ничто. Авто с 0,5 км в час — это меньше, чем пешеход, однако такова быстрота самого скорого автомобиля на нью-йоркских улицах в известные часы.

Ибо, чем больше машин и чем они лучше, тент их меньше вмещается в городе н тем они хуже {т. е. медленнее). Идеалом авто-движения в городе окажется лишь иллюзорное впадение авто — (все будут иметь отдельное и, может быть, и не одно авто, — к этому идет дело), но не способность осуществлять это владение.

Вот почему авто стали делаться закрытыми, они ушли за город, — за городом возможно бешеное движение, снег н пыль в движении превращаются в такую постоянную силу, что от нее яе избавиться временным прикрытием.

Вот почему жилища ныне строят за городом: особняки, коттеджи, отели вдоль авто-магистралей; вот почему города стали строиться за городом (сооружение испанской организации Madrilena de Urbanisacion, сооружение австралийской столицы, поселки фордовскнх рабочих в Детройте и т. д.). Побеждает не Уэллс, а «город-линия» Ш. Жида и др. Город гибнет, происходит процесс его разложения. Коммунисты защищали его от романтиков идиллия «идиотизма деревенской жизни». Коммунисты не могут его защищать от автомотора. Наоборот, коммунист должен посадить человека на этот автомотор, чтобы помочь ему «бажать иа города в поисках за свежим воздухом и чистой водой» (Энгельс, Ленин). Мы с помощью авто уничтожим «противоестественные скопления гигантских масс в больших городах» (Ленин). Ибо «капитализм…готовит элементы этой связи (земледелия и промышленности М. О.) на почве… нового расселения человечества». (Ленин).

«В настоящее время, когда возможна передача электрической энергии на расстояние, когда техника транспорта повысилась настолько, что можно при меньших (против теперешних) издержках перевозить пассажиров с быстротой свыше 213 км в час — нет ровно никаких технических препятствий к тому, чтобы сокровищами науки и искусства, веками скопленными в немногих центрах, пользовалось все население, размещенное более или менее равномерно по всей стране». (Ленин).

Строителям социалистического, затем агро-, затем агро-индустриального города, беда которых в том, что они родились (вернее — их идеи родились) в стране автомоторного голода, следует учесть трагический урок, вытекающий из всей истории капиталистического строительства городов. Они должны понять, что не только Москва, но и их самый «новый» город будет разорен появлением авто, и разорен он будет в ближайшие же 5-10 лет максимум.

Дезурбанизм — это не теория противников города — нет, это неизбежный, объективный процесс. Не наше дело выходить «с иконами» навстречу авто, как эго делал крестьянин, встречая первый паровоз на своей старой земле. 

Disurbanism — this is not merely a theory of those who oppose the city — no, it is an inevitable, objective process.  It is not our business to go out to meet the car “with our icons,” as did the peasant, upon meeting the first steam locomotive on its old ground.

«РАСПАД города» (Бруно Таут)/“The DISINTEGRATION of the City”/Die Auflösung der Städte (Bruno Taut)

Bruno Taut’s article “RASPAD goroda” (“The DISINTEGRATION of the City”) was published by the Constructivist journal Modern Architecture in early 1930, just as the debate over the future of socialist resettlement of the USSR was getting underway.  In this article, he states his position vis-à-vis the major Soviet theorists of the city who had thus far thrown their hats into the ring: Leonid Sabsovich, Mikhail Okhitovich, Aleksandr Zelenko, and Aleksandr Pasternak.  As a point of reference, he draws upon his book Die Auflösung der Städte, published twelve years earlier in Germany.  While he was still at that point designing in the Expressionist vein, a style he would later drop in favor of a more thoroughgoing modernism, the main points of the book, as he indicates, are anti-urban in their sentiments.  Taut thus sympathized the most with the Soviet disurbanists Okhitovich and Pasternak.

Из Современная архитектура — (1930) — № 1/2

From Modern Architecture — (1930) — № 1/2 

Pg. 63

Редакция Moskauer Rundschau в своем примечании к статье А. Пастернака (№ 2, 1930 1.) предлагает открыть дискуссию по поводу четко и превосходно отмеченного им противопоставления двух теорий будущего города. Я тем более охотно принимаю участие в этой дискуссии, что она затрагивает наиболее важную для меня область моих собственных работ.

Die Auflösung der Städte (1918)

Я вполне разделяю критику Пастернаком теории Сабсовича. Он прав, если он говорит, что подобные поселки «постепенно превратятся просто в города с регулярно расположенными каменными кубами, в которых жизнь будет протекать по социалистической инсценировке». К этому надо добавить следующее. Еще в 1916 г., когда я писал свою книгу — «Венец города» и наметил схему чисто плоскокрышего города на социалистической основе, с населением в 150 тыс. жителей, я верил, что можно число жителей ограничить. Теперь я не верю больше, чтобы можно было ограничить население города, исходя из определенной цифры, что является основной предпосылкой Сабсовича, и что подобный план вообще осуществим. Первое, если такой город процветает, по причине ли благоприятных транспортных и промышленных возможностей или по каким-либо другим причинам то никто не сможет помешать тому, чтобы он превратился в миллионный город. А второе—его регулярное, кубическое и шахматное построение постепенно разрастается и примет такие формы, которые вполне правильно можно будет назвать типом города капиталистического периода. Неизбежной необходимостью явятся так называемые небоскребы, хотя он сам усматривает в американских городах не что иное, как взвинченную вверх земельную ренту. Поэтому небоскреб никогда не был и не будет олицетво, рением архитектуры. Что же касается его экономической стороны, сточки зрения капиталистической прибыли, то даже наиболее ярый псалмопевец Америки, немец Вернер Хегеман, в течение долгого времени работавший там в качестве архитектора, говорит о том, что небоскребы обходятся очень дорого, и что вертикальное сообщение лифтом в многоэтажном доме является наиболее невыгодной формой скорого сообщения (Wettbühne № 8, 1930 г.) Укладывание обобществленного быта со всеми его жизненными процессами в многоэтажные кубы фактически не является результатом материалистического мышления, а это скорее продукт удобной схематизации. «Город будущего» Корбюзье в его «Урбанизме» как раз весьма четко показывает артистические черты такого формалистического мышления. Хаос большого американского города Ле Корбюзье переделывает по всем правилам парижской художественной школы в чисто буржуазные застывшие формы. В немецкой пропаганде высоких домов для бедноты выявляется то же мышление, по которому человек, ребенок и земля должны отступить на второй план перед техническими тенденциями. Один известный немецкий архитектор заявил мне, что он следуя идеям Ле Корбюзье, во всяком случае представляет себе жилище поднятым над землей, путем устройства домов на колониях, ибо для него земля — это мусор. Социалистическая жизнь в таком городе с неизбежной последовательностью должна превратиться в «социалистическую инсценировку», как совершенно Правильно замечает Пастернак.

Теория Охитовича, я должен признаться, вызвала у меня великую радость. Тем более, что еще во время войны, лотом 1918 г., Я сам пришел к такой же мысли, вызванной безнадежностью положение Европе, и не только в основной ее тенденции, но и в отношении некоторых важных ее деталей. С того времени я изучая политическую и экономическую литературу, исследовал ее скрытые тенденции в этом направлении и к моему все растущему изумлению я констатировал, что как критические исследования существующих больших городов, так и пророческие предсказания поэтов, начиная с Руссо, и великие социальные теории Маркса, Энгельса, и наконец Ленина,— все они приходят к одинаковому результату. В феврале 1920 г. я сделал 30 набросков на эту тему и, снабдив их выдержками из указанной литературы, я объединил их в одну книгу под названием «Распад городов», которая появилась в том же году в издательстве Фояъквакга в Гагене. Эта книга обратила на себя внимание и ее название «Распад городов» стало техническим термином для тенденции, которая, однако, в процессе развития «строительства» послевоенного периода все более и более приходила в забвение н если случайно упоминалась, то с презрительной или иронической усмешкой. То, что советская действительность на основе материальных предпосылок пришла к такому же выводу, наполняет меня радостью не столько потому, что мысли, возникшие у меня 12 лет тому назад, теперь подтвердились, сколько самый факт как таковой. Я полагаю, что для дискуссия советской печати представляет интерес ознакомиться с основными принципами этой книги, поскольку она в СССР еще не известив. В ней изложены следующие точки зрения, как выводы соответствующей литературы: в первую очередь вопрос об общественной форме, которая при сохранении старых методов не может быть плановой. Социалистической она может быть только, если мы строить города будем строго планомерно. Все отрицательные стороны больших городов вытекают из этого момента. Все современные работы научного строительства городов на Западе должны укладываться в тесные рамки тех толстых стен, которые называются частной земельной собственностью. После сноса этих стен придется, однако, разрушить также некоторые стены ограниченного мышления, которые по вышеуказанной причине крепко засели в головах. Они относятся преимущественно к вопросам производства — промышленности и сельского хозяйства, — транспорта и, наконец, к условиям быта человека, являющимся преимущественно результатом порядка распределения земля для жилищных надобностей. Что касается последнего, то еще в 1893 г. англичанин Г. В. Пур — О. V. Рооге — указал, что житель перенаселенного города нуждается в большем участке земли, чем житель деревенский, даже в том случае, если у них обоих а отношении пищи и одежды одинаковые потребности. Это надо, понимать в том смысле, что снабжение перенаселенного города водою и уничтожение отбросов нерационально по сравнению с одинаковым удовлетворением потребностей деревенских жителей. Что касается транспорта и производства, я считаю точку зрения Пастернака правильной. Но я хотел бы уточнить некоторые небольшие мои расхождения с ним, и для этой цели я воспользуюсь некоторыми характерными чертами набросков в моей книге «Распад городов».

Эти наброски покажутся многим, как и мне самому теперь, излишне патетическими и романтическими. Объясняется это в первую очередь влиянием переживаний тогдашнего периода последнего года войны и наступившей по ее окончании депрессии, когда надежды на новое созидательное строительство все более и более рушились, и в конце концов остался только лишь один призыв, являвшийся не столько выражением реальных возможностей, сколько продуктом чувства. Эта книга «только утопия», хотя она в то же время содержат указанна на далекую действительность. Мы тогда верили, что по существу утопии но существует, если только она не исходит от сумасшедшего, что утопия — это только вопрос темпа и времени для ее осуществления. Для правильной мысли, если она не сопровождается соответствующей перспективой, есть опасность, что она выродится а фанатическое сектантство, вроде вегетарианства, антиалкоголизма, анархизма и т. д. Форму утопии я выбрал также и по другим соображениям: никогда не следует смешивать» «материалистическое» с «материальным» и никогда вопрос насыщения желудка не должен являться альфой и омегой всех желаний. Поэтому дан эскиз культурного обобществленного строительства по ту сторону необходимого, как парабола для перспективы, лежащей по ту сторону осязаемого. Шаги становятся неуверенными и теряют направление, если не видно на горизонте отдаленной цели. Этой цели, которую еще нельзя точно определить, легко придают формы того, что находится у нас вблизи.

Первые наброски толкуют об индустрии и аграрных коммунах, обе сравнительно небольших размеров, особенно последние, если их сравнить с гигантскими вашими совхозами и колхозами, далее мы переходим к большим поселкам, связанным с крупными производственными предприятиями: верфями, заводами, фабриками и т. д. В этом отношении у меня имеется некоторое расхождение с Охитовичем, поскольку большие дороги для автомобильного сообщения не лежат не по средственно вдоль поселков и жилых домов, а находятся несколько в стороне, соединяясь с последними проселочными путями дорог к эскиз плана сообщений имеет вид свободной петельной ткани, причем наиболее тесные петли обозначают автомобильные дороги, а более широкие — каналы и воздушные линии. Железная дорога больше не существует (на Западе, например, в Рурской области железные дороги уже сильно чувствуют конкуренцию автомобиля). Железная дорога с ее станциями и узловыми пунктами фактически является основной причиной вырастании больших тесных населенных пунктов, но это свое значение они по мере развития автомобильного сообщения будут постепенно утрачивать до тех пор, пока они, наконец, совершенно не исчезнут.

Покидая эту область четких рациональных основ, не совсем уже молодой автор с некоторый чувством ответственности направляется в другую область, — область неведомого, — которую он, однако, игнорировать не может. Шестой набросок содержит в сопровождающем нашем тексте следующие слова: «Мир держится на принципе изобилия. Работа, направленная друг против друга — эта работа впустую. Работа друг для друга ведет к избытку». Если, следовательно, не сомневаются в успехе планового хозяйства и коллективного труда, то надо иметь в виду также и то, что лежит по ту сторону необходимого, то, чем рабочий сможет заполнить свой большой досуг, который он потом будет иметь. Надо показать, что имеются перспективы нового духовного содержания по ту сторону экономических моментов, если даже для отображения такой перспективы в будущем приходится воспользоваться нашими современными вряд ли соответствующими представлениями и понятиями. Речь в данном случае идет до известной степени о гиперболе, которая зиждется на фактах нашей действительности, но которую мы должны развить и придать ей формы будущего. Тут, понятно, есть известной опасность как для самого автора — некоторые мои тогдашние наброски кажутся теперь мне самому уже устаревшими, — так и для читателя, который может впасть в фантастику и мечтательность, тем не менее каждая материалистически обоснованная теория должна ваять на себя этот риск, если мы не хотим, чтобы идея превратилась в сухой субстрат мысли.

Расширение нашего поля зрения в отношении одного лишь производства приводит нас к новым жилищным формам. Поставленное Марксом и поддержанное Лениным требование «рассеяния поселений», другими словами «дезурбанизация», привело меня тогда, как ныне Охитовича, к тому выводу, что параллельно с принципом обобществления, изоляция человека, как стимулирующий момент к развитию его личности является также равноправным требованием. В соответствии с этим набросок № 7 показывает одноквартирный дом со всеми подсобными помещениями и с ванной. В принципе это — «коробка» с единственным жилым помещением, форма которого меняется в зависимости от ветра, солнца и местоположения. Однородные части стен, так же как и потолок, сделаны из щитов — плохих термических проводников, — снабженных по краям фальцами и из которых, смотря по желанию, можно создать любую форму жилища.  Отопление, варка и освещение электрическое. Промежуточные стенки передвижные, так что внутреннему помещению также можно придать любую форму. Другими словами бесконечная вариация форм из одинаковых составных частей дома. Как и человек, дом может быть подвержен всяким превращениям. Пространственно отдаленные друг от друга люди ведут более интенсивную индивидуальную жизнь, возрастающая ценность которой усиливает ценность всего общества. Другими словами: не оседлость и не кочевничество, не мещанский уют и не бродяжничество, не крестьянин, но и не горожанин, человек — не растение, которое «пускает корни», но и не какое-либо животное, а именно — человек, который вкушает гостеприимство земли.

Народный дом для собраний трудящихся служит одновременно выставочным помещением для обмена опытом в области промышленности и сельского хозяйства. Арена для массовых собраний и для народных игр. Канал, снабженный подъемным краном для подачи хлеба в элеваторы для хранения запасов на черный день. Площадка для аэропланов на крышах гостиниц, подъем автомобилей на эти крыши, «прибытие по воде, по суше и в воздухе», увеселительный парк и т. д. — Если в тексте этого наброска сказано, что государство, как и город, ло словам Энгельса, уже отмирают, то это не может, разумеется, иметь отношения к данному моменту, ибо это было бы анархическим тупоумием.

Дальнейшие отображения обобществленной жизни должны опираться, понятно, на вышеуказанные гиперболические данные, для того, чтобы придать перспективам культурного развития некоторую осязаемость. Хотя подобная игра фантазии может показаться случайной, но несомненно, что развитие индустрии, а вместе с нею и воздушного сообщения гораздо более радикально изменят поверхность земли, чем это делают теперь железные дороги и фабрики. Использование солнечных лучей, электричества из воздуха и т. д. еще впереди. К этому надо добавить световые маяки для воздушных дорог. Использование цветного света и стекла на узловых пунктах воздушных дорог протянет над землею световые цепи и создаст новую архитектуру, в которой груборациональное сольется в художественном в единое целое. Большие световые центры, которые можно будет наблюдать с аэроплана, будут обозначать те культурные центры, отнюдь не поселковые центры, в которых будет протекать научно-исследовательская работа и ее применение в жизни. Там будут изучать наиболее тяжелые случаи болезней физических, психических и моральных и их лечение, а также методы воспитания.

Также и школу я в своей Утопии считал пережитком старого. «Ребенок работает, где он хочет, и ведет свою жизнь самостоятельно и т. д.» — В вопросе воспитания и семейного быта я у Пастернака, в его изложении распада городов, проповедуемом Охитовичем, вижу некоторую неясность. Я считаю принципиальное требование отделять жизнь детей от родителей схематическим вмешательством. Достаточно будет уточнить отношения взрослых к детям и в остальном предоставить все естественному ходу вещей. Совершенно неправильно мнение, что дети лучше всего развиваются только в среде множества других детей. Наблюдатели подтверждают, что и ребенок стремится к известной изоляции, и нельзя сказать, чтобы он наверняка любил даже самый прекрасный детский сад. К предостережению Крупской против сверхколлективизации в области воспитания надо отнестись чрезвычайно серьезно.

К массовому искусству, в первую очередь к совершенно преображенному, при участии масс, театру, надо еще добавить новые формы массовых развлечений, неукладывающиеся в рамки необходимого, носящие утопический характер. Работа над гигантскими творениями якобы совершенно излишнего характера является психологически обоснованной и нужной а тот момент, когда все потребности жизни будут удовлетворены и не будет больше ни войн, ни приготовлений к таковым. Тогда образуется вакуум, который надо будет заполнить культурным содержанием для [Pg. 65] того чтобы дать выход избытку энергии бороться с дурными инстинктами.

В кратких чертах я дал обзор «Распада городов», который в некоторых пунктах дополняет, а в других, быть может, содержит критику теории Охитовича. Проектирование для будущего может иметь только направляющий характер и поэтому менее важно заводить спор о деталях того, что будет в будущем, как именно, путем дискуссии, выявить и определить самую тенденцию. Уже благодаря одному этому образуются и выявляются достаточные рефлексы в отношении того, на какие моменты надо обращать внимание уже теперь, при организации новых поселков. В первую очередь чрезвычайно важно отказаться от геометрического (Корбюзье) или другого формалистического подхода к устройству поселков. На его место надо вводить безграничную вариацию форм, которую, в противовес к кристаллическому и геометрическому можно было бы назвать вегетабильной или биологической (дело не в названии или лозунге). Так же как развитие транспорта базируется на собственных присущих ему законах, так обстоит дело и с организацией поселков. Так же как в Сибири железная дорога является пока лишь первым фактором цивилизации (Турксиб), ибо автомобильные дороги и развитие автомобилизма закономерно могут иметь теперь лишь второстепенное значение, так и в отношении поселков надо пока довести до полного совершенства современный метод строительства. Тем не менее основная тенденция уже теперь указывает не предпочтение плоского строительства в его различных формах. Лишь после усовершенствования возможных в данный момент методов можно будет приступить к успешному производству отдельных составных частей сборочного — монтажного — дома. Усоверше[н]ствование современных методов жилищного строительства ведет по прямому пути к этой цели. Новое строительстве в его отдельных формах и отдельных элементах уже предвосхищает эту цель, что выражается в том, что оно придает строительству соответствуюший характер. Тем не менее к здесь, как и у «урбанизма», есть на-лицо опасность урбанизации. В моей новой книге «Новое искусство строительства» (издательство Юлиус Гофман. Штуттгарт) я определил международность архитектуры как автономию народов в архитектуре.

В высокой степени радостно, что автономия мышления о городском строительстве берет теперь свое начало в Советском союзе. Распад города как ясная теория, ведет к целительному освобождению от формалистических цепей доктринерства, историцивма и эклектизма (безразлично относится ли это к старому или к новому на Западе). Распад есть следствие и параллельное явление освобождения пролетариата от цепей капитализма.

Pg. 63

The editorial in the Moskauer Rundschau, in its footnote to the article by A[leksandr] Pasternak (№ 2, 1930 1.) proposes to open a discussion on the clearly and ideally marked contrast between two theories of the city.  I am especially happy to take part in this discussion, which touches on the area most important to my own work.

I totally agree with Pasternak’s criticism of Sabsovich’s theory.  He’s right, if such settlements “gradually turn into a city of regularly placed stone cubes, a socialist staging-ground through which life will flow.”  To this must be added the following.  Already in 1916, when I wrote in my book Crown City, and outlined a scheme of a purely flat-roofed city on a socialist basis, with a population of 150 thousand inhabitants, I believed that it was possible to limit the number of residents.  Now, to an even greater extent I do not believe that one can limit a city’s population, based on the specific figures that are Sabsovich’s basic premise, or that such a plan is at all feasible.  First, if a city is thriving, because of auspicious transportative and industrial opportunities, or for any other reason, no one can prevent it from turning into a city of one million.  And secondly, his regular, cubic, and staggered buildings will gradually grow and take forms that can quite rightly be called the type of city of the capitalist period.  The inevitable necessity of these so-called skyscrapers will appear, although he himself perceives in the American city nothing more nor less than upwards-inflated land rent.  The skyscraper has therefore never been and never will be the embodiment of architecture.  As far as its economic side goes, from the standpoint of capitalist profit, even the most ardent psalmist of America, the German Werner Hegeman, in the course of having worked there for a long time as an architect, has said that the cost of skyscrapers is very expensive, that the vertical conveyance of an elevator in a high-rise apartment is the most uneconomical form for a speedy connection (Wettbühne, № 8, 1930).  The bundling of socialized life, with all its vital processes, into multi-story cubes is not in fact the result of a materialistic mindset, but is rather just convenient product schematization.  Corbusier’s “City of the Future” in his Urbanisme very clearly exhibits the artistic features of such formalistic thinking.  The chaos of the big American cities Le Corbusier recasts in all the rules of the Parisian art school, in purely bourgeois frozen forms. The German propaganda about tall high-rises for the poor reveals the same mentality, in which the person, the child, and the land are forced to stand back in the background compared with the technical tendencies.  One renowned German architect who told me that he was following the idea of Le Corbusier, in any case represents a dwelling raised above the ground, by way of building houses on columns, since for him the ground — it’s trash.  Socialist life in such a city with an inevitable sequence must evolve into a “socialist reenactment,” as Pasternak rightly observes.

The theory of Okhitovich, I must admit, has caused me great joy.  Especially because while still during the war, in the summer of 1918, I myself came to the same thought, hopelessness brought on by the situation in Europe, and not only in its main tendencies, but for some of its important details.  Since that time I have studied the political and economic literature, explored its latent tendencies in this direction and, to my ever-growing amazement, I found that the critical study of the large existing cities and the prophetic visions of the poets, beginning with Rousseau, as well as the grand social theories of Marx, Engels, and finally Lenin — all of them arrived at the same result.  In February 1920 I completed 30 sketches on this subject and, supplying them with quotations from these said sources, I combined them into a book entitled The Disintegration of the City, which appeared that same year from the publisher Folkwang in Hagen.  This book attracted some attention to itself and “the Disintegration of the City” became the technical term for the trend.  This increasingly came to be forgotten as if by accident, however, in the process of the development of “construction” in the postwar period — and if it was mentioned, then it came with a contemptuous or ironic smile.  The fact that Soviet reality, on the basis of material conditions, came to the same conclusions, fills me with joy not so much because the thoughts that occurred to me twelve years ago have been confirmed, as much as the fact itself.  I believe that the discussion in the Soviet press represents an interest to learn the basic principles of this book, inasmuch as it is still not known in the USSR.  It contains the following viewpoints, as the implications of the literature: first, the question of the social formation, which, while retaining the old methods, cannot be planned.  A city can only be socialist if is built strictly according to plan.  All the negative aspects of big cities follow from this moment.  All the present work on the scientific construction of cities in the West must fit inside the narrow framework of thick outer walls that is called private property.  After the demolition of these walls, however, it is then necessary to break down some of the walls of limited thinking that, for the aforementioned reasons, is solidly lodged in their minds.  They relate mainly to issues of production — to industry and agriculture — to transport, and, finally, to the conditions of human life, which is mainly the result of the order of allocation for housing requirements.  With regard to the latter, as far back as 1893 the Englishman G.V. Poore — O.V. Rouge — pointed out that the resident of a crowded city needs a larger plot than a resident of the village, even if they have both food and clothing for the same needs. This must be understood in the sense that the supply of water and waste disposal of the overcrowded city is irrational compared with the same needs of the villagers. With regard to transportation and production, I think that Pasternak’s viewpoint is correct.  But I would like to clarify some of my minor disagreements with him, and for this purpose I will use some of the characteristic features of the outline from my book, The Disintegration of the City.

These sketches seem to many (such as myself) too pathetic and romantic now.  This can be accounted for by the experiences of the period of the last year of the war and the ensuing Depression at its end, when hopes for a new creative construction increasingly collapsed, and eventually left only one clarion-call, which was not so much the expression of real possibilities as it was the product of emotions.  This book is “only a utopia,” although at the same time it provides guidance to a distant reality.  We then believed that the substance of utopia does not exist if it only emanates from a madman — that utopia is just a question of pace and the time for its implementation.  For if a correct idea is not accompanied by the appropriate perspective, there is a danger that it will degenerate and the fanatical sects, such as vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism, anarchism, and so on.  The form of the utopia I selected also for other reasons: one should never confuse “materialistic” [Pg. 64] with “material” and never question that the satiety of the stomach should not be the alpha and omega of all desires.  Therefore, this sketch of the cultural, socialized construction on the other side is needed as a parabola for a perspective that lies beyond the tangible.  Steps become insecure and lose their direction if they are not visible on the horizon, a distant goal.  This objective, which is still impossible to determine exactly, is easy to impart to the form of that which is nearby us.

The first sketches expound on industry and agrarian communes, both relatively small if you compare them with your huge state and collective farms (especially the last).  Then we move to the big towns associated with the large manufacturing enterprises: shipyards, plants, factories, etc.  In this regard, I have some disagreement with Okhitovich, insofar as vast roads for automotive conveyance do not lie directly along the towns and dwellings, but some are situated on the side, conjoined with the back roads.  The sketch of the plan of communication possesses the form of loosely looping fabric, in which the closest-bound stitches represent the automotive roads, while the wider ones are the channels and overhead lines. The larger railroad no longer exists (in the West, for example, in the Ruhr region, railroads already deeply feel the competition of the car).  The railway and its nodal points are in fact the main source for the sprouting of large, closely-packed settlements, though their significance will continue to fade in proportion to the development of automotive transport, until they finally disappear completely.

Departing from this area of clear rational foundations, a young author with some feeling of responsibility already heads off, not entirely, into another area — the area of the unknown — which, however, he cannot ignore.  In the accompanying text to the sixth sketch is contained the following words: “The world rests on the principle of abundance. Work, when directed against one another this work is wasted. Work for each other leads to surplus.”  If, therefore, they do not doubt the success of planned economies and the collective labor, that which lies beyond the necessary must also be borne in mind, how the worker can fill his great leisure-time, which he then would have.  We must show that there are prospects of a new spiritual content on the other side of economic issues, even if it is necessary to avail ourselves of our contemporary, hardly adequate concepts and ideas for the imagery of such a prospect in the future.  Speech about a case in point comes to a certain degree of hyperbole, which is based on the facts of our reality, but which we need to develop and give to it the shape of the future. Here, clearly, there is a certain danger for the author — some of my sketches of those days now seem to me already obsolete — and for readers, who may fall into fantasy and reverie.  However, each sketch, grounded in materialist theory, should form in itself this risk if we do not want the idea turned into a dry substrate of thought.

Expanding our field of view with respect merely to production leads us to new forms of housing.  Posited by Marx and maintained by Lenin, the demand for a “scattering of settlements,” or in other words “disurbanization,” moreover led me then, as Okhitovich now, to the conclusion that in parallel with the principle of socialization, the isolation of man — as a stimulating moment in the development of his personality — also has an equal claim.  In accordance with this sketch, № 7, shows a single-apartment home with all the storage rooms and the baths.  In principle, this is a “box,” with unique living space, the form of which varies in relation to the wind, sunlight, and location.  Homogeneous parts of the walls, as well as a ceiling made of panels — poor thermal conductors — fitted to both the edges and folds from which, according to one’s desires, he can create an omniform dwelling.  [It will have] heating, cooking, and electric lighting.  The intermediate walls are adjustable, so that the interior can also be given any shape.  In other words, there is an infinite variation of forms from the identical constituent parts of a home.  Just as with a man, a house can be subjected to all sorts of transformations.  Spatially distant from one another, people can conduct more intensive individual lives, the rising value of which increases the value of the whole society.  In other words: Neither sedentarism nor nomadism, neither petit-bourgeois comfort nor loitering, not a peasant, though also not a townsman, but a person — not a plant that “takes root,” but also not some sort of animal, but namely — a man who partakes of the hospitality of the earth.

The people’s assembly house for the working masses also serves as an exhibition facility for the exchange of agricultural and industrial experience.  It is an arena for mass meetings and folk games.  It is a passage equipped with a crane for the delivery of grain in elevators from the stockpiles, for rainy days.  It is a platform for airplanes on the roofs of hotels, and a car-lift to these roofs, “for the arrival by water, by land, or by air”; it is an amusement park, etc. — If the text in the sketch said, like Engels did, that the state, the city, and the local are already dying, then it obviously cannot have a relationship to the present, because this would be anarchistic stupidity.

The further mapping of socialized life should clearly be based on the hyperbolic data above, in order to give the prospects for cultural development some tangibility.  Although this corresponding thought-experiment may seem random, there can be no doubt that the development of industry, and along with it, of air traffic, will much more radically alter the earth’s surface than railroads and factories are doing now.  The use of sunlight, of electricity in the air, etc., is still ahead.  To this we must add light beacons for airstrip runways.  The use of colored lights and glass on the nodal points of airstrips will stretch over the land a chain of light and create a new architecture, in which crude rationalization merges with art into a coherent whole.  The large points of light that can be observed from an airplane will be marked by the cultural centers, nowhere near the town centers, in which the research work and its application in life will take place.  There one will learn about the most severe cases of disease of physical, psychological, and moral, and their treatments, as well as child-rearing practices.

Also, I consider the school in my own Utopia to be a relic of the old.  On the issue of education and family life, I have Pasternak, in his account of the disintegration of cities, while I see some confusion in the preaching of Okhitovich.  I believe it is a fundamental requirement to separate the lives of children from their parents in a schematic intervention [after the fashion of Sabsovich].  It will be sufficient to clarify the relationship of adults to children and the rest to provide to all the natural course of things. Completely wrong is the view that children develop best only among many other children. Observers verify that the child tends to strive after a certain isolation, and probably cannot say that he loved even the most beautiful nursery.  In warning against excessive collectivization in education, Krupskaia should be taken extremely seriously.

For mass art, to be completely transformed primarily with the participation of the masses, to the theater must be added new forms of mass entertainment, an unsettling within the framework of the necessary, the wearing of utopian clothes.  Work on these gigantic creations, of a supposedly completely unnecessary character, is psychologically sound and necessary once the moment when all the necessities of life are satisfied and there will not be any more wars, there will be no preparations for such.  Then a vacuum is created which will need to fill the cultural content [Pg. 65] in order to provide an outlet for excess energy in dealing with ugly instincts.

In brief outline I gave an overview of the Disintegration of Cities, which in some places supplements, while in others criticizes, Okhitovich’s theory.  Designing for the future may only have a guiding character, and therefore it is equally important to start a dispute about the details of what will happen in the future, namely, by way of discussion, to identify and determine the same tendencies.  Already, thanks to one of these appeared and disclosed sufficient reflections as to which features need to be paid attention even now, with the establishment of new settlements.  First and foremost it is essential to abandon the geometric (Le Corbusier) and other formalist approaches to the organization of towns. In its place needs to enter unlimited variations of form, which, in contrast to the crystalline and geometrical, could be called the vegetative or biological (the affair is not a title or slogan).  Just  as the development of transportation is based on its own inherent laws, so is the case with the organization of settlements.  Just as in Siberia the railway is still only the first factor of civilization (Turksib), because roads and automotive development can now naturally be of only secondary importance, and with respect to the settlements they have yet to bring to perfection the modern method of construction. Nevertheless, the basic trend now indicates no preference for flat-building in its various forms.  Only after improvements are possible in the present can methods begin to successfully manufacture some of the components for the assembly — for the erection — of the home.  The perfection of the modern methods of housing construction is a direct route to this goal.  New construction, in its separate forms and separate elements, is already anticipating this goal, which is reflected in the fact that it attaches to construction a corresponding character. Nevertheless, it is also here, as in “urbanism,” that the threat of urbanization is obvious.  In my new book, The New Art of Building, (published by Julius Hoffman, Stuttgart), I define international architecture as autonomous nations in architecture.

To a great degree the joy of the autonomy of thinking about city-building now takes root in the Soviet Union.  The disintegration of the city is a clear theory leading to the healing emancipation from the formalist chains of dogmatism, historicism, and eclecticism (whether or not it refers to the old or the new in the West).  This disintegration is a consequence of and a parallel to the phenomenon of the liberation of the proletariat from the chains of capitalism.

An excellent website containing all of Taut’s illustrations for Die Auflösung der Städte, from 1918, can be accessed by clicking here.

Recommended Architectural Blogs and Articles, along with My Gratitude

Leonidov's Proposed "Ministry of Heavy Industry" (1934)

I should like to thank the following architecture-related websites and point to some of their best articles:

  1. dpr-barcelona: I would like to thank Ethel Baraona not only for her enthusiastic promotion of my site on Twitter and so on, but for her friendship.  After I posted some links to a few of the journals I’d uploaded, she immediately e-mailed me personally expressing her thanks.  That said, she and her co-contributor have produced some excellent content of their own, in articles both in English and in Spanish.  To point to just a couple of them: “Ivan Leonidov and the Russian Utopias” and “Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms | Iakov Chernikhov.”
  2. Critical Grounds: Thanks to the author of this blog for pointing his students to the English-language modernist architectural archive I created.  And if you have the time, please read the following excellent articles: “In the Name of Being: Critical Regionalist Landscape Urbanism, a Critique,” his reference to another critique of environmentalism in “Ross Adams on the ‘eco-city’,” and finally his own “Parallel Lines: formal expression as publicity in the architecture of Hadid’s Central Building for BMW Leipzig.”
  3. sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy: As always, the Bolshevist and “interdistrictite” Owen Hatherley must make the list.  Not only for his incredibly helpful promotion of my own blog, but for his numerous good articles.  Some of his older articles from his previous blog are more immediately related to what I’ve been working on: “No Rococo Palace for Buster Keaton: Americanism (and Technology, Advertising, Socialism) in Weimar Architecture,” “The Functionalist Deviation Politics of building, aesthetics of anti-architecture,” and especially “A Pod of One’s Own — Architecture or Revolution: the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne, 1928-33.”
  4. Kosmograd: There’s too much good, cosmopolitan material at this site, which is mostly dedicated to early Bolshevik architecture and the Soviet space program.  He has linked to my site on several occasions, for which I am very thankful.  Interesting articles on this site include “Communal House of the Textile Institute,” the hilarious “Eco-town of Tomorrow and Its Planning,” and his interesting piece on “Decaying Orbiters.”

Leonid Sabsovich, Urbanism, and the Socialist City [Соцгород] (1929-1931)

Sabsovich’s “The USSR in (literally ‘after’) 15 Years”

In July 1929, the economist Leonid Sabsovich sparked a debate regarding the future of Soviet urbanism with an article he wrote for Плановое Хозяйство (Planned Economy), entitled «Проблема города» (“The Problem of the City”).  Sabsovich was convinced that the major urban centers of the USSR were overcrowded and overpopulated; they needed to be reduced to a more manageable size, while preserving the industrial base they provided.  At the same time, he considered the countryside to be far too provincial and culturally isolated to remain in the state it was in at that point.  So Sabsovich proposed instead a uniform distribution of the population at regular intervals, of interconnected “socialist cities” — both industrial cities and “agro-cities.”  These would be evenly populated, with between thirty and fifty thousand inhabitants each.

Sabsovich’s position came to be called the “urbanist” vision of Soviet municipal reformation.  The widely-respected group of modernist architects — the brothers Leonid, Aleksandr, and Viktor Vesnin — endorsed his proposal.  They all saw Sabsovich’s proposal as a way to overcome what Marx, Engels, and Lenin had termed “the antithesis between town and country.”  Reduce the size of the filthy, noisy, and overcrowded mega-cities, Sabsovich argued, and disperse the population into new municipal units that could still maintain their industrial productivity.  Conversely, these measures would reorganize the largely peasant population of the various Soviet Republics and grant them access to the culture, education, and opportunity that larger towns would make available.  Quite ambitiously, Sabsovich thought that the entire population of the USSR could be redistributed accordingly within a period of ten years — or two five-year plans.  He thus wrote a wildly utopian book under the title of СССР через 10 лет (The USSR in 10 Years), elaborating his vision and stressing the practical feasibility of the plan.  Later, he would revise this figure to a more modest (but still outlandish) fifteen years, and stressed the central importance of this goal to the greater project of social transformation under communism.

Against Sabsovich’s notion of the middle-path between town and country, the sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich and the renowned Constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg would oppose their idea of “disurbanism,” abandoning the notion of centralized resettlement altogether, advancing instead their notion of a “linear city.”  This would lead to the first major split in the editorship of the journal Современная архитектура (Modern Architecture), as Ginzburg and the Vesnins for the first time found themselves at odds with one another.  Luckily, by then, the position of main editor of the magazine had passed on to Roman Khiger, so the one side did not totally drown out the other.  Khiger clearly sided with Ginzburg and Okhitovich, however, and so Sabsovich was forced to promote his viewpoint from the pages of Плановое Хозяйство and the various books he managed to publish through Генплан (Genplan, the central planning agency of the Soviet Union at the time).  The Urbanist-Disurbanist dispute would continue through until 1931, when both sides were reigned in for utopian speculation.  At that point, a number of foreign architects — Le Corbusier and André Lurçat from France, and Bruno Taut, Hannes Meyer, and Ernst May from Germany — were called in to assist in the process of planning Soviet urbanism.  Their presence would in turn become unwelcome by 1937, at the height of the Stalinist terror, when the state would hand down the order that all foreign experts exit the country, under suspicion of “sabotaging” Soviet progress.

The following is the original journal article that sparked the whole controversy, reproduced in its entirety:

Леонид Сабсович – «Проблема города» – Плановое Хозяйство – (1929) – № 7

Mikhail Okhitovich, Moisei Ginzburg, and Disurbanism

Public-House for 100 People (1930)

According to legend, the Soviet sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich wandered into the VKhUTEIN (ВХУТЕИН) studios one day in the summer of 1929.  He left after a short while, having only been noticed by a few students and instructors.  Okhitovich returned the next morning, this time storming directly into the office of the esteemed Constructivist architect and theorist, Moisei Ginzburg.  Okhitovich then promptly locked the door, sequestering the surprised Ginzburg and himself inside the office.  Ginzburg, whose work had hitherto mainly been focused on the problem of the collective dwelling and its place in the modern city, was known to have been an enthusiastic supporter of Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme.  In fact, he had personally translated extracts from Corbusier’s book on city-planning for the inaugural issue of Sovremennaia arkhitektura (Современная архитектура) in 1925.  After an hour and-a-half of heated discussion, however, Ginzburg emerged from his office with Okhitovich a convinced Disurbanist.  The suddenness of his conversion was stunning.  He would later suffer a great deal of criticism for his perceived fickleness in this matter.  But Ginzburg would remain committed to the Disurbanist vision despite pressure from his friends and colleagues (Sabsovich and the Vesnin brothers) to revert to his earlier position.  Ginzburg only relinquished his allegiance to this philosophy of decentralization after Stalin’s government stepped in and put a stop to all this “utopian” speculation, as they called it.

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Color illustration from Modern Architecture (1929) of a disurbanized dwelling

Ginzburg’s reply to Le Corbusier on deurbanization

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IMAGE: Color illustration in Modern Architecture
of a “disurbanized” dwelling unit (1929)

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My dear Le Corbusier,

Our recent conversation about city planning and your letter have compelled me to rethink the entire problem, to recall your objections, the objections you made when you visited me and which you now write about in your letter.

Like all my friends, I value you tremendously not only as a subtle master architect but also as a man with the ability to solve radically and fundamentally the important problems of organization.

For me you are today the greatest and most brilliant representative of the profession that gives my life content, goal, and meaning.

That is why your ideas and solutions in the area of city planning have for us a quite exceptional interest and importance. Continue reading

Ernst May, “City Building in the USSR” (1931)

Ernst May and collaborators, “The General Plan of Magnitogorsk — a settlement for 150,000 inhabitants attached to the Magnitogorsk industrial complex” (1931)

From Das Neue Rußland, vol. VIII-IX.  Berlin, 1931:

City Planning in Evolution

If there is any one area of endeavor in the USSR where the Revolution is still in full motion, then city building and dwelling construction must be considered first.  This is not surprising, for the replacement of a thousand-year-old social system by a new one is a process that will take more than just a dozen years to complete, or even to provide a clear and unequivocal direction.  Moreover, since the thorough reorganization of the the entire social life of the USSR, which covers on sixth of the land area of our globe, will vitally affect city development and housing everywhere, it follows that within the context of this general process of change it is at the present moment impossible to offer a panacea that would suddenly cure all the many ills accumulated over centuries and bring about immediate mature results.

Nevertheless, a number of theories have been advanced and are in hard competition with each other.  Some have been published abroad, and this in turn may have led to the impression that it is only these that represent the mainstream of Russian city planning.  Nothing could be more misleading!

So far there has been no firm commitment to one or the other system of city planning, and by all indications no such commitment should be forthcoming in the near future.  This does not mean that the field is dominated by a lack of planning or by arbitrariness.  The basic precepts of modern city planning, which in the past years have found wide acceptance in Europe, and which are now being implemented, have become the A to Z of planning in the USSR as well.  Clear separation of industry and residence, rational traffic design, the systematic organization of green areas, etc., are considered as valid a basis for healthy planning there as here; similarly, open-block planning is giving way to single-row building.

The Central Problem of the Socialist City

However, even though the general principles for the planning of Socialist cities have been established, the real problem is only beginning.  In other words, a city structure will have to be developed that in terms of its entire genesis as well as in terms of its internal articulation and structuring will be fundamentally different from the capitalist cities [189] in the rest of the world.  While our own cities in most cases owe their origin to commerce and the market place, with private ownership of land largely determining their form, the generating force behind the development of new cities in the Soviet Union is always and exclusively industrial economic production, regardless of whether in the form of industrial combines or agricultural collectives.  In contrast to prevailing practice in Europe, and with particular reference to trends in the USA, building densities in Soviet cities are not influenced by artificially inflated land values, as often happens in our case, but solely by the laws of social hygiene and economy.  In connection with this it should be pointed out most emphatically that the word ‘economy’ has taken on an entirely new meaning east of the Polish border.  Investments, which in a local sense may appear to be unprofitable, become convincingly [190] viable when seen from the vantage point of over all national planning by the state.

At this point I should like to point out most emphatically that among the innumerable misjudgments made abroad, none is more incorrect than that which assumes that work in the field of city planning and housing in the USSR is done without rhyme or reason, and that the ground has been cut out from under their feet.  The truth is that the economic and cultural reconstruction of all life in the USSR has no parallel in the history of mankind.  It is equally true that this reconstruction is being accomplished by a sober evaluation of all the realities, and it should be obvious to any observer that in each successive stage, matters recognized as desirable and ideal are being consciously subordinated to matters that are feasible and possible within the limitations of the present.  In the course of this discussion I shall return to this point on appropriate occasions.

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