Interview with Gazete Duvar

Posted by Ross Wolfe

Recently I was contacted by Kavel Alpaslan of the paper Gazete Duvar, an independent outlet from Turkey founded in 2016. He was interested in interviewing me about my blog, Soviet architecture, and urban planning. The interview was translated into Turkish, but it was originally conducted in English via email. You can read my original responses below.

1. First we’d like to talk about your blog, The Charnel House. Can you tell us its story? How it started, how it’s going?

I started The Charnel-House back in 2008, a year or so after I finished my undergraduate degree in history and philosophy at Penn State. So my first few posts were actually just papers I’d written on Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and Hegel. Already at this time I’d begun reading some later theorists as well, for whom German idealism was a touchstone: figures like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, and Slavoj Žižek. But I hadn’t really written anything about them as yet, though they would deepen my engagement with Marxism.

Later, I entered grad school at the University of Chicago. There I took some classes with Moishe Postone and began to study Marx more seriously. I had some familiarity with Marx and Marxism from my involvement in the antiwar movement during the mid-aughts and my exposure to different sectarian soft fronts, primarily Trotskyist organizations. My interest was primarily in early Soviet history, and my sympathies lay with Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle for succession after Lenin’s death. So when I returned to blogging semi-regularly in 2011, I began commenting on contemporary politics as well as historical matters connected to Marxist theory and the Soviet avant-garde.

At UChicago, I was a student of the great historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. She recommended that I read Vladimir Paperny‘s Culture Two: Architecture in the Age of Stalin, which was astonishing. Paperny originally wrote this text in the late seventies, but it was so controversial in the USSR that it really only circulated among samizdat presses in the West. The book is sweeping and grandiose in its claims, not all of which I agree with, but which captivated me. I read Boris Groys‘ Total Art of Stalinism next, but then went back and read books like Anatole Kopp‘s Town and Revolution and then the original publications. When I moved to New York from Chicago, I got in touch with the recently deceased Jean-Louis Cohen, and sat in on some classes with him.

For about six or seven years, I updated the blog fairly frequently, sometimes even multiple times a week. My work situation at the time was a bit more irregular, so I was able to post more often. The content was somewhat varied. At times I wrote off-the-cuff commentary on current events, while other times I posted more formal analysis. Still other times I reposted articles and essays that were rare, but which I felt deserved a broader audience. When it came to updates on art and architecture, including various modernist magazines and publications, I tried to include as many high resolution images as I could. I’d devote some posts to individual thinkers whose work I valued, featuring PDFs of their writings.

In recent years I’ve become a teacher, which is much more demanding on my time. My blog hasn’t been quite as active since then, but I still post occasionally. I continue to do research on topics of interest, and have published a number of articles in outlets like Brooklyn Rail, Situations, Rethinking Marxism, and Datacide, as well as architectural journals like The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis, Calvert Journal, Strelka Magazine, and Archithese. Right now I am working on a large project about the Marxist theory of the family. Still, I hope to return to blogging more at some point.

2. We would like to comment on constructivist, futurist art and architecture in the Soviet Union. Especially the first two or three decades. Many people portray the Soviet architecture as “depressing” and “rough” but is it really like that? What makes people think that?

I’m not sure if cubo-futurist, suprematist, and constructivist art is thought of as bleak. More often it has been dismissed as too abstract, or childishly simple in its rendering of basic shapes. Let’s move on to architecture, though, which is more what I focused on. A number of misperceptions surround the legacy of modern architecture in the former USSR. There were different waves of modernism in the Soviet Union: 1) the “heroic” avant-garde of the early twenties through the early thirties, which built a few iconic workers’ clubs and handful of other structures but largely remained on paper; 2) the Khrushchev-era revival of functional forms, which actually did provide mass housing and produced some notable government buildings; 3) late period Brezhnevian quasi-brutalism, which largely continued the previous trend while integrating stylistic elements from the West.

When people think of drab Soviet блокови, or East German plattenbauten, they generally have the second two waves in mind. And in truth much of this, particularly the хрущёвки, were of notoriously poor quality, even if it was impressive that they managed to house so many people in such a short period of time. I recently contributed a chapter on Soviet modernism of the fifties and sixties to a collection The Visibility of Modern Architecture, edited by Gevork Hartoonian. Here I made use of Marx’s old line, amending Hegel, about how things historically happen twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. Khrushchev was in some ways the last utopian leader of the USSR, despite upholding the Stalinist political edifice. But the architecture of the period, to the extent that it took inspiration from the immediate post-revolutionary years, was but a pale imitation.

The early Soviet architectural avant-garde was more visionary, and arguably on the cutting edge of modern architecture worldwide (especially in the second half of the twenties). It was self-consciously part of the broader European and American movement, translating texts by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier while also exchanging in student exchanges between Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. Early on, many of the structures were fairly fantastical, especially those developed by former painters and sculptors. Tatlin and Lissitzky are exemplary in this respect, though Nikolai Ladovsky and his followers extended it further. Iakov Chernikhov was perhaps the pinnacle of this trend, with his architectural fantasies. Later came more functionalist designs, starting with the Vesnin brothers and Moisei Ginzburg the OSA milieu surrounding the journal Современная архитектура.

Relatively few avant-garde buildings during this period were actually realized, partially owing to the low technological level of the Soviet Union at the time and in part due to the lack of a centralized state mandate that would have taken them up on their more ambitious proposals. Of those that were built, even fewer remain, and many of those that do are in rather poor condition. Konstantin Mel’nikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club, Ilya Golosov’s Zuev Workers’ Club, Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building, Noi Trotsky’s Pravda building, Ivan Nikolaev’s Textile Institute, and Mikhail Barshch’s planetarium. Many modifications were made, as the buildings were often repurposed or overhauled with little regard for the original plan. A few have been renovated with an eye to restore them. But most today are in a sorry state.

As far as these buildings looking depressing, I suppose it’s a matter of taste. Personally, I find them elegant and innovative. Because of the low level of technology in the early Soviet Union, avant-garde architects were unable to build on the mass scale they envisioned. They only succeeded in completing a fairly small number of projects. Given that their buildings were fairly exceptional, then, it’s no wonder that they never became monotonous in the way that Khushchev-era units did. However, the technological limitations they faced meant that they had to be very clever in the way they approached construction. Their range of materials and building methods was constrained, but they often devised very novel solutions. Continue reading →

Jean-Louis Cohen, 1949-2023

Posted by Ross Wolfe

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I am shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden passing of the architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen. Cohen was a giant in his field, perhaps the last capable of producing a truly comprehensive account of modern design from the perspective of someone who still had a stake in its project. One of his students, Anna Kats, put it well in a public post: “Jean-Louis Cohen was the twentieth century… The entire century seemed to have happened to him, because of him, or to have passed before him in some immediate way. Losing him is losing a world.”

After the first wave of heroic histories of modern architecture—written by the likes of Siegfried Giedion, Nikolaus Pevsner, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Bruno Zevi, and Leonardo Benevolo—came a number of more critical retrospectives. Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri each explored the contradictions of modernism, offering subtler dialectical narratives informed by the Frankfurt School and Marxism. Similarly, William Curtis sought to both historicize and globalize the modern movement by expanding its canon of master practitioners.

While Cohen initially specialized in the Soviet avant-garde, his interests eventually grew to encompass the whole of international modernism. His encyclopedic 2012 overview of The Future of Architecture since 1889: A Worldwide History, is as far-ranging a survey as anything written by the authors I just mentioned. Cohen also organized numerous exhibitions on Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and lesser-known architects like André Lurçat. His accompanying studies of these figures are among the best available.

Politically, Cohen struck me as a Tocquevillean. Unlike Tafuri, whose work he memorialized in a moving 1994 piece, Cohen was not a radical. He rightly abhorred the undemocratic authoritarianism of the Stalinist state, but seemed to suspect that all Marxist politics tended in that direction. Although a protégé of Anatole Kopp, Cohen was a liberal. Despite this, he remained principled and consistent amidst mainstream pressures to censor anything with a connection to Soviet or Russian history in light of the war in Ukraine.

Just a few months ago, for example, after NYU professor Peder Anker launched a ridiculous and defamatory online campaign against Anya Bokov’s outstanding VKhUTEMAS show at Cooper Union, Cohen was among the most outspoken in support of Bokov. Surprisingly, The New York Times chose to cover the controversy, and reached out to him for comment:

Jean-Louis Cohen, a New York University professor and an architecture historian who has written on the VKhUTEMAS since 1978—he was a thesis adviser to Bokov—disputes the show’s involvement with Soviet imperialism. “I don’t think you can establish any connection between this version of the avant-garde and Russian imperialism,” he said in a phone interview. He noted that Stalin’s regime was equally repressive to independent national movements and to freethinking institutions like VKhUTEMAS. Its professors and students were ostracized, with scores sent to the gulags. Some were executed. The Soviet state expunged VKhUTEMAS.

“So you take Pushkin out of the libraries? You cancel Tschaikovsky concerts? You don’t perform Chekhov?” Cohen asked. “That’s a dogmatic, rigid position which I personally don’t share.” Cohen added that the design school was not strictly Russian: There were many Ukrainian students and teachers in VKhUTEMAS, along with Jews, Armenians, Tartars, and other ethnic groups [I made a similar point in a comment on Anker’s original article attacking Bokov].

Furthermore, and on a personal note, Cohen was always extremely generous towards me. When I left grad school in 2011 and moved to New York, feeling somewhat adrift in life, he invited me to sit in on some of his lectures and classes on the Soviet avant-garde. Years later, he asked me to attend a talk he was giving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and graciously accepted a request I made for an interview about it. I’ve included some photos I took of Cohen from his lecture at the Met and before our interview.

Below you can find a selection of Cohen’s books and articles in PDF form, followed by my aforementioned interview with him and the review I wrote of his CCA exhibit on “Amerikanizm” in Russian architecture. The interview was originally published in the Field Notes section of the Brooklyn Rail, edited by Paul Mattick (himself a longtime admirer of Cohen’s writings on art), while the review was originally published by Strelka Magazine, which has voluntarily ceased publication since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“The Emergence of Architectural Research in France” (1987)
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1994) [third edition, revised and updated]
“‘Experimental’ Architecture and Radical History: Remembering Manfredo Tafuri” (1995)
Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893-1960 (1995)
“A Conversation with Yves-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss” (Summer 1999)
“Exhibitionist Revisionism: Exposing Architectural History” (September 1999)
“Architectural History and the Colonial Question: Casablanca, Algiers, and Beyond” (2006)
“Introduction to Toward an Architecture“ (2007)
“Soviet Legal Documents on the Preservation of Monuments” (Summer 2008)
“Le Corbusier’s Tsentrosoiuz in Moscow” (Summer 2008)
“Preserving Modernism: A Russian Exception?” (Summer 2008)
“Scholarship or Politics? Architectural History and the Risks of Autonomy” (September 2008)
“Mirror of Dreams” (Fall 2010)
The Future of Architecture since 1889: A Worldwide History (2012)
“In the Cause of Landscape” (2013) [from the exhibition Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes]

Quite a few pieces are missing from this list. Most notably: Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR (1992); Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (2011); and Building a New New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (2020). Cohen has another piece forthcoming in The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture: A Debate (2023), a collection where I’ve also got an essay. My essay goes over the rediscovery of modernism under Khrushchev. Not terribly original, but hopefully solid.

Architecture and revolution

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Jean-Louis Cohen is among today’s preeminent historians of modern architecture. The following interview took place the evening of October 21, 2019, and focused on four main points: the enduring relevance of the Soviet avant-garde; the relationship between revolutionary architectural form and revolutionary social content; the legacy of the Vkhutemas school for architecture in Moscow, often overshadowed by the smaller German Bauhaus; and Cohen’s new show at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal on “Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture.”

Ross Wolfe (Rail): Last spring, you delivered the inaugural Leonard A. Lauder lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum. You chose to cover the first two decades of modern architecture in the USSR, under the title “Art x Architecture: Russian Intersections, 1917–1937.” Why this topic? What does the Soviet avant-garde have to teach us today?

Jean-Louis Cohen: Let’s start with the end. I don’t think that the avant-garde “teaches” us anything. It remains a unique historical experience. I’m very skeptical about the idea of being “taught” by history. But, that said, studying this experience can help us make decisions and consider the condition of architecture and the arts today.

The Russian avant-garde, globally speaking, was split into many currents, subcurrents, movements, etc. So the term “avant-garde” subsumes widely diverse innovative efforts that developed in Russia already before the revolution. Everything started around 1912 and continued in varied forms all the way through to the late ’30s. The basic message was that art, and research into unseen forms, could be articulated with social change, that art, or the most extreme forms of radical innovation in art, could embody values of social change. In parallel, the generous values of the early Soviet Union were lost between the 1917 revolution and the Stalinist regression of the early ’30s. That’s the basic thing.

Continue reading →

Early Soviet avant-garde journal of Contemporary Architecture, 1926-1930

Posted by Ross Wolfe

I’ve been meaning to post these for a while, but have been very busy with work and whatnot. The archivists who run the outstanding Russian website Techne have compiled some high-resolution PDFs of the legendary Soviet avant-garde architectural journal Современная Архитектура, usually translated into English as Contemporary Architecture. As Jean-Louis Cohen explained in a 2019 interview I conducted with him, the reason the editors chose this title was because “modern architecture” in Russia was still associated then with the style moderne branch of Art Nouveau which flourished in that country around the turn of the twentieth century.

When the people who run Techne originally posted these resources back in 2014, they included some crude PDFs knitted together from photos I took (of uneven quality) ten years ago in the bowels of the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia. Recently these old files have been thoroughly superseded by direct scans from the Nekrasov Central Universal Scientific Library in Moscow, which I’ve attached below — further organized by year and enumerated beneath.

My view is that Современная Архитектура rivals, if not surpasses, any of the analogous publications of international modernism released in other countries during the period: De Stijl, the Bauhausbücher series, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, etc. Edited by Moisei Ginzburg and the Vesnins over the first three years, and Roman Khiger over the last two, the journal was consistently cosmopolitan in scope and focus. Because its layout is so masterfully designed, I have also included images of the individual pages underneath links to the PDFs.

1926
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1927
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1928
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1929
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1930
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Современная архитектура (1926) № 1

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Typology and ideology: Moisei Ginzburg revisited

Posted by Ross Wolfe

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Introduction

Igor Dukhan
Belorusian State
University, 2013
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Victor Carpov belongs to that rare breed of contemporary scholars who have preserved the “pure principles” of such Russian art theorists as Alexander Gabrichevskii, Vassilii Zubov, and Aleksandr Rappaport and linked them with the Western methodology of architectural typology, drawn from the work of Joseph Rykwert, Giulio Carlo Argan and others. He is a senior fellow of the Institute for the Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning in Moscow and one of the leading architectural thinkers in Russia today.

The paper “Typology and Ideology: Moisei Ginzburg Revisited” was published in 2013 in the magazine Akademia: Arkhitektura i Stroitelstvo [Academia: Architecture, and Construction] and was based on a lecture, first presented at the conference “Style and Epoch,” which was organized by the Aleksei Shchusev State Museum of Architecture in cooperation with the Institute for the Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning, and dedicated to the centenary of Moisei Ginzburg’s birth. This paper is closely connected with Victor Carpov’s entire research into the evolution of architectural typology, which celebrated an important step in contemporary post-Heideggerian architectural theory.

Already in his dissertation of 1992, the author considered the history of typological thinking in architecture from Vitruvius to the late twentieth-century architects and theorists (Saverio Muratori, Giulio Carlo Argan, Aldo Rossi, Joseph Rykwert, Rob and Léon Krier and others). Later, an interest in typological (that is, ontological and pre-linguistic) thinking in architecture — which might be called architectonic thinking per se — led him to Alberti and other heroes of typological thinking in architecture in essays including “Tip-antitip: k arkhitekturnoi germenevtike” [Type-Antitype: Towards Architectural Hermeneutics] of 1991 (revised in 2012).

Photograph of a perspective drawing for the editing block of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of an elevation for the principal façade for the editing block of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of a perspective drawing for the editing block of the Izvestiia newspaper combine with an erased [?] plan, Moscow

Photograph of a perspective sketch for the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of a model for the editing block of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of a model for the club of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of first and second floor plans for the club of the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

Photograph of a plans and perspective sketches for the Izvestiia newspaper combine, Moscow

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Mies van der Rohe

Posted by Ross Wolfe

Fotograf: Willy Römer
ab 1930-1933 Direktor des Bauhauses in Dessau
Aufnahmedatum: 1931
Aufnahmeort: Berlin
Objektmaß 13×18 cm
Inventar-Nr.: WR_ON0026

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe hardly needs any introduction to readers of this blog, or indeed to anyone more than casually familiar with the history of twentieth century architecture. Still, a few words might be included here for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure. He was the third director of the legendary Bauhaus art school, after the pioneering modernist Walter Gropius and the controversial Marxist Hannes Meyer. Descended from stonemasons, Mies entered the building trade at a young age. Prior to his tenure at the Bauhaus, he was an apprentice along with Gropius in the studio of Peter Behrens, who also later supervised a Swiss prodigy by the name of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (alias Le Corbusier). Under the German master’s tutelage, Mies gained an enduring appreciation for the Prussian classicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Besides Behrens, the other modern influence on Mies during this early phase of his career was the Dutchman Hendrik Petrus Berlage, through whom Europe learned of the groundbreaking designs of Frank Lloyd Wright in America.

Mies’ turn to full-fledged modernism came in the 1920s, after he came into contact with Kurt Schwitters and other members of the international avant-garde. Although his commissions earlier in the decade still came from clients whose taste was rather more traditional, Mies nevertheless began writing bold articles and manifestos for the constructivist journal G. Other contributors to this periodical were artists and critics such as El Lissitzky, Werner Gräff, and Walter Benjamin. Jean-Louis Cohen, author of The Future of Architecture (2012), details the various experiments Mies conducted around this time. In 1926, he was selected to design the monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin. Following the success of the 1927 Wießenhof exhibition, spearheaded by Mies, a number of more daring projects now opened themselves up to him. Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia and the Wolf House in Gubin, Poland were only the most famous of these projects. In 1929, Mies was chosen to design the German pavilion for the world’s fair in Barcelona, which received widespread acclaim. You can read more about these works in an excerpt taken from Alan Colquhoun’s historical survey Modern Architecture (2002).

In any case, just as Mies was beginning to make a name for himself, Gropius asked Mies to step in and replace Meyer over at the Bauhaus in Dessau. At the time, Meyer was embroiled in a scandal concerning his communist sympathies. He exited, along with many of his left-wing students, to plan new cities in the USSR. (Eva Forgacs has written excellently about the politics that surrounded this decision). With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Gropius’ iconic Dessau building was commandeered by the Nazis and the school moved to Berlin. Mies’ choice to stay in Germany, and indeed collaborate with the fascist authorities, has been chronicled at length by Elaine Hochman in her 1989 study Architects of Fortune. Cohen dismisses this book as a bit of journalistic sensationalism, but its charges are worth taking seriously. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, for her part, never forgave him for this. “When [Mies] accepted the commission for the Reichsbank in July 1933, after the coming to power of Hitler, he was a traitor to all of us and to everything we had fought for,” she wrote. In a 1965 letter, she further rebutted the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock:

Mies van der Rohe seemed to be wholly a part of that slow death when he finally arrived in this country in 1937. His first scheme for the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is painfully reminiscent of his deadly fascist designs for the German Reichsbank, and the Krefeld Factory of 1937 proved the old German proverb that he who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas. Yet he was the only one of the diaspora architects capable of starting a new life as a creative designer following World War II, because to him technology was not a romantic catchword, as it had been for the Bauhaus program, but a workable tool and an inescapable truth.

Personally, I am inclined to agree with the judgment of Manfredo Tafuri and his co-author Francesco Dal Co. Mies was for the most part apolitical; i.e., “not connected with any political ideology.” Either way, as Moholy-Nagy herself noted, he enjoyed great fame and prestige throughout the postwar period, in which he consolidated the formal principles of the international style of the twenties and thirties, despite his opposition during those decades to formalism or “problems of form.” However, Tafuri was right to deny this apparent variance: “There is nothing more erroneous than the interpretation of Mies van der Rohe in his late works as contradicting the Mies of the 1920s, or the reading of his late designs as renunciatory incursions into the unruffled realm of the neoacademic.” In many ways, it was only during this later phase of his career that Mies was able to realize the programmatic vision he laid out between 1921 and 1923. One need only take a look at the apartments he designed in Chicago or Lake Point Tower, posthumously realized by his pupils John Heinrich and George Schipporeit, to see the embodiment of the speculative office building and the skyscraper he envisioned back in the 1920s. Really, it is a shame that Mies’ signature style has lent itself so easily to imitation, because the features which seem replicable conceal the subtler secret of their proportions.

At any rate, you can download a number of texts which deal with the work of Mies van der Rohe below. Following these there are a number of images, sketches and delineations of various provenance (most come from MoMA’s collection), as well as photographs of both Mies and buildings which were realized. Texts on Mies written by Cohen, Colquhoun, and Tafuri/Dal Co finish these off.

Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985/2012)
Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art (1991)
Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (1989)
George Dodds, Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)
Detlef Mertins, “Mies’ Event Space” (2005)
Dietrich Neumann, “Three Early Designs by Mies van der Rohe” (1992)
Gevork Hartoonian, “Mies van der Rohe: The Genealogy of Column and Wall” (1989)
Gevork Hartoonian, “Mies: The Window Framed” (2008)
Thomas de Monchaux, “Mies Reconsidered: A Review of Detlef Mertins’ Mies” (2014)
Carsten Krohn, Mies van der Rohe: The Built Work (2014)

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Moscow constructivism

Posted by Ross Wolfe

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Images taken from the Russian language website Medusa, along with a translation of the short blurb that accompanied it. Reportedly several hundred Musvovites gathered to protest the razing of the Tagansk Telephone Exchange, mentioned below. But developers went ahead with it anyway.

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Demolition of the Tagansk Telephone Exchange — a constructivist building lacking the official status of architectural landmark — began at the end of April in Moscow. In place of the Telephone Exchange, they plan to build a hotel. Aleksandr Gorokhov, photo editor of Medusa, found in the archives of the Shchusev Architecture Museum some old photographs of other constructivist buildings, in order to show readers how they looked having just been built.

В конце апреля в Москве начался снос Таганской АТС — конструктивистского здания, не имевшего формального статуса памятника архитектуры. На месте АТС планируют построить отель. Фоторедактор «Медузы» Александра Горохова нашла в архиве музея архитектуры имени Щусева старые фотографии других конструктивистских зданий, чтобы показать читателям, как они выглядели, когда только были построены.

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Hannes Meyer, The new world [Die neue Welt] (1926)

Posted by Ross Wolfe

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The flight of the “Norge” to the North pole, the Zeiss planetarium at Jena and Flettner’s rotor ship represent the latest stages to be reported in the mechanization of our planet. Being the outcome of extreme precision of thought, they all provide striking evidence of the way in which science continues to permeate our environment. Thus in the diagram to the present age we find everywhere amidst sinuous lines of its social and economic fields of force straight lines which are mechanical and scientific in origin. They are cogent evidence of the victory of man the thinker over amorphous nature. This new knowledge undermines and transforms existing values. It gives our new world its shape.

Motor cars dash along our streets. On a traffic island in the Champs Elysées from 6 to 8 p.m. there rages round one metropolitan dynamism at its most strident. “Ford” and “Rolls Royce” have burst open the core of the town, obliterating distance and effacing the boundaries between town and country. Aircraft slip through the air: “Fokker” and “Farman” widen our range of movement and the distance between us and the earth; they disregard national frontiers and bring nation closer to nation. Illuminated signs twinkle, loud-speakers screech, posters advertise, display windows shine forth. The simultaneity of events enormously extends our concept of “space and time,” it enriches our life. We live faster and therefore longer. We have a keener sense of speed than ever before, and speed records are a direct gain for all. Gliding, parachute descents and music hall acrobatics refine our desire for balance. The precise division into hours of the time we spend working in office and factory and the split-minute timing of railway timetables make us live more consciously. With swimming pools, sanatoria, and public lavatories, hygiene appears on the local scene and its water closets, faience washbowls and baths usher in the new line of sanitary fittings in earthenware. Fordson tractors and v. Meyenburg cultivators have resulted in a shift of emphasis in land development and sped up the tilling of the earth and intensive cultivation of crops. Borrough’s calculating machine sets free our brain, the Dictaphone our hand, Ford’s motor our place-bound senses and Handley Page our earthbound spirits. Radio, marconigram, and phototelegraphy liberate us from our national seclusion and make us part of a world community. The gramophone, microphone, orchestrion, and pianola accustom our ears to the sound of impersonal-mechanized rhythms: “His Master’s Voice,” “Vox,” and “Brunswick” see to the musical needs of millions. Psychoanalysis has burst open the all too narrow dwelling of the soul and graphology has laid bare the character of the individual. “Mazdaism,” “Coué” and “Die Schönheit” are signs of the desire for reform breaking out everywhere. National costume is giving way to fashion and the external masculinization of woman shows that inwardly the two sexes have equal rights. Biology, psychoanalysis, relativity, and entomology are common intellectual property: France, Einstein, Freud, and Fabre are the saints of this latterday. Our homes are more mobile than ever. Large blocks of flats, sleeping cars, house yachts, and transatlantic liners undermine the local concept of the “homeland.” The fatherland goes into a decline. We learn Esperanto. We become cosmopolitan.

Postcard featuring Mel’nikov’s Soviet Pavilion in Paris, 1925.

The steadily increasing perfection attained in printing, photographic, and cinematographic processes enables the real world to be reproduced with an ever greater degree of accuracy. The picture the landscape presents to the eye today is more diversified than ever before; hangars and power houses are the cathedrals of the spirit of the age. This picture has the power to influence through the specific shapes, colors, and lights of its modern elements: the wireless aerials, the dams, the lattice girders: through the parabola of the airship, the triangle of the traffic signs, the circle of the railway signal, the rectangle of the billboard; through the linear element of transmission lines: telephone wires, overhead tram wires, high-tension cables; through radio towers, concrete posts, flashing lights, and filling stations. Our children do not deign to look at a snorting steam locomotive but entrust themselves with cool confidence to the miracle of electric traction. G. Palucca’s dances, von Laban’s movement choirs, and D. Mesendieck’s functional gymnastics are driving out the aesthetic eroticism of the nude painting. The stadium has carried the day against the art museum, and physical reality has taken the place of beautiful illusion. Sport merges the individual into the mass. Sport is becoming the university of collective feeling. Suzanne Lenglen’s cancellation of a match disappoints hundreds of thousands, Breitensträter’s defeat sends a shiver through hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands follow Nurmi’s race over 10,000 meters on the running track. The standardization of our requirements is shown by: the bowler hat, bobbed hair, the tango, jazz, the Co-op product, the DIN standard size, and Liebig’s meat extract. The standardization of mental fare is illustrated by the crowds going to see Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, and Jackie Coogan. Grock and the three Fratellini weld the masses — irrespective of class and racial differences — into a community with a common fate. Trade union, co-operative, Lt., Inc., cartel, trust, and the League of Nations are the forms in which today’s social conglomerations find expression, and the radio and the rotary press are their media of communication. Co-operation rules the world. The community rules the individual.

Each age demands its own form. It is our mission to give our new world a new shape with the means of today. But our knowledge of the past is a burden that weighs upon us, and inherent in our advanced education are impediments tragically barring our new paths. The unqualified affirmation of the present age presupposes the ruthless denial of the past. The ancient institutions of the old — the classical grammar schools and the academies — are growing obsolete. The municipal theaters and the museums are deserted. The jittery helplessness of the applied arts is proverbial. In their place, unburdened by classical airs and graces, by an artistic confusion of ideas or the trimmings of applied art, the witnesses of a new era are arising: industrial fairs, grain silos, music halls, airports, office chairs, standard goods. All these things are the product of a formula: function multiplied by economics. They are not works of art. Art is composition, purpose is function. The composition of a dock seems to us a nonsensical idea, but the composition of a town plan, a block of flats…?? Building is a technical not an aesthetic process, artistic composition does not rhyme with the function of a house matched to its purpose. Ideally and in its elementary design our house is a living machine. Retention of heat, insolation, natural and artificial lighting, hygiene, weather protection, car maintenance, cooking, radio, maximum possible relief for the housewife, sexual and family life, etc. are the determining lines of force. The house is their component. (Snugness and prestige are not leitmotifs of the dwelling house: the first resides in the human heart and not in the Persian carpet, the second in the attitude of the house-owner and not on the wall of a room!) Today we have new building materials at our disposal for building a house: aluminium and duralumin in plates, rods, and bars, Euboölith, Ruberoid, Forfoleum, Eternit, rolled glass, Triplex sheets, reinforced concrete, glass bricks, faience, steel frames, concrete frame slabs and pillars, Trolith, Galalith, Cellon, Goudron, Ripoliin, indanthrene paints, etc. We organize these building elements into a constructive unity in accordance with the purpose of the building and economic principles. Architecture has ceased to be an agency continuing the growth of tradition or an embodiment of emotion. Individual form, building mass, natural color of material, and surface texture come into being automatically and this functional conception of building in all its aspects leads to pure construction [Konstruktion]. Pure construction is the characteristic feature of the new world of forms. Constructive form is not peculiar to any country; it is cosmopolitan and the expression of an international philosophy of building. Internationalism is the prerogative of our time.

Today every phase of our culture of expression is predominantly constructive. Human inertia being what it is, it is not surprising that such an approach is to be found most clearly at first where the Greeks and Louis XIV have never set foot: in advertising, in typographical mechanical composition, in the cinema, in photographic processes. The modern poster presents lettering and product or trademark conspicuously arranged. It is not a poster work of art but a piece of visual sensationalism. In the display window of today psychological capital is made of the tensions between modern materials with the aid of lighting. It is display window organization rather than window dressing. It appeals to the finely distinguishing sense of materials found in modern man and covers the gamut of its expressive power: fortissimo = tennis shoes to Havana cigarettes to scouring soap to nut chocolate! Mezzo-forte = glass (as a bottle) to wood (as a packing case) to pasteboard (as packing) to tin (as a can)! Pianissimo = silk pajamas to cambric shirts to Valenciennes lace to “L’Origan de Coty”! Continue reading →

Soviet avant-garde models and sketches, 1922-1935

Posted by Ross Wolfe

Continue reading →

Return to the Horrorhaus: Hans Poelzig’s nightmare expressionism, 1908-1935

Posted by Ross Wolfe

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Two years ago, I introduced my readers to the work of the German expressionist architect Hans Poelzig. Many were doubtless familiar with his buildings already. What I sought to highlight, though, was the sheer scariness of his architecture. Hence “scary architecture.” SOCKS Studio, always excellent and often operating on the same wavelength, also put up a post on Poelzig around the same time.

In the time that has passed, I have amassed hundreds more high-quality images of plans, sketches, and period photographs of Poelzig’s built work. Needless to say, they aren’t any less scary than before. One could easily imagine Max Schreck’s Nosferatu lurking in the corridors of these structures, with Caligari’s hypnotized somnambulist dashing madly over their rooftops. Alfred Kubin’s monsters threaten to burst forth at any minute.

Flights of fancy aside, these really are stunning images. Dark, peculiar, and unexpected. I’m not sure what lends them this eerie quality, especially as a range of different building types are depicted, delineated, or photographed. Yet all of Poelzig’s structures share this tenebrous aspect, whether one takes his elegant cinema palaces, ominous monuments, or frightening industrial complexes (see the acid factory and gas works). Great stuff.

Click any of the following thumbnails to see the images in higher resolution, and scroll through to see more. Enjoy!

Hans Poelzig _ Albert Vennemann Deli-Lichtspiele, Breslau (1926-1927)

Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) Geschäftshaus S. Adam, Leipziger Straße_ Friedrichstraße, Berlin (1928)z

Hans Poelzig (1869-1936) Geschäftshaus S. Adam, Leipziger Straße_ Friedrichstraße, Berlin (1928)

Continue reading →

Moisei Ginzburg’s constructivist masterpiece: Narkomfin during the 1930s

Posted by Ross Wolfe

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Recently I happened across a cache of extremely rare photos of Moisei Ginzburg’s constructivist masterpiece, Dom Narkomfin, in Moscow. They are reproduced here along with a brief popular exposition of the building’s history and current status by Athlyn Cathcart-Keays, which I thought quite good (despite an overly personalized narrative). Most of the photos were taken by three different individuals:

Charles Dedoyard, a Frenchman and contributor to the avant-garde journal L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui;
Vladimir Gruntal, a noted constructivist photographer and member of Rodchenko’s October Association; and
Robert Byron, a British travel writer and Byzantine historian known for his deep appreciation of architecture.

It’s difficult for me to say whose photographs of Narkomfin I like best, as each capture very different “moods” of the building. Byron’s are dark, brooding, and ominous, while those of Gruntal and Dedoyard are comparatively sunny, vivacious, and light. Someone who knows more about photography, especially architectural photography, might say more about them. Ginzburg’s revolutionary communal housing structure is as photogenic as ever, though the real complexity of the building tends to get lost in single snapshots (whether taken indoors or from the outside). Hopefully I’ll be writing a longer article on Narkomfin soon. Please contact me if you’d like to publish it.

Lately, apart from work, I’ve been wasting far too much time antagonizing tankies on Twitter — defending friends and Slavoj Žižek along the way — instead of spending it on more productive ventures. They’re young, and I’m bored, but it’s not like my trolling and ceaseless mockery will persuade them of anything. So I apologize to anyone I’ve offended these past several weeks. From now on, I’ll try to redirect my energies to more fruitful ends. Besides a few pieces I’ve already written and have stowed on the backburners, I think I’m going to finally finish that book for Zer0. Enjoy these for now.

Charles Dedoyard

Vladimir Gruntal

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing stairs, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment showing the built-in kitchen, People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Photograph of a perspective drawing for the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, before 1929

Gruntal, V.G. Partial view of the garden façade of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930c

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment showing the built-in wall unit in the dining room [?] which opens onto the built-in kitchen, Narkomfin Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing a communal space [?], 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Exterior view of the pilotis of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of an entrance to the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing a bulletin board, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing a corridor, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Partial view of the lateral façade of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing the elevated walkway, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building from the upper level showing a built-in cupboard and a desk, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing the upper level, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Partial view of the garden façade of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Nikolai Milutin’s apartment in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building from the upper level, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Exterior view of the communal centre of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Exterior view of the pilotis of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow,, after 1930a

Gruntal, V.G. Interior view of Moisei Ginzburg’s studio in the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing a woman seated at a desk, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow after 1930

Gruntal, V.G. Partial view of the garden façade of the People’s Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building showing the roof garden, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, after 1930

Robert Byron

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative Exterior view, communal center, detail

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative Exterior view, side façade with balconies, detail

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative Exterior view, front facade, detail

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative Exterior view, side facade with pilotis, detail

Robert Byron Narkomfin apartments Moscow, USSR Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1928-1929) Type: A-negative

Unknown

Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow: A Soviet blueprint for collective living

Athlyn Cathcart
The Guardian
May 5, 2015

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In the shadow of one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters skyscrapers in Moscow’s Presnenskii District, an unkempt park gives way to a trio of yellowing buildings in varying states of decay. The crumbling concrete and overgrown wall-garden don’t give much away, but this is the product of the utopian dreams of a young Soviet state — a six-storey blueprint for communal living, known as the Narkomfin building.

Designed by architects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis in 1928, the building represents an important chapter in Moscow’s development — as both a physical city and an ideological state. Built to house the employees of the Narodnyo Kommissariat Finansov (Commissariat of Finance), Narkomfin was a laboratory for social and architectural experimentation to transform the byt (everyday life) of the ideal socialist citizen. Continue reading →

“Comrades!

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

To you who accept the legacy of Russia, to you who will (I believe!) tomorrow become masters of the whole world, I address the question: with what fantastic structures will you cover the fires of yesterday?” ⎯ Vladimir Maiakovskii, “An Open Letter to the Workers” (1918)

“Utopia transforms itself into actuality. The fairy tale becomes a reality. The contours of socialism will become overgrown with iron flesh, filled with electric blood, and begin to dwell full of life. The speed of socialist building outstrips the most audacious daring. In this lies the distinctive character and essence of the epoch.” ⎯ I. Chernia,“The Cities of Socialism” (1929)

“The idea of the conquest of the substructure, the earthbound, can be extended even further and calls for the conquest of gravity as such. It demands floating structures, a physical-dynamic architecture.” ⎯ El Lissitzky, The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union (1929)

The Charnel-House

From Bauhaus to Beinhaus

modern architecture

Interview with Gazete Duvar

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Jean-Louis Cohen, 1949-2023

Architecture and revolution

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Early Soviet avant-garde journal of Contemporary Architecture, 1926-1930

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Современная архитектура (1926) № 1

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Typology and ideology: Moisei Ginzburg revisited

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Introduction

Igor Dukhan
Belorusian State
University, 2013
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Mies van der Rohe

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Moscow constructivism

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Hannes Meyer, The new world [Die neue Welt] (1926)

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Soviet avant-garde models and sketches, 1922-1935

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Return to the Horrorhaus: Hans Poelzig’s nightmare expressionism, 1908-1935

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Moisei Ginzburg’s constructivist masterpiece: Narkomfin during the 1930s

Charles Dedoyard

Vladimir Gruntal

Robert Byron

Unknown

Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow: A Soviet blueprint for collective living

Athlyn Cathcart
The Guardian
May 5, 2015

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In­tro­duc­tion

Ig­or Dukhan Be­lor­usian State University, 2013 .

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Charles Dedoyard

Vladimir Gruntal

Robert Byron

Unknown

Athlyn Cathcart The Guardian May 5, 2015

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Introduction

Igor Dukhan
Belorusian State
University, 2013
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Athlyn Cathcart
The Guardian
May 5, 2015