Jean-Louis Cohen, 1949-2023

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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. 

  1. “The Emergence of Architectural Research in France” (1987)
  2. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1994) [third edition, revised and updated]
  3. “‘Experimental’ Architecture and Radical History: Remembering Manfredo Tafuri” (1995)
  4. Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893-1960 (1995)
  5. “A Conversation with Yves-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss” (Summer 1999)
  6. “Exhibitionist Revisionism: Exposing Architectural History” (September 1999)
  7. “Architectural History and the Colonial Question: Casablanca, Algiers, and Beyond” (2006)
  8. “Introduction to Toward an Architecture (2007)
  9. “Soviet Legal Documents on the Preservation of Monuments” (Summer 2008)
  10. “Le Corbusier’s Tsentrosoiuz in Moscow” (Summer 2008)
  11. “Preserving Modernism: A Russian Exception?” (Summer 2008)
  12. “Scholarship or Politics? Architectural History and the Risks of Autonomy” (September 2008)
  13. “Mirror of Dreams” (Fall 2010)
  14. The Future of Architecture since 1889: A Worldwide History (2012)
  15. “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.

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

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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  1. Современная архитектура (1926) № 1
  2. Современная архитектура (1926) № 2
  3. Современная архитектура (1926) № 3
  4. Современная архитектура (1926) № 4
  5. Современная архитектура (1926) № 5-6

1927
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  1. Современная архитектура (1927) № 1
  2. Современная архитектура (1927) № 2
  3. Современная архитектура (1927) № 3
  4. Современная архитектура (1927) № 4-5
  5. Современная архитектура (1927) № 6

1928
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  1. Современная архитектура (1928) № 1
  2. Современная архитектура (1928) № 2
  3. Современная архитектура (1928) № 3
  4. Современная архитектура (1928) № 4
  5. Современная архитектура (1928) № 5
  6. Современная архитектура (1928) № 6

1929
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  1. Современная архитектура (1929) № 1
  2. Современная архитектура (1929) № 2
  3. Современная архитектура (1929) № 3
  4. Современная архитектура (1929) № 4
  5. Современная архитектура (1929) № 5
  6. Современная архитектура (1929) № 6

1930
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  1. Современная архитектура (1930) № 1-2
  2. Современная архитектура (1930) № 3
  3. Современная архитектура (1930) № 4
  4. Современная архитектура (1930) № 5
  5. Современная архитектура (1930) № 6

 

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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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).

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Mies van der Rohe

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).

portriat-of-german-born-american-architect-ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe-1886-1969-as-he-sits-in-a-chair-in-his-home-chicago-illinois-1956 mies-van-der-rohe_casa-de-campo-de-ladrillo-1924-mies-van-der-rohe portriat-of-german-born-american-architect-ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe-1886-1969-as-he-peers-from-between-a-model-of-his-26-story-twin-apartment-buildings-located-at-860-on-the-right-and-880-lake

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.

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Moscow constructivism

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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.

Вегнер А.П., Мотылев М.И., Молоков Н.М., Звездин И.А., Шервинский Е.В., Федоров А.Н., Буров И.Г., Блохин Б.Н., Савельев Л.И., Виссинг М.Г. Дворец культуры автозавода им. Сталина-Лихачева. Здание столовой. Архитекторы братья Веснины А.А., В.А., Л.А. Фото 1937 года Дворец культуры автозавода имени Сталина-Лихачева (ЗИЛа). Крыша с обсерваторией. Архитекторы братья Веснины А.А., В.А., Л.А. Фото 1937 года Дворец культуры автозавода имени Сталина-Лихачева. Клубная часть. Интерьер, лестница. Архитекторы братья Веснины Фото 1937 года Дворец культуры автозавода имени Сталина-Лихачева. Переход из театрального зала в клубную часть. Архитекторы братья Веснины Фото 1937 год. Дом «Известий». Архитектор Бархин Г.Б. Фото 1937 года Continue reading

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

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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.

triptychon-1921

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

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

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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!

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

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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:

  1. Charles Dedoyard, a Frenchman and contributor to the avant-garde journal L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui;
  2. Vladimir Gruntal, a noted constructivist photographer and member of Rodchenko’s October Association; and
  3. 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
Dedoyard, C. Exterior view of the People's Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow September 1932 Dedoyard, C.  Exterior view of the Narkomfin (People's Commissariat for Finance) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, September 1932b Dedoyard, C.  Exterior view of the Narkomfin (People's Commissariat for Finance) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, September 1932a Dedoyard, C.  Exterior view of the Narkomfin (People's Commissariat for Finance) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, September 1932 Dedoyard, C.  Exterior view of the People's Commissariat for Finance (Narkomfin) Apartment Building, 25 Novinskii Boulevard, Moscow, September 1932

Vladimir Gruntal

Robert Byron

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Unknown  Interior views of the House-commune of transitional type communal centre, some showing Solomon Lisagor, Rostokino, Moscow, 1928-1930 [www.imagesplitter.net]-1-1 Unknown  Interior views of the House-commune of transitional type communal centre, some showing Solomon Lisagor, Rostokino, Moscow, 1928-1930 [www.imagesplitter.net]-1-0 Unknown  Interior views of the House-commune of transitional type communal centre, some showing Solomon Lisagor, Rostokino, Moscow, 1928-1930 [www.imagesplitter.net]-0-1 Unknown  Interior views of the House-commune of transitional type communal centre, some showing Solomon Lisagor, Rostokino, Moscow, 1928-1930 [www.imagesplitter.net]-0-0

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

Gosprom: The State Industry building in Kharkov, 1925-1928

Robert Byron, Gosprom in Kharkov (1929)a Robert Byron, Gosprom in Kharkov (1929)b Robert Byron, Gosprom in Kharkov (1929)c Robert Byron, Gosprom in Kharkov (1929)d

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The most breathtaking of all constructivist projects has to be the Gosprom complex (or “Palace of Industry”) in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. There can’t have been anything else of this scale and ambition anywhere else in Europe at the time: indeed, it resembles more some particularly ambitious work of the late 1960s than the mid-twenties, an unacknowledged prototype of that sixties motif, the elevated walkway, the street in the sky. Constructed between 1926 and 1928, apparently by volunteers from the local Komsomol, this is Metropolis — or Aelita — actualized. Concrete and glass blocks from 7 to 13 storeys connected by skyways, curving round a huge public square, this resembles a small city in its own right. Its designers, Serafimov, Kravets, and Felger, appear to have been as obscure at the time as they have been since, yet only an El Lissitsky, a Gropius, or a Corbusier were designing anything as ambitious in 1926. Eisenstein and Vertov both used it on film (The General Line and Three Songs of Lenin, respectively), aptly, as the contrasts, angles and multiple levels had spatial affinities to their montage techniques: more literally, Friedrich Ermler used it in Fragment of Empire, a communist Rip van Winkle tale, as exemplar of the incomprehensible new world that the sleeper awakes to.

(From Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism)

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