The Vesnin brothers’ ZIL Palace of Culture in Moscow, 1931
Conference room inside the Vesnin brothers’ ZIL Palace of Culture in Moscow, 1931.
.
.
Image: Ivan Nikolaev’s constructivist dormitory
for the Textile Institute in Moscow (1929-1930)
.
The following is taken from Martin Gittins’ outstanding Kosmograd site.
I absolutely love this painting by Mikhail Nemtsov of The Communal House of the Textile Institute in Moscow:
Designed by Ivan Sergeevich Nikolaev and completed in 1931, it is one of the seminal buildings of the Constructivist era, and is often referred to simply at Nikolaev’s House. It embodies the radical approach to communal living and education that gained popularity in the post-revolutionary fervent, when all social institutions became open to reexamination. The painting by Nemtsov doesn’t just represent the building but also tries to capture the multitude of social relations that would have taken place in the building.
Since 1968, when it was last repaired, the building has fallen into disrepair, and although Nemtsov likes the fact that it still supports a variety of uses, a renovation is planned.
.
Over the last couple years I’ve amassed a frightening number of high-quality photographs and image scans depicting Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’ Dom Narkomfin in Moscow. It is, without question, one of the most iconic pieces of Soviet constructivist architecture that was actually realized.
For this very reason, however, it has already been the subject of countless studies and historical investigations. Some of these have been quite good: Owen Hatherley’s Catherine Cooke’s. Others have been competent, if unmoving: Victor Buchli’s. George Baird’s treatment of Narkomfin in The Space of Appearance left me singularly unimpressed — something I wasn’t counting on, since I generally appreciate his architectural criticism.
Regardless, there’s very little new to say about the building, at least in English or in Russian. While I debated for some time whether or not I should write something “original” on Narkomfin, offering my own “unique” perspective, I’ve finally decided that my energies would be best spent elsewhere. Hence, I am appending just a few short overviews of the structure, detailing its layout and specifications, as well as Owen Hatherley’s longer description of the building from Militant Modernism (2009).
A few months ago, I did something similar with his article “Buried Treasure.” Maybe I’ll translate a short bit on Narkomfin from Sovremennaia arkhitektura soon. Enjoy this for now, however!
.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1929).
A collective house for workers in the
People’s Commissariat of Finance.
Moscow, USSR. Novinskii Boulevard.
The shorter wing of the complex houses a children’s home, dining room, kitchen, and laundry. The complex is placed in the center of a park, away from street noise. Apartments are two stories high. Height of rooms is 2.2 m, that is, for two-story spaces, 4.4 m. Continuous side corridor every second floor. Roof garden. On the ground floor are rooms for rest and recreation.
The individual bourgeois apartment is no longer appropriate for new dwelling relations, which are based on principles other than the unified patriarchal family with its petty individualistic conduct. The economic routines of the worker’s family (nutrition, cleaning, washing) as well as the education of children, their care and control and the fulfillment of the cultural and sport needs of workers and children, can and must be collectivized, that is, produced on a collective basis. Therefore all those rooms that for their functional destination and their character must serve entire collectives and not only single individuals must be reshaped into corresponding highly collectivized premises: the canteen, common resting rooms, reading rooms and libraries, gyms, child care rooms and nurseries, etc.; single individual rooms are the sleeping cabins, restrooms, rooms for individual use and for scientific work.
The windows open like an accordion to transform the living cell into an open terrace surrounded by greenery. The sense of a room is lost: it becomes a platform integrated within nature.
The Building Committee [Stroikom] of
the Economic Soviet RSFSR 1928.
(Architects: Ginzburg, Pasternak, Barshch, Vladimirov).
Project for a collective house, Type F.
This dwelling beehive does not contain any of the functions usually attributed to a full housekeeping flat. In contrast to a hotel, bachelor flats, and pensions, such a dwelling beehive should not be considered in itself a complete dwelling entity. The program of “dwelling” includes all the relevant social, study, etc. spaces, and separate children’s rooms are concentrated outside of this dwelling beehive in their own separate buildings.
.
Image: El Lissitzky,
PROUN 1-C (1919)
.
1. We have named PROUN a station on the path to the construction of the new form. […] From being a simple depicter the artist becomes a creator (builder) of forms for a new world — the world of objectivity. This does not mean the creation of a rivalry with the engineer. Art has not yet crossed paths with science.
2. PROUN is understood as the creative construction of form (based on the mastery of space) assisted by economic construction of the applied material. The goal of PROUN is progressive movement on the way to concrete creation, and not the substantiation, explanation, or promotion of life.
The path of the PROUN does not lie within the narrowly limited, fragmented, and isolated scientific disciplines — the builder consolidates them all together in his own experimental investigation.
The path of the PROUN is not the incoherent approach of separate scientific disciplines, theories, and systems, but is rather the straightforward path of learned influence over reality. […]
.
Image: A penguin pauses
midway down the ramp
of Lubetkin’s pool (1934)
.
.
From The Architectural Review.
(№ 138: Sept. 1965). Pg. 186.
.
Collapsed goal-posts among the trees — this, undoubtedly, is the first impression of the North Aviary from Primrose Hill, and equally undoubtedly it is a very belated contribution to the Arcadian tradition in British architecture. But, within that tradition, it does not belong to the gimcrack wing that gave us so many fake ruins and other collapsed objects among trees; rather, it belongs to the tough-minded stream whose triumphs are the palm stove at Kew Gardens, or Paxton’s Victoria Regia house at Chatsworth.
Lubetkin and Tecton’s Penguin Pool (built 1934)
In common with these great temples of acquisitive botany, the aviary is a walk-through exhibition-environment. This is not a total innovation at Regent’s Park Zoo, because one is also permitted to share the same physical space as the humming-birds, for instance. But to build on this scale and in the open is a very different problem from the creation of the small, totally artificial environment in which the humming-birds enjoy a manufactured climate secured by double-doored light-trap entrances. In the North Aviary the problem was more that of taming a piece of the existing topography and covering it with an enclosure high enough and broad enough for large birds to fly convincingly — and yet keep the public close enough to avoid the “Whipsnade effect” of sheer distance and natural surroundings making the exhibits invisible. With very little ingenuity, the form and levels of the present site would probably have made for better-than-average visibility even with an enclosure that permitted observation only from the outside. The creation of an internal observation route, by means as complex as a dog-leg bridge without intermediate supports, therefore proposes a significant improvement over outside viewing — and if the design failed to deliver this, then it would fail as architecture however handsome the covering structure. But quite obviously (though not so obviously that one does not have to explain it, alas) the bridge offers a bird’s-eye-type view of the cliff-face that no rearrangement of the solid topography could afford, except by making an equally high cliff directly opposite, and cliff-nesting birds do not nest on the sides of trenches. The other views, of birds washing and wading in the cascades for instance, are supernumerary benefits by comparison, though their sum-total is a substantial additional justification for the bridge. Continue reading
Never realized before just how plugged-in Walter Benjamin was with the avant-garde architectural scene in Germany, France, and Austria during his day. Seriously, even just skimming through the convolutes of his unfinished Arcades Project, the text is teeming with references to Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme (1925), Adolf Behne’s Neues Wohnen — Neues Bauen (1927), Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928), and Emil Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier, Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen Architektur (1933). An acquaintance pointed out to me that he corresponded with Erich Auerbach, later author of Mimesis, as well.
Surprisingly prescient, too. Corbu was already an established figure by then, but Giedion and Kaufmann were relatively unknown. Auerbach wasn’t even on the radar.
Over the next few posts will be spread out some of Benjamin’s notes quoting and discussing some of these figures.
The writings of the French-German Marxist and architectural historian Claude Schnaidt (1931-2007) are hardly known at all in the English-speaking world. His only major essay to appear in translation was reproduced in the previous post, along with photos and scans illustrating the subjects covered. Intellectually, he can be compared to his colleague and collaborator Anatole Kopp, whose work I reflected upon in a recent blog entry.
Paul Chemetov, one of Schnaidt’s students, recently authored an article for the bilingual journal Le visiteur in which he briefly sketched the relationship between the two men and their intertwining career paths. Chemetov writes:
To those who knew him or met him, Claude Schnaidt was a curious figure. Curious because of his voice, coloured by so many accents — he was a native of Geneva, but German-speaking, with occasional echoes of old-style Parisian “lip.” And curious in his appearance — ascetic, but loving life. A soldier-monk? In reality, a passionate teacher. As the successor to Max Bill, he took on the role of director at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm until its closure in 1967-68, and the Institut de l’Environnement in Paris (located, incredibly, at the corner of Rue d’Ulm and Rue Jean Calvin…), founded by André Malraux after the events of 1968, and clad in Schnaidt’s day in a façade by Prouvé, before Philippe Starck’s marble top-coat signified the end of that particular pedagogical, political, and intellectual interlude. Born in 1931, Claude Schnaidt died on the 22nd of March, 2007. “A young man in the mainstream of modernity,” in Gubler’s words. He was a close associate of that other eternal young man, Anatole Kopp, whose book Quand le moderne n’était pas un style mais une cause (“When modernism was not a style but a cause”) is a precise resumé of both of their careers.
Whereas Kopp dedicated his life to the excavation of early Soviet avant-garde architecture, Schnaidt’s focus was narrower. Most of the work he’s known for concerned a single figure from the annals of modernism: the Marxist and modernist Hannes Meyer. Nevertheless, from what I can tell (and Chemetov’s remarks seem to confirm this) their projects were otherwise remarkably similar. As Chemetov suggests, their primary interest was to recover the sociohistoric mission of modern architecture, which had by their time degenerated to what they most despised in 19th-century architecture: “style.” Since modern architecture had formally triumphed, flourishing in the postwar years, the broader program of social transformation it once aspired to had been lost. Like Kopp, Schnaidt believed that by revealing modernism’s radical, quasi-socialist origins, this project might be renewed.
Claude Schnaidt, Herbert Lindinger, und Herbert Kapitzki leiten die Versammlung der HfG am 2/23/1968
His frustration with the impasse modern architecture reached in the mid-1960s comes through quite clearly in a 1967 article, “Architecture and Political Commitment”:
Greater truth, directness, and depth cannot be given to human relations by the invention of novel forms. The aberrations of modern city life have deeper social causes than the shape of the buildings. The erection of monuments — and only history can decide what is a monument and what is not — will add nothing to human happiness. Self-glorification has never made men happy. Technology cannot be domesticated by putting up lepidopterous theaters and sinusoidal airport buildings. Far from settling the hash of the engineers, contemporary Baroque emphasizes their triumph. What is the use of impugning the formal schematics of the rationalist if one leaves unassailed the utopian ideas behind them? What is the use of decrying the squalor of urban conglomerations and the degradation of the modern habitat without at the same time denouncing the bourgeois commercialism which gives rise to them? What is the use of accusing rationalism, when, in point of fact, the rationalism accused is mechanistic, limited, and obsolete. If modern architecture is at a dead-end, it is not through any abuse of rationalism but through ignorance of genuine scientific thought, not through any abuse of social sense, but rather through a lack of concrete social content.
Of course, this was a common theme seized upon by many leftists in the 1960s. The technical and economic progress of society had not brought with it the emancipatory results many expected would accompany them. Modernism, the ideological extrapolation of this societal expectation, had finally been accepted by the public at large. Yet humanity was no freer for it. Kopp and Schnaidt thus sought to mobilize the memory of modern architecture’s most revolutionary phase against empty stylizations that would reduce problems of construction to mere formulae. Continue reading
.
Image: Cover to Claude Schnaidt’s
biographical essay Hannes Meyer (1964)
Hannes Meyer died ten years ago. The publication of his work is both too early and too late. Too late because there is reason to believe that the course of modern architectural history has been changed, although it is hard to say how much, by ignorance of this work. Certain misconceptions concerning the movements and events with which he was associated might have been avoided if his work had been accessible at an earlier date. These debatable interpretations of the recent past are partly responsible for the present confusion in the minds of a whole generation of architects. Today architecture is venturing along dangerous paths from which it might have held back if the real intentions of preceding generations had been better understood. People talk, for example, of the misdeeds of functionalism and prepare to write it off without really knowing what it was. Too late, again, because the lapse of time has made Hannes Meyer a legendary figure. His is the legend of an accursed architect which must now be divested of its fictitious elements to uncover the real man concealed beneath. But this book on Hannes Meyer is also too early. The passions stirred up by the man and his work are still a long way from being quelled. There are still too many people with a stake in misrepresenting the truth. Yet, in order to establish the historical truth, we still lack many of the elements that time alone can supply.
Why, it will be asked, has the work of Hannes Meyer been misunderstood for so long? There are a number of reasons. First of all, Meyer himself was too engrossed in his daily tasks to be troubled with the preparation of a book on his works. It is also likely that such an intention was alien to his cast of mind; he was too much imbued with the idea of collective work to want to parade his own originality. And if in the last years of his life he did think of turning his enforced leisure to account by preparing a book, ill health prevented him from putting this plan into effect. Moreover, the very character of his work is ill fitted for publication. A substantial portion of it is made up of organizational measures or of research, analyses and reports prepared by a team and stored away in many instances in archives in Germany, the USSR or Mexico. But if Meyer is little or imperfectly known, this is due more particularly to the conspiracy of silence organized by all those who felt threatened by his revolutionary opinions and zest. There is also the indifference due to a failure to understand ideas transcending the conventional. If Meyer had spoken a little more often about art and a little less about politics, if he had merely indulged in reassuring generalities instead of impugning an economic system, if he had built luxury villas instead of co-operative housing estates, he would probably have been entitled to more honors than he has received. Meyer did not share the overweening ambition of his contemporaries. He did not believe that society could be changed merely by changing its architecture and its town-planning. He opposed this idealist dream and made a deliberate attempt to adapt his work to the living reality of the world. That is why there is something disconcerting about Meyer’s work at first sight: it is based on very strict principles but assumes a great variety of forms of expression.
Hannes Meyer, Dokumente zur Frühzeit:
Architektur und Gestaltungsversuche, 1919-27
Whether belated or, in certain respects, premature, it may be hoped that the publication of Hannes Meyer’s work will shed light on some matters of topical interest, more particularly the debate on the status and role of the architect in an industrial civilization, the controversy raging around functionalism, the reassessment of the heritage of the Bauhaus, and the crisis in the teaching of architecture. On all these outstanding questions Meyer, either implicitly or explicitly, took up a position which was original and singularly clear-sighted. Generally speaking, however, it is the general situation of architecture which underlines the topicality of Meyer’s work. Modern architects are no longer able to cope with the demands which they have helped to create. The aims and methods of architecture are due for a radical reappraisal and for this a return to the sources seems increasingly necessary. Continue reading
For those ardent enthusiasts of Soviet avant-garde architecture from the 1920s, whom I suspect account for a great deal of this blog’s readership, my retrospective evaluation of Konstantin Mel’nikov’s famous house in Moscow from a few weeks back may have rubbed some the wrong way. While generally appreciative of the architect’s built and unbuilt legacy, it was decidedly less impressed with the private domestic arrangement he designed for himself. This might not seem all that controversial to those of you who remain unschooled in Soviet architectural esoterica, but when it comes to a structure as iconic as Dom Mel’nikova — a building currently threatened by years of neglect and decay — such an opinion could well be considered anathema. In case this opinion offended any Mel’nikov partisans among you, however, this post is intended to make up for it. Today we’ll review one of his projects that I consider an overwhelming and unambiguous success: the Soviet Pavilion for the 1925 Paris Exposition.
Mel’nikov’s undoubtable talents as an architect revealed themselves nowhere more clearly than in his submissions to international design competitions. A number of historians have noted this fact.”Mel’nikov rose to prominence through competitions,” writes Jean-Louis Cohen in his recent historical overview, The Future of Architecture since 1889. “Mel’nikov created a sensation with his Makhorka Tobacco Pavilion at the Agricultural Exhibition held in Moscow in 1923 and, two years later, with the pavilion he designed to represent the USSR at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes” (pgs. 165-166). Though they drew a dubious inference regarding Mel’nikov’s overall “qualifications” from the work, Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co reached a similar conclusion in their history of Modern Architecture: “Mel’nikov acquired immediate international fame with his Russian pavilion for the Paris Exposition of 1925” (pg. 180).
.
As the above would seem to suggest, Mel’nikov’s pavilion was, at least visually, extremely striking. Not only that, however. Its perambulatory effect, experienced chiefly through the mechanism of the open staircase, was similarly unprecedented. The glasswork, laid out in flat sheets stood vertically adjacent to the stairs, allowed the entire contents of the building’s interior (its stands, internal layout, and displays). Concerning the formal significance of the structure’s composition, and its reception by crowds of Parisians and foreign visitors, Cohen summarizes: “Composed of two glazed triangular volumes bisected diagonally by a staircase, it was the most conspicuous structure at the Paris exhibition. It revealed to the West the existence of a new Russian architecture, which was further confirmed by the presentation elsewhere at the fair of over one hundred projects conceived in the USSR since 1920” (The Future of Architecture, pg. 166).
El Lissitzky, writing several years after the 1925 Paris Expo, reasoned along similar lines. For him, the Mel’nikov’s piece was significant as an early and profound expression of the formalist wing of Soviet architecture, represented in the theory and methods of the ASNOVA group, of which Mel’nikov was a member at the time. Lissitzky wrote:
The first small building that gave clear evidence of the reconstruction of our architecture was the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair of 1925, designed by Mel’nikov. The close proximity of the Soviet Pavilion to other creations of international architecture revealed in the most glaring way the fundamentally different attitudes and concepts embodied in Soviet architecture. This work represents the “formalistic” [Rationalist] wing of the radical front of our architecture, a group whose primary aim was to work out a fitting architectural concept for each utilitarian task.
In this case, the basic concept represents an attempt to loosen up the overall volume by exposing the staircase. In the plan, the axis of symmetry is established on the diagonal, and all other elements are rotated by 180 ̊. Hence, the whole has been transposed from ordinary symmetry at rest into symmetry in motion. The tower element has been transformed into an open system of pylons. The structure is built honestly of wood, but instead of relying on traditional Russian log construction [it] employs modern wood construction methods. The whole is transparent. Unbroken colors. Therefore no false monumentality. A new spirit. (The Reconstruction of Architecture in the USSR [1929], pgs. 35-36.
The building thus reflected the relatively advanced state of Russia’s architectural thinking rather than any inherent political message. Tafuri and Dal Co. wisely warned against seeing the structure as some kind of metaphor for socialism. Paying close attention to the architect’s initial sketches (shown above), they derived an interpretation of the pavilion as a daring formal experiment rather than a propaganda piece. “[Mel’nikov’s pavilion] was a dynamic building based on the intersection of deformed geometrical masses that obliged the visitor to move along specific diagonals. There is no point in reading those ‘intersections’ as metaphors of the socialist dynamic: the preparatory drawings for the pavilion show circular buildings which are broken up, inclined, and interconnected in informal manner, indicating beyond a doubt that what interested the architect was only experimentation with a language made up of alienated objects, of volumes designed to deform their own geometry and in fact clashing with each other” (pg. 180).
.
This was, incidentally, roughly in accordance with Mel’nikov’s own self-understanding at the time of the Paris Expo. Upon arriving in Paris, and completing the startling structure, the Soviet architect found himself a minor celebrity on the scene. A buzz already surrounded Mel’nikov given the sketches that’d been previewed in the Parisian press. In the summer of 1925, then, a major newspaper sat down to interview the emerging designer. Continue reading
.
In this epoch of the triumphant development of mechanical engineering and the continuous growth of industrialization a new conception of artistic activity is being born. New demands are being made of the fine arts. Old and decrepit forms are being repudiated. Modernity demands of fine art that it should directly serve the urgent needs of our time.
Bending their ear to the modern world’s demands, artists are trying to find new principles forgiving form to their intentions — new principles that will be in keeping with the industrial and technological character of modern civilization. If they proceed from outside and amount to an “adapting” of old forms to new content, these attempts are rarely successful. Art can be brought onto its true path only through the creation of new forms which are adequate to the forms of life itself, and which answer its concrete requirements. Instead of seeking every kind of adaptation from the outside, what we need is the equally possible discovery of new values from within, that is, in the field of those phenomena which are characteristic of the modern tenor of life, of the modern state of technology. To a certain degree, art may become engineering. It must move from its previous aimless decorativeness, from its unprincipled aestheticism alienated from life, to an existence of practical utility. In this process the question of a transformation of artistic forms must not depend exclusively upon ideological content, but must be solved on the basis of a fundamental re-examination of the means of expression. Industrial and technological “being” cannot fail to influence the artistic and creative “consciousness.”
Needless to say, diverse other factors can also influence this consciousness. In the latest Western European art, and on the Left Front of the visual arts in the USSR, one can see the influence of prehistoric, primitive art, of ancient, archaic cultures, of the art of savages, children folk-cultures and so on. But when we are told that the artists who soak up these influences are “setting up new traditions,” are “achieving one of the greatest revolutions ever known in the history of the arts,” we are justified in doubting the extent to which these “new” traditions have any genuinely revolutionary content. Would it not be more correct to regard them as feeble imitation sui generis, as a conscious return to those albeit great, but already incarnate and largely extinct forms of which countless multitudes fill the long history of art — sometimes outreaching their original prototypes created at the dawn of human existence, sometimes endlessly inferior to them. Do we have to seek artistic models in the cemeteries of dead art, in the depth of history, amongst socially backward strata of modern humanity, when the progress of modern life is endlessly generating new forms, is conquering the indifference of the elements and harnessing them in the steel chains of technology. Instead of imitating the stiffened corpses of dead forms — albeit of beautiful ones — is it not better to seek the basis of a new art in the deep structures of organic and spatial phenomena in the world around us?
Investigation of the principles governing these structures leads to an identification of the primary geometrical laws common to the most diverse phenomena of the external world. It is precisely investigation, positing the principle of a scientific foundation for art, that will offer the possibility of finding a synthesis of technology with all aspects of the visual arts in a single constructivist art.
We do not yet have one single investigation specifically devoted to the question of constructivism. More than that, we do not have so much as an essay which elucidates the concept of constructivism, or outlines its course of development. Most discussion of constructivism is very superficial and unconvincing: people point out that it is based on principles of the mechanical and geometrical inter-relations of materials and their forms. They mention that constructivism aspires to create practically useful and externally beautiful objects (or in the first place, designs for them). Finally they underline constructivism’s direct connection with the mechanization of the whole structure of our lives, with the intensive development of industrial production, and so on. None of these diffuse and foggy definitions give any precise or true understanding of the essence of constructivism. Indeed, it is difficult to give a precise definition when it has still not fully defined itself. It is impossible to write an investigation of a subject whose actual nature has still not yet entirely emerged. This is why constructivism should not now be written about by historians of art or aesthetic critics, but by theoreticians of art or — even better — by practitioners, that is to say by those artists (or engineers) who are themselves constructivists.
The book presented to the reader here by architect-artist Iakov G. Chernikhov constitutes precisely such an experiment in laying out the fundamentals of constructivism. The author is not an art historian evaluating an artistic phenomenon “from the sidelines,” but a builder-artist pursuing and creating relatively new forms of depiction in his own personal professional work.
Chernikhov’s book The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms is not a narrowly specialist technical investigation or handbook; if it were the latter there would be no place in it for a preface from an art historian. This book has an incomparably broader perspective. It is an investigation of theoretical principles which touch upon certain problems of the philosophy of art. The questions which the author raises about the meaning of the constructive approach, about its essence, about the nature or “constitution” of that approach, about the laws of construction and about constructive principles of form-generation, all these lead to the boundaries where the theory of art begins. However the author does not withdraw into the debris of abstract cognition. He does not get cut off from the real origins of his theoretical debate. In his role as a practicing artist participating directly in the productive and constructional life of our country, Chernikhov knows all too well the importance and value of concrete tasks in the art of today understanding “art,” as I do, in the very broadest sense of that word. While taking into account the methodological value of abstract solutions and structures, he also knows that we must not build forms which are beyond the realm of the useful, that we must not prop up the concept of a self-sufficient, “pure” art. His book rests upon a recognition of the profound commonality of the constructive principles underlying art and technology. And with that, on a recognition that the creative handling of materials can become a great organizing force, if it is directed towards the creation of useful, utilitarian forms. Continue reading
