Plan for "New Moscow" (April 1929)
Here’s another batch of early Soviet avant-garde architectural journals, from between 1929-1930. The 1929 one is the one I most recently worked on; the others were converted into PDFs back before I had perfected the method of separating out the text from the rest of the page. As a result, these are all in grayscale, though they remain very readable. The image quality is a little lower than on my more recent uploads. But here they are, so enjoy!
Mel’nikov’s Proposal for the Laboratory of Sleep (1930)
Included in this post is the original issue of Building Moscow (Строительство Москвы), in which the general planning schemes for the proposed “Green City” of Moscow were submitted. Contributors to this competition included some of the premier architects and city-planners of the day: Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch of OSA, Nikolai Ladovskii of ARU (a splinter group of ASNOVA), and Konstantin Mel’nikov, who was more of an independent (his membership in the different avant-garde architectural societies of the day varied over time).
The plans were wildly ambitious, and, unfortunately, none of them were realized. Nevertheless, the ambition and utopianism of their proposals remain as fascinating and haunting today as ever. Haunting, because these plans were so crudely shoved aside by Kaganovich and the Stalinist bureaucracy — because the ideas survived as artifacts long after their potential for realization had passed, because their fantasy has since outlived history and continues to linger over it, like a ghost. Thus, the fact that these science fictions were discarded, placed on the Hegelian “slaughterbench of history,” did not mean that they altogether vanished without a trace. They survive, spectrally, as testaments to a society that could have been.
The extraordinary ambitions of the Soviet planners were declared unrealistic and impracticable. And indeed, given the Soviets’ technological and material limitations at that time, they may well have been impossible. But such a verdict has often been passed on past visions of the future, and utopian speculation in general. Yet the modernists who took part in this competition felt that such utopianism was not only warranted, but required by a revolutionary society like the Soviet Union. Under capitalism, they argued, utopianism was a waste of time and impossible to realize. Now that the October Revolution had overturned these social relations, however, utopia was at last realizable, and so fantastic visions of the future were at last justified.
In any case, this issue contains Ginzburg and Barshch’s reproduction of their famous Disurbanist scheme for the Green city, which they had first unveiled in an issue of Modern Architecture (Современная архитектура) a month before. It also includes Mel’nikov’s mysterious and intriguing proposals for a “Laboratory of Sleep,” an “Institution for the Transformation of the Perspective of Man,” and a “Sonata of Sleep.” Ladovskii’s project for “the rationalization of rest and socialist living” saw him experimenting with his notion of a parabolic city within the municipal limits of Moscow. The rationalization of rest and sleep were indeed very important when it came to the Green City; Le Corbusier mentioned over and over his delight at the Soviets’ abolition of the seven-day week, replaced now by a five-day cycle of working for four days and resting on the fifth.
Below is the original issue, digitized and restored to the best of my ability from the microfiche copy:
El Lissitzky's "New Man" (1923)
Note from the blogger: I tend to agree with the Marxist architectural critic Manfredo Tafuri’s assessment of the various strains of the avant-garde as all aspiring to enact a Weberian “rationalization” of society, whether in it’s negative, nihilistic form (Dada, Absurdism) or in its positive, constructive form (Futurism, Functionalism, Constructivism). But Eagleton quite rightly points out the politicization of modern art, as it appropriated and took on the form of political literature: the tract, and the manifesto. He also notes the avant-garde’s tendency to associate with various anti-capitalist movements (Bolshevism, Trotskyism, and even Fascism). All this corresponded to, after the death of the avant-garde in the 1960s (see Arthur Danto on this), post-modern art’s seeming apoliticism. Just as modern art was heavily political, post-modern art is largely post-political, in the sense that the ideology of the “post-ideological age” took on in the 1980s and 1990s. The following piece is by the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, whose work I occasionally enjoy and at other times find problematic. This particular work is a review of an upcoming book by Aleksei Danchev, though Eagleton’s article takes on something of a life of its own:
In the world of polite letters, literature is the enemy of programmes, polemics, sectarian rancour, the sour stink of doctrinal orthodoxies. It is the home of the unique particular, the provisional and exploratory, of everything that resists being reduced to a scheme or an agenda. This, one might note, is a fairly recent point of view. That literature should be free of doctrinal orthodoxy would have come as a surprise to Dante and Milton. Swift is a great writer full of sectarian rancour. Terms like “provisional” and “exploratory” do not best characterize Samuel Johnson’s literary views.
Nor do they best describe the views of the various twentieth-century avant-gardes, which set out to demolish this whole conception of art. From the Futurists and Constructivists to the Surrealists and Situationists, art became militant, partisan and programmatic. It was to be liberated from the libraries and museums and integrated with everyday life. In time, the distinction between art and life, the playful and the pragmatic, would be erased. There were to be no more professional artists, just common citizens who occasionally wrote a poem or made a piece of sculpture. The summons rang out to abandon one’s easel and design useful objects for working people, as some of the Russian Constructivists did. Poets were to read their poetry through megaphones in factory yards, or scribble their verses on the shirt-fronts of passing strangers. A moustache was appended to the Mona Lisa. A Soviet theatre director took over a whole naval port for several days, battleships and all, and commandeered its 300,000 citizens for his cast.
Theatre audiences might be asked to vote at the end of the play, or march en masse on the local town hall. From agitprop to poster design, art was an instrument in the service of political revolution. For some avant-gardists, there were to be no more permanent art objects, since they would only suffer the indignity of becoming commodities. Instead, one should create gestures, happenings, situations, stray intensities, events which consumed themselves in the act of production. “To the electric chair with Chopin!”, fulminated the founder of Mexican Stridentism. “The Venus de Milo is a graphic example of decline”, declares Kasimir Malevich in his lengthy Suprematist Manifesto of 1916, reproduced here. The most obscene word of all was “academic”.
In this cultural revolution, two broad currents can be distinguished. The more positive strain of avant-gardism sought to transform human perceptions in order to adapt them to the new technological age. Avant-gardes tend to take root in societies still in the first flush of modernization, when the oppressive aspects of the new technologies are less obvious than the exhilarating ones. History is now skidding by so fast that the only image of the present is the future. Nothing is more typical of these activists than a mindless celebration of novelty – a brash conviction that an absolutely new epoch is breaking around them, that twentieth-century humanity is on the brink of greater, more rapid change than at any time in the past (they were to be proved right about that), and that everything that happened up to ten minutes ago is ancient history. How one would set about identifying absolute novelty is a logical problem that did not detain them.
This fetishism of the future crops up on almost every page of 100 Artists’ Manifestos, deftly selected and stylishly introduced by Alex Danchev. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which as Danchev points out founded not only Futurism but the very idea of the artistic manifesto, celebrates “the beauty of speed”. “A racing car, its bonnet decked with exhaust pipes like serpents with galvanic breath . . . is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” A later Futurist proclamation incites the brethren to destroy all “passéist” clothes (“tight-fitting,colourless, funereal, decadent”) and invent futurist clothes instead, “daring clothes with brilliant colours and dynamic lines”. Like Romanticism, the revolutionary avant-garde was staffed by the young, full of contempt for their experimentally challenged elders. In its more flamboyant moments, of which it had more than a few, it raised adolescence to an ideology.
Revolutionaries singing the praises of technological progress is rather like archbishops recommending adultery. These cultural experimenters seem to have overlooked the fact that no social system in history has been more innovative and dynamic than capitalism, and that a credulous trust in progress was a stock belief of the very middle classes they sought to outrage. It is true that this faith was coming badly unstuck in the early twentieth century, and would finally lie bleeding on the battlefields of the First World War. Even so, turning the middle classes’ belief in technological progress against their own cultural conservatism was always a perilous tactic.
Scandalizing the bourgeoisie, whose grandchildren were to be charged fancy prices for the very works of art that did so, meant more than rejecting this or that convention. It involved an assault on the idea of men and women as autonomous individuals with rich interior lives. That ripe, Proustian interiority was to be ripped apart by an art that was externalizing, mechanistic and deconstructive. For the first time in the history of aesthetics, fragmentation and dislocation ousted the impulse to unify. The Old Man (private, spiritual, contemplative) was to be taken apart, and the New Man (active, collectivist, mobile, anonymous) was to be constructed in his place. This meant waging an unpleasantly macho campaign against moralism, realism and Romanticism, all of which were soggy with feminine feeling. The Futurist Manifesto ditches feminism along with libraries, museums and academies. The avant-garde was a robustly masculine affair; its hymns to lust and Deleuze-like cult of desire boded ill for anyone furnished with a uterus. A Manifesto of Futurist Woman encourages woman “to find once more her cruelty and her violence that make her attack the vanquished because they are vanquished”. There is a good deal of such sub-Nietzschean swagger in the current as a whole. The decadent values of pity and compassion – mere fronts for the predatory bourgeoisie – must give way to a certain spiritual brutalism.
Alongside the more positive strand of avant-garde revolt, with its complex relations to Bolshevism, Trotskyism and (in the case of Marinetti) Fascism, flourished a more negative, even nihilistic strain, which held that the cultural establishment could absorb attacks on this or that meaning; what it could not withstand was an assault on meaning as such. It followed that the most lethal revolutionary weapon was absurdity. In a period of savage irrationalism stretching from the Somme to the rise of Hitler, only the lunatic could be said to be sane. Reason itself was an oppressive force, and the title of madman was one to be cherished. Logic was the preserve of those incapable of creation. Since manifestos made a kind of sense, they, too, were to be junked. “No more manifestos”, demanded a Dadaist manifesto. “DADA MEANS NOTHING”, announced another.
Caspar David Friedrich, "Sunset" (1835)
History proves again and again
How Nature points out the folly of man…
— Blue Oyster Cult, “Godzilla”
With recent events in Japan and images of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunami still fresh in our minds, it seems appropriate to revisit the old issue of humanity’s relationship to nature. The proper exposition of the problem would require a great deal of space; therefore, I propose to divide my treatment of the issue into three separate blog entries, each of which builds on the results of those that precede it. After all, the problem of man’s relation to nature has been conceived in a number of distinct ways over the ages, many of which survive into the present day, in various mutations.
So perhaps it might be useful to begin with an overview, a genealogy of sorts, so that these different conceptions and their relation to one another can be clarified. The presentation will be dialectical, but not out of any obligation to some artificially preconfigured format. It will be dialectical because the subject at hand is itself really dialectical, as the various conceptions of nature interweave and overlap in their progress through history. For man’s orientation to nature has by no means been the same over time; and by that same token are no later conceptions of nature that do not bear the traces of those that came before it.
And so, to begin at the beginning:
At some points, nature was viewed as an adversary to be feared, bringing plague, catastrophe, and famine to ravage mankind. Often these elemental forces were either animistically, naturalistically, or totemistically embodied as divine powers in themselves,[1] or anthropomorphized as gods who commanded these forces as they saw fit. When cataclysms occurred, it was because the gods or spirits had somehow been enraged by the misdeeds of men, and thus they unleashed their fury upon the mass of fear-stricken mortals. In Christian times, this same logic persisted,[2] with periods of plenty seen as signs of God’s providence and grace, while periods of blight were viewed as God’s wrath, brought on by the sinfulness and iniquity of men.
Later, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, nature was reenvisioned as dead matter, abiding by a set of mechanical but unknown laws, which could be discovered and mastered through careful study and observation under controlled conditions. As the Baconian dictum went, contra Aristotle: “the secrets of nature reveal themselves better through harassments applied by the arts [torture] than when they go on in their own way.”[3] Thus began the “conquest” of nature, the quest to harness its forces so that they may serve the ends of mankind. Robbed of their mysterious properties, natural objects therefore became “disenchanted,” in the Weberian sense.[4] With the arrival of the Enlightenment, as Hegel recognized, “the intellect will cognize what is intuited as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber.”[5]
Romanticism responded to this alienation from nature with a sense of tragic loss, and sought to regain what they saw as the fractured unity of man and nature. The Romantics exalted the primitive, celebrating the charming naïveté of the ancient Greeks or their modern-day counterparts, who appeared in the form of “noble savages.” The playwright Friedrich Schiller even dedicated an essay to the distinction between the “naïve”[6] and “sentimental” in poetry. For modern man, he asserted, “nature has disappeared from our humanity, and we can reencounter it in its genuineness only outside of humanity in the inanimate world. Not our greater naturalness [Naturmäßigkeit], but the very opposite, the unnaturalness [Naturwidrigkeit] of our relationships, conditions, and mores forces us to fashion a satisfaction in the physical world that is not to be hoped for in the moral world.”[7] The Romantics thus preferred the bucolic simplicity of the small old village to the sprawling chaos of the modern city. Vitalistic explanations of nature, like Goethe’s and Schelling’s, were offered as alternatives to the Democritean-Newtonian vision of the universe as composed of dead matter and obeying a changeless set of mechanical laws.
During my time as author of The Charnel-House I have been the beneficiary of a number of appreciative comments and plugs that have helped to publicize and further spread the word about my blog. Needless to say, I am deeply grateful to have received these endorsements. But now it has come time to return their generosity, as well as to include a few plugs of my own.
First of all, I should like to thank the following blogs for their support:
1. Anti-German/Anti-National Translation: A blog with incredible breadth and critical acuity, providing translation work as well as discussions of anti-Semitism on the Left.
2. Nasty, Brutalist, and Short: Perhaps the most original and intriguing architectural critic to be found in the blogosphere, writing from an explicitly Bolshevist and pro-Modernist perspective.
3. Renegade Eye: A blog associated with the Trotskyist International Marxist Tendency (IMT), whose position on Chavez and Venezuela might be a far cry from my own, but which always provides interesting articles and topics for discussion. The quality of discussion varies from post to post, but the author of the blog himself is quite to-the-point and intellectually honest.
4. Bob From Brockley: Of all the blogs that have linked to mine, I am by far the least acquainted with this one. From what I understand, the author is a British Leftist who quickly got fed up with all the nonsense floating around on the Left there. It’s a blog I’d love to explore some more in the coming months.
The list of sites I’d like to plug is too long for a single post, but you’ll find them all in my links on the right-hand side of the page, organized roughly according to their content. I recommend all of them, with the only reservation being that they do not necessarily reflect my own views. Nevertheless, I find all of them engaging enough to check out. Enjoy!
Diagram for the Proposed Reconstruction of Moscow
Строительство Москвы, pronounced “Stroitel’stvo Moskvy,” was a Soviet journal published from 1924-1941. In the first couple years of its existence, its focus was primarily on the construction industry and its activities in Moscow, talking about city renovation following the end of the devastating Civil War. Its articles during this period were of a mostly journalistic nature, reporting recent developments and discussing new building proposals. One section toward the end was usually reserved for a “Chronicle of Foreign Technology,” in which new technological achievements in the West were detailed.
Around 1927, however, the focus of the journal shifted to more theoretical matters, absorbing some of the avant-garde influences of magazines like SA, which was reflected by some of the more programmatic articles it featured. The nature of modern architecture was discussed, in a way that was slightly more inclusive than the strictly Constructivist SA, under the editorship of Ginzburg and the Vesnins (and later Khiger). Nikolai Ladovskii published several articles in Building Moscow, as well as his protégés Krutikov and Krasil’nikov. Some of the more traditional, academic architects were also able to publish during this period.
Between 1929 and 1931, the subject of greater city planning was introduced to the journal, with a great deal of attention devoted to the plans to reconstruct Moscow, overseen by Stalin’s henchman Kaganovich. The competition for the design of the Palace of the Soviets, planned for construction right outside the Kremlin, was also a major subject dealt with by Building Moscow. After 1932 or so, with the results of the competition in, the journal slowly began to drift into a neoclassicist direction, where it would remain until it ceased publication in the leadup to war with Germany in 1941.
Anyway, here are another few issues of the journal, of a more avant-garde and theoretical flavor, talking about urbanism and design:
Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 5
Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 6
Aleksandr Sil'chenkov's Proposal for the "House of Industry" Project, 1929
Another long overdue update. My two-month absence can be explained by a series of personal matters to which I’ve had to attend, as well as by an exceedingly laborious part of my research in which I’ve been involved. This post will share some of the fruits of that labor, however, providing a sneak-peak into some of the subjects I’ve been working on. I flatter myself to think that I am also hereby contributing to the further democratization of knowledge, freeing long-forgotten documents from their obscurity in old libraries and distant archives. But the truth is that I have been the beneficiary of so much of the work undertaken by people with similar motives, scanning valuable documents and thereby disseminating their information, that I feel this is the least I could do.
Cutting to the matter at hand, the files attached to this post are just some of the old avant-garde journals which I’ve been carefully converting to a readable PDF format, in full-text versions that include illustrations as well as raw text. The difference between these files and the ones I digitized from Современная архитектура late last year is that I actually never encountered the physical documents that I was working with. These rare documents were only accessible to me in microfiche and microfilm format, preserved as part of Columbia University’s and the New York Public Library’s effort to catalogue early Soviet periodicals. Some of these microform documents were in good condition, with minimal dust and other imperfections. Others, unfortunately, were not.
To briefly describe the process by which I digitized these journals (for those who might be interested or are perhaps considering similar work), I shall here sketch out the major steps it involved. First, I had to create a makeshift light-table separate from the actual microform scanners at the library, which tend to produce extremely shoddy and unreadable facsimiles. I then proceeded to photograph each individual frame of microfilm or microfiche with a digital camera. I personally do not own a camera with a very high-resolution optical lens (this requires something like a 40-100x zoom), so I instead removed one of the detachable high-zoom lenses from one of the scanners and then shot my own pictures at my camera’s maximum zoom through this second lens. Anyone who has better equipment than I did can easily bypass this step.
It took a while to get used to taking good shots of each individual frame, but once I had gathered all of them I loaded them onto my computer and began running them through image-processing software. The number of programs I ended up using, which probably could be simplified by anyone who knows how to work with images better than I, included Aperture, Photoshop, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). If anyone is interested in the actual adjustments I made to each file to render them more readable, they can inquire in the comments section. I shall spare my readers these boring details. Anyway, clarifying the text portions of these journals I found often distorted the images that appeared alongside them, and so I decided to process each page with images twice, once for the images and once for the text. I then mapped on some cleaned-up versions of the pictures onto the cleaned-up texts and ran the resulting images through the ABBYY FineReader text-recognition program.
The final product of this whole confounded process can be found below. Enjoy! More will be coming soon. I’ve catalogued the entire run of Строительство Москвы from 1926-1932, Советская архитектура from 1931-1934, and a number of assorted articles relating to architecture from the journals Советское искусство, Плановое хозяйство, and Революция и культура. They shall be forthcoming. Here are some of the ones I’ve finished so far:
Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 9
Строительство Москвы – (1931) – № 8
Строительство Москвы – (1930) – № 1
Строительство Москвы – (1929) – № 1
Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 4
Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 2
Строительство Москвы – (1928) – № 3
Николай Докучаев – «Архитектура и планировка городов» – Советское искусство – (1926) – № 6
Many thanks to Arch-Grafika.ru/ for making available the following major works of the famed Russian avant-garde architect Iakov Chernikhov, which I have converted into PDF form and rendered searchable:
1. Яков Чернихов — 101 архитектурная фантазия (1927) [101 Architectural Fantasies]
2. Яков Чернихов — Основы Современной Архитектуры (1930) [The Fundamentals of Modern Architecture]
3. Яков Чернихов — Конструкция машинных и архитектурных форм (1933) [The Construction of Machine and Architectural Forms, of which I have recently posted an excellent full-text translation by the late Catherine Cooke]
An additional thank you to Arch-Grafika for crediting my work in uploading Izvestiia ASNOVA.
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IMAGE: Lev Rudnev’s City of the future (1925),
before his turn to Stalinist neoclassicism
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An update on the Modernist Architecture Archive/Database I discussed a couple posts ago. I’ve begun work on it, and have uploaded almost half of the documents I intend to include. Only a few of the Russian ones are up yet, but I’m hoping to post them over the next couple days. There are many more on the way.
However, this might not be the most convenient way to browse through it all. For a more manageable overall view of each of the individual articles (detailing the author, title, and year of publication), click here.
The Original Cover to Behne’s Book, Featuring El Lissitzky’s “Cloudprop”
Foreword
Man’s primordial reason for building is to protect himself against the cold, against animals, against enemies. He is driven by necessity: he would not build were it not for definite, compelling, urgent purposes. His early buildings are purely functional in character; they are in their nature essentially tools.
But when we study the earliest stages of human culture, we find that the instinctive joys of play cannot be separated from practical matters. Primitive man is not strictly utilitarian. He demonstrates his instinct for play even in his tools, which he makes smooth and beautiful beyond the demands of strict necessity, painting them or decorating them with ornaments.
The tool called “house” is no exception to this.
From the very beginning the house has been as much a toy as a tool. It is difficult to say how long a balance was maintained between the two poles.
In the course of history we only rarely find such a balance.
The play instinct led to interest in form. Without that instinct it would be impossible to understand why the tool called “house” must look good and be a certain shape. Thus our play instinct established certain laws of form, although they are subject to change from time to time.
The laws of form did change periodically. But if laws of form were unquestionably the secondary element in the origin of all building, they became the stronger, stricter, more rigid principle in the history of human building — stronger, stricter, and more rigid than mere fulfillment of utilitarian function. Formal considerations outweighed considerations of purpose.
Thus a return to purpose is always revolutionary in its effect. Forms that have become tyrannical are discarded in order to create — from the recollection of the original function, from as neutral a condition as possible — a rejuvenated, living, breathing form.