A fairly rare, untranslated article by Manfredo Tafuri on the crisis of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union.
Italian translators welcome! Jasmine Curcio, I’m looking at you.
[scribd id=126848164 key=key-m8mpkza4mqu2i7gjih0 mode=scroll]
planning
Modernist architecture archive
.
IMAGE: Lev Rudnev’s City of the future (1925),
before his turn to Stalinist neoclassicism
.
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.
Le Corbusier’s “The Atmosphere of Moscow,” along with His Letter to Ginzburg on Deurbanization
Barsch and Ginzburg, Proposal for the Green City (1930)
From Le Corbusier’s Precisions on the Present
State of Architecture and City Planning (1930)
*****
I am not trying to learn Russian, that would be a wager. But I hear people saying krasni and krassivo. I question. Krasni means red, krassivo means beautiful. Before [the Revolution], they say, the terms meant the same: red and beautiful. Red was beautiful.
If I base myself on my own perceptions, I affirm: red is what is a living being, life, intensity, activeness; there is no doubt.
So naturally I feel I have the right to admit that life is beautiful, or that the beautiful is life.
That little linguistic mathematics is not so ridiculous when one is preoccupied with architecture and planning.
*****
The USSR has decided to carry on a general program of equipment for the country: the five-year plan. It is being carried out. It was even decided to concentrate the greater part of the product of present work on carrying out this program: that is why there is no longer any butter on the spinach here,nor any more caviar in Moscow; the savings are used to make foreign exchange.