Socialist architecture

[alexandru.mircea]

Excellent stuff, No1.

[No1]

Thank you.
Many people do not realize that social realism (comiblocks) and Stalinism are not ideas formed in Russia. Social realism originated in the UK and part of Germany and France. It was imported into Russia. The original socialist architecture in Russia had nothing to do with social realism. The original revolutionary architecture originated in Russia is Constructivism and that is modern and avant-garde. In fact we can see by the architecture fall of the Soviet Union.
Here's the text from the Financial Times:

Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935, Royal Academy, London

In the long history of modernism, painting and architecture only very rarely came together. But the moment when they most visibly did, a little under a century ago, sparked an explosion of visual language that still looks revolutionary today. That collision occurred in Russia after 1917 and the result was constructivism, the restless, relentless, radical offspring of modernism, agitprop and revolution. Quite how viscerally modern it still seems is clear from a visit to the genteel faux-Renaissance courtyard of London’s Royal Academy, in the middle of which sits a model of Tatlin’s Tower, communism’s mooted, spiralling Tower of Babel, a 400m-high propaganda machine and conference centre that would have towered above Moscow.
The red-painted tower is the perfect trail for an exhibition of utopian visions and painful realities. Like communism itself, the purity of the vision belies today’s physical reality. The paintings and sketches, the black, red and grey geometric forms floating on white fields, are still mesmerising – an abstract, ethereal architectural ideal. One highlight is the beautiful flattened post-cubist space of Solomon Nikritin’s “The Connection of Painting to Architecture” (1919-21), which eloquently justifies the exhibition’s claim that, for a time at least in Soviet Russia, politics, art and architecture fused to create a still unsurpassed moment of architectural invention. But part of the fascination here is the juxtaposition of these pure compositions with contemporary images of the architecture they inspired.
Exquisite, fragile drawings by Vladimir Tatlin, Ivan Kliun, Alexandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and less familiar names sit beside a series of superb photos by Richard Pare that reveal the decaying ruins of the era’s surviving architectural monuments. Factories, bakeries, housing co-operatives and workers’ clubs are documented in merciless detail, the paint on their walls flaking, their plaster spalling, their rendering crumbling, with huge ducts driven through clean lines with DIY bodge-job ingenuity. These are buildings that were envisaged as harbingers of a new world of efficiency, hygiene and technocratic achievement, but were inhabited by generations of workers whose lives never fulfilled that promise and who never had the means to maintain them.
Where the art and the architecture come together most perfectly, though, is in the extraordinary inventiveness of revolutionary agitprop. The designs for the incredible contraptions intended to proselytise the proletarian revolution look as startlingly innovative today as they ever did. The red rims of Gustav Klutsis’s jutting speaker horns, for example, appear on the picture plane like suprematist motifs, sitting atop a simple construction of struts and cables; the same designer’s elaborate, almost Dadaist design for a combination platform, kiosk and speaker system looks like a mechanical version of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”, its frames and podium collapsing and folding like a surreal concertina. These designs reveal the insecurity of the revolution – it being seen as critical to spread the message to hesitant workers – and represent the purest expressions of constructivism, uncompromised as they are by construction and use.
Those buildings that were realised were shoddily thrown together by a regime short of money and materials and a depleted workforce exhausted by war and hunger, its skills still those of the 19th century – at best. It was a stage-set modernity. The only building that achieved any semblance of permanence or the crispness of the drawings was the one with which the show closes, Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square by Alexei Shchusev. A late constructivist pyramid, it remains the movement’s darkest, most enigmatic building, bridging the transition from revolutionary utopianism to heavy-handed Stalinist classicism.
This is a superb show, full of unfamiliar things, from Soviet archive photos of constructivist masterpieces (the bureaucracy of full employment visible in their meticulous index card settings) to the wonderful drawings on cheap parcel paper, things that reveal the texture of shortages and the urgency of the artistic moment. There are huge gaps – no Malevich, no Chernikov – but it doesn’t matter, there’s plenty here to stimulate and inspire, even if we know it all ended badly (particularly for the architecture itself which languishes in such a universally sorry state).
The day before I visited the exhibition I’d hung around the curious tent cities by St Paul’s and in Finsbury Square, with their proliferation of handwritten, misspelt cardboard signs and droopy banners. The aesthetics of anti-capitalist demonstration, of outrage agitprop, need to be relearned, it seems. This show is the perfect place to do it.

Nico_Uru, which opened thread obviously know the difference because he/she have avatar is Tatlinov tower-one of Constructivist symbols. Nico_Uru was first clearly stated the difference between Stalinism and Constructivism.

[No1]

Lenin's Mausoleum(Tomb) on Red square in Moscow represent transition from Constructivism to Stalin neo-clasicism-Postconstructivism:



http://www.historvius.com/images/ori...soleum-581.jpg



http://www.edupics.com/lenin-mausoleum-t4977.jpg

[No1]

More examples of Postconstructivism:

Karpovka housing-Leningrad(Saint Petersburg), by Igor Fomin, 1934



http://galleria.sovarch.ru/lensovet/lensovet01.jpg



http://galleria.sovarch.ru/lensovet/lensovet02.jpg



http://galleria.sovarch.ru/lensovet/lensovet05.jpg



http://galleria.sovarch.ru/lensovet/lensovet06.jpg

Today:



http://galleria.sovarch.ru/lensovet/lensovet14.jpg



http://galleria.sovarch.ru/lensovet/lensovet13.jpg



http://galleria.sovarch.ru/lensovet/lensovet24.jpg

[No1]

And example of Stalinist architecture:

-Red Army Theatre in Moscow(1940)

View from sky:

image hosted on flickr


http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4015/4...6d4e275f_z.jpg

And from Earth:



http://prv0.lori-images.net/tsentral...88-preview.jpg



http://lifeglobe.net/media/entry/346/2687191_3.jpg



http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4705/...ab_3a657060_XL



http://prv1.lori-images.net/tsentral...21-preview.jpg



http://www.zakazmebeli.com/images/st...r/SF__4492.JPG

[No1]

I believe that many will not agree with me but I think this is a big drop. From the avant-garde and something new in the world where you set the standard to neo-classical kitsch.

[Iluminat]

I can agree with you that constructivism was more interesting but socreal have it's charm too I wouldn't call it kitch it was quite a diverse style with many variations in different countries, some examples are very similar to modernism.

[AlekseyVT]

Originally Posted by No1

Constructivism has set standards of avant-garde architecture of the 20th century. He had a huge impact on the west. German Bauhaus was heavily influenced by Constructivism. It is interesting that the Nazis embraced Bauhas even though he was under enormous Russian ie. Communist influence.

Power station of Textile Factory "Red Banner" in St. Petersburg (1925-1926, architect - Erich Mendelsohn). The only project realised by German Сonstructivists in USSR:




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Banner_Textile_Factory

[No1]

Originally Posted by Iluminat

I can agree with you that constructivism was more interesting but socreal have it's charm too I wouldn't call it kitch it was quite a diverse style with many variations in different countries, some examples are very similar to modernism.

I agree that not all kitch and has good building in socrealism but it is certain decline.

Mosselprom Building, Moscow. 1923-1924(D. M. Kogan, A. F. Loleit, V. D. Tsvetaev)



http://theconstructivistproject.com/...elprom1_nm.jpg



http://www.mskvd.ru/plugins/p17_imag...mages/1/15.jpg

Kirov Palace of Culture, St. Petersburg. 1930-1937(N. A. Trotskii, S. N. Kozak)

image hosted on flickr


http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1398/5...bf2011a9_z.jpg

image hosted on flickr


http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3600/3...923_z.jpg?zz=1

Intourist Garage, 1934(K. Melnikov, V. Kurochkin)



http://theconstructivistproject.com/...ourist2_nm.jpg



http://files2.structurae.de/files/ph...geinturist.jpg

[wkiehl101]

This is a rather interesting thread. The buildings in it aren't so bad.

[No1]

Russian State Library(Lenin Library) Moscow, 1928-1941( Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh)

In the process, the building acquired the modernized neoclassicism exterior features of the Palace of Soviets (co-designed by Shchuko and Gelfreikh), departing from the stern modernism of the 1927 drafts

First, Constructivist, plan:



http://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com...brary-1928.jpg

Today:



http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/d30-24/lenin-library.jpg




http://www.fotocity.ru/FOTOS/N040924_37e.jpg



http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/russia...a-Images/2.jpg

That is not Lenin on picture it's Dostoyevski. For those people can't recognize




http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5607/...9f_89780620_XL



http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5806/...67_8ceb2cf1_XL



http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5708/...98_8196eadb_XL



http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4407/...7c_45d9b789_XL

[No1]

This is one of the biggest librarys in the world with over 17 milion books.
Interiror:



http://telfleur.files.wordpress.com/...e-lobb_ruy.jpg



http://www.crownheights.info/media/3...%20library.jpg



http://englishrussia.com/wp-content/...010/10/461.jpg

Near library is Metro station same name: Biblioteka Imeni Lenina(open 1935):



http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-Lenina-mm.jpg

[Gibbs93]

[Paper Ninja]

image hosted on flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/2410564...57625525270391

[ThatOneGuy]

Aside from the average commieblocks, communist architecture was really beautiful, in its own way! As long as it's well maintained.

[desertpunk]

image hosted on flickr

Untitled by ivanglie, on Flickr

[SydCampeador]

aesthetics vs safety

[ovem]

If there was no WW2, Moscow would be the the worlds greatest masterpiece.

[ovem]

wrong post

[erbse]

Originally Posted by ovem

If there was no WW2, Moscow would be the the worlds greatest masterpiece.

What the heck are you talking about? The commies started destroying most of the city's beauty prior to WW2.