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Constructivist architecture was aconstructivist style ofmodern architecture that flourished in theSoviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. Abstract and austere, the movement aimed to reflect modernindustrial society and urban space, while rejecting decorative stylization in favor of the industrial assemblage of materials.[1] Designs combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedlycommunist social purpose. Although it was divided into several competing factions, the movement produced many pioneering projects and finished buildings, before falling out of favor around 1932.[2] It has left marked effects on later developments inarchitecture.
Constructivist architecture emerged from the widerConstructivist art movement, which grew out ofRussian Futurism. Constructivist art had attempted to apply a three-dimensionalcubist vision to whollyabstract non-objective 'constructions' with akinetic element. After theRussian Revolution of 1917, it turned its attentions to the new social demands and industrial tasks required of the new regime. Two distinct threads emerged, the first was encapsulated inAntoine Pevsner's andNaum Gabo'sRealist manifesto which was concerned with space and rhythm, the second represented a struggle within theCommissariat for Enlightenment between those who argued forpure art and theProductivists such asAlexander Rodchenko,Varvara Stepanova andVladimir Tatlin, a more socially oriented group who wanted this art to be absorbed in industrial production.[3]
A split occurred in 1922 when Pevsner and Gabo emigrated. The movement then developed along sociallyutilitarian lines. The productivist majority gained the support of theProletkult and the magazineLEF, and later became the dominant influence of the architectural groupO.S.A.
The first and most famous Constructivist architectural project was the 1919 proposal for the headquarters of theComintern inSt Petersburg by theFuturistVladimir Tatlin, often calledTatlin's Tower. Though it remained unbuilt, the materials—glass and steel—and its futuristic ethos and political slant (the movements of its internal volumes were meant to symbolise revolution and the dialectic) set the tone for the projects of the 1920s.[4]
Another famous early Constructivist project was the Lenin Tribune byEl Lissitzky (1920), a moving speaker's podium. During theRussian Civil War theUNOVIS group centered onKasimir Malevich and Lissitzky designed various projects that forced together the 'non-objective' abstraction ofSuprematism with more utilitarian aims, creating ideal Constructivist cities— see also El Lissitzky'sProunen-Raum, the 'Dynamic City' (1919) ofGustav Klutsis; Lazar Khidekel's Workers Club (1926) and his Dubrovka Power Plant and first Sots Town (1931–33).
Immediately after theRussian Civil War, the USSR was too impoverished to commission any major new building projects. Nonetheless, the Soviet avant-garde schoolVkhutemas started an architectural wing in 1921, which was led by the architectNikolai Ladovsky, which was calledASNOVA (association of new architects). The teaching methods were both functional and fantastic, reflecting an interest inGestalt psychology, leading to daring experiments with form such as Simbirchev's glass-clad suspended restaurant.[5] Among the architects affiliated to the ASNOVA (Association of New Architects) wereEl Lissitzky,Konstantin Melnikov,Vladimir Krinsky and the youngBerthold Lubetkin.[6]
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Projects from 1923 to 1935 like Lissitzky andMart Stam's Wolkenbügel horizontal skyscrapers and Konstantin Melnikov's temporary pavilions showed the originality and ambition of this new group. Melnikov would design the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts of 1925, which popularised the new style, with its rooms designed by Rodchenko and its jagged, mechanical form.[4] Another glimpse of a Constructivist lived environment is visible in the popular science fiction filmAelita, which had interiors and exteriors modelled in angular, geometric fashion byAleksandra Ekster. The state-run Mosselprom department store of 1924 was also an early modernist building for the new consumerism of theNew Economic Policy, as was the Vesnin brothers' Mostorg store, built three years later. Modern offices for the mass press were also popular, such as theIzvestia headquarters.[7] This was built in 1926–7 and designed by Grigori Barkhin[8]
A colder and more technological Constructivist style was introduced by the 1923/4 glass office project by theVesnin brothers forLeningradskayaPravda. In 1925 theOSA Group, also with ties to Vkhutemas, was founded byAlexander Vesnin andMoisei Ginzburg—the Organisation of Contemporary Architects. This group had much in common with Weimar Germany'sFunctionalism, such as the housing projects ofErnst May.[4] Housing, especially collective housing in specially designeddom kommuny to replace the collectivised 19th century housing that was the norm, was the main priority of this group. The termsocial condenser was coined to describe their aims, which followed from the ideas of V.I.Lenin, who wrote in 1919 that "the real emancipation of women and real communism begins with the mass struggle against these petty household chores and the true reforming of the mass into a vast socialist household."
Collective housing projects that were built includedIvan Nikolaev'sCommunal House of the Textile Institute (Ordzhonikidze St, Moscow, 1929–1931), and Ginzburg's MoscowGosstrakh apartments and, most famously, hisNarkomfin Building.[8] Flats were built in a Constructivist idiom in Kharkiv, Moscow and Leningrad and in smaller towns. Ginzburg also designed a government building inAlma-Ata, while the Vesnin brothers designed a School of Film Actors in Moscow. Ginzburg critiqued the idea of building in the new society being the same as in the old: "treating workers' housing in the same way as they would bourgeois apartments...the Constructivists however approach the same problem with maximum consideration for those shifts and changes in our everyday life...our goal is the collaboration with the proletariat in creating a new way of life".[9] OSA published a magazine,SA or Contemporary Architecture from 1926 to 1930. The leading rationalist Ladovsky designed his own, rather different kind of mass housing, completing a Moscow apartment block in 1929. A particularly extravagant example is the 'Chekists Village' in Sverdlovsk (nowYekaterinburg) designed by Ivan Antonov, Veniamin Sokolov and Arseny Tumbasov, a hammer and sickle shaped collective housing complex for staff of thePeople's Commissariat for the Internal Affairs (NKVD), which currently serves as a hotel.
The new forms of the Constructivists began to symbolise the project for a new everyday life of the Soviet Union, then in the mixed economy of theNew Economic Policy.[10] State buildings were constructed like the hugeDerzhprom complex in Kharkiv[11] (designed by Serafimov, Folger and Kravets, 1926–1928) which was noted byReyner Banham in hisTheory and Design in the First Machine Age as being, along with theDessauBauhaus, the largest scale Modernist work of the 1920s.[12] Other notable works included the aluminum parabola and glazed staircase of Mikhail Barsch and Mikhail Sinyavsky's 1929 Moscow Planetarium.
The popularity of the new aesthetic led to traditionalist architects adopting Constructivism, as inIvan Zholtovsky's 1926 MOGES power station orAlexey Shchusev's Narkomzem offices, both in Moscow.[13] Similarly, the engineerVladimir Shukhov'sShukhov Tower was often seen as an avant-garde work and was, according toWalter Benjamin in his Moscow Diary, 'unlike any similar structure in the West'.[14] Shukhov also collaborated withMelnikov on theBakhmetevsky Bus Garage andNovo-Ryazanskaya Street Garage.[4] Many of these buildings are shown inSergei Eisenstein's film The General Line, which also featured a specially built mock-up Constructivist collective farm designed by Andrey Burov.
A central aim of the Constructivists was instilling the avant-garde in everyday life. From 1927 they worked on projects for Workers' Clubs, communal leisure facilities usually built in factory districts. Among the most famous of these are theKauchuk,Svoboda andRusakov clubs byKonstantin Melnikov, the club of the Likachev works by the Vesnin brothers, andIlya Golosov'sZuev Workers' Club.
At the same time as this foray into the everyday, outlandish projects were designed such asIvan Leonidov's Lenin Institute, a high tech work that bears comparison withBuckminster Fuller. This consisted of a skyscraper-sized library, a planetarium and dome, all linked together by a monorail; orGeorgy Krutikov's self-explanatory Flying City, an ASNOVA project that was intended as a serious proposal for airborne housing.The Melnikov House and hisBakhmetevsky Bus Garage are fine examples of the tensions between individualism and utilitarianism in Constructivism.
There were also projects forSuprematist skyscrapers called 'planits' or 'architektons' byKasimir Malevich, Lazar Khikeidel – Cosmic Habitats (1921–1922), Architectons (1922–1927), Workers Club (1926), Communal Dwelling (Коммунальное Жилище)(1927), A. Nikolsky and L. Khidekel – Moscow Cooperative Institute (1929). The fantastical element also found expression in the work ofYakov Chernikhov, who produced several books of experimental designs—most famouslyArchitectural Fantasies (1933)—earning him the epithet 'the SovietPiranesi'.
Despite the ambitiousness of many Constructivist proposals for reconstructed cities, there were fairly few examples of coherent Constructivist town planning. However, the Narvskaya Zastava district ofLeningrad became a focus for Constructivism. Beginning in 1925 communal housing was designed for the area by architects like A. Gegello and OSA's Alexander Nikolsky, as well as public buildings like the Kirov Town Hall by Noi Trotsky (1932–4), an experimental school by G.A Simonov and a series of Communal laundries and kitchens, designed for the area by local ASNOVA members.[15] An example of a finished Constructivist neighborhood isSotsmisto (Sotsgorod) ofZaporizhzhia.[16]
Many of the Constructivists hoped to see their ambitions realised during the 'Cultural Revolution' that accompanied thefirst five-year plan. At this point the Constructivists were divided between urbanists and disurbanists who favoured agarden city orlinear city model. The Linear City was propagandised by the head of the Finance Commissariat Nikolay Milyutin in his bookSozgorod, akaSotsgorod (1930). This was taken to a more extreme level by the OSA theoristMikhail Okhitovich. His disurbanism proposed a system of one-person or one-family buildings connected by linear transport networks, spread over a huge area that traversed the boundaries between the urban and agricultural, in which it resembled a socialist equivalent ofFrank Lloyd Wright'sBroadacre City. The disurbanists and urbanists proposed projects for new cities such asMagnitogorsk were often rejected in favour of the more pragmatic German architects fleeing Nazism, such as 'May Brigade' (Ernst May,Mart Stam,Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky), the 'Bauhaus Brigade' led byHannes Meyer, andBruno Taut.
The city-planning ofLe Corbusier found brief favour, with the architect writing a 'reply to Moscow' that later became the Ville Radieuse plan, and designing theTsentrosoyuz government building with the ConstructivistNikolai Kolli. The duplex apartments and collective facilities of the OSA group were a major influence on his later work. Another famous modernist,Erich Mendelsohn, designed Leningrad'sRed Banner Textile Factory and popularised Constructivism in his bookRussland, Europa, Amerika. A Five Year Plan project with major Constructivist input wasDniproHES, designed byVictor Vesnin et al. El Lissitzky also popularised the style abroad with his 1930 bookThe Reconstruction of Architecture in Russia.
The 1932 competition for thePalace of the Soviets, a grandiose project to rival theEmpire State Building, featured entries from all the major Constructivists as well asWalter Gropius,Erich Mendelsohn andLe Corbusier. However, this coincided with widespread criticism of Modernism, which was always difficult to sustain in a still mostly agrarian country. There was also the critique that the style merely copied the forms of technology while using fairly routine construction methods.[17] The winning entry byBoris Iofan marked the start of eclectic historicism ofStalinist Architecture, a style which bears similarities toPost-Modernism in that it reacted against modernist architecture's cosmopolitanism, alleged ugliness and inhumanity with a pick and mix of historical styles, sometimes achieved with new technology. Housing projects like the Narkomfin were designed for the attempts to reform everyday life in the 1920s, such as collectivisation of facilities, equality of the sexes and collective raising of children, all of which fell out of favour as Stalinism revived family values. The styles of the old world were also revived, with theMoscow Metro in particular popularising the idea of 'workers' palaces'.
By the end of the 1920s Constructivism was the country's dominant architecture, and surprisingly many buildings of this period survive. Initially the reaction was towards anart decoesque Classicism that was initially inflected with Constructivist devices, such as in Iofan'sHouse on Embankment of 1929–32. For a few years some structures were designed in a composite style sometimes calledPostconstructivism.
After this brief synthesis, Neo-Classical reaction was totally dominant until 1955. Rationalist buildings were still common in industrial architecture, but extinct in urban projects. Last isolated constructivist buildings were launched in 1933–1935, such asPanteleimon Golosov'sPravda building (finished 1935),[18] the Moscow Textile Institute (finished 1938) or Ladovsky's rationalist vestibules for theMoscow Metro. Clearly Modernist competition entries were made by the Vesnin brothers and Ivan Leonidov for theNarkomtiazhprom project in Red Square, 1934, another unbuilt Stalinist edifice. Traces of Constructivism can also be found in some Socialist Realist works, for instance in theFuturist elevations of Iofan's ultra-Stalinist 1937 Paris Pavilion, which had Suprematist interiors by Nikolai Suetin.
Due in part to its political commitment—and its replacement byStalinist architecture—the mechanistic, dynamic forms of Constructivism were not part of the calm Platonism of theInternational Style as it was defined byPhilip Johnson andHenry-Russell Hitchcock. Their book included only one building from the USSR, an electrical laboratory by a government team led by Nikolaev.[19] During the 1960s Constructivism was rehabilitated to a certain extent, and both the wilder experimental buildings of the era (such as theGlobus Theatre or theTbilisi Roads Ministry Building) and the unornamentedKhrushchyovka apartments are in a sense a continuation of the aborted experiment, although under very different conditions. Outside the USSR, Constructivism has often been seen as an alternative, more radical modernism, and its legacy can be seen in designers as diverse asTeam 10,Archigram andKenzo Tange, as well as in muchBrutalist work. Their integration of the avant-garde and everyday life has parallels with theSituationists, particularly the New Babylon project ofGuy Debord andConstant Nieuwenhuys.
High Tech architecture also owes a debt to Constructivism, most obviously inRichard Rogers'Lloyd's building.Zaha Hadid's early projects were adaptations of Malevich's Architektons, and the influence of Chernikhov is clear on her drawings.Deconstructivism evokes the dynamism of Constructivism, though without the social aspect, as in the work ofCoop Himmelb(l)au. In the late 1970sRem Koolhaas wrote a parable on the political trajectory of Constructivism calledThe Story of the Pool, in which Constructivists escape from the USSR in a self-powering Modernist swimming pool, only to die, after being criticised for much the same reasons as they were under Stalinism, soon after their arrival in the USA. Meanwhile, many of the original Constructivist buildings are poorly preserved or in danger of imminent demolition.[20]
![Public Assembly Building (now Philharmonic Theater) in Dnipro (1912), which is considered a precursor of Constructivism.[21]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3a%25D0%2591%25D1%2583%25D0%25B4%25D0%25B8%25D0%25BD%25D0%25BE%25D0%25BA_%25D0%2593%25D1%2580%25D0%25BE%25D0%25BC%25D0%25B0%25D0%25B4%25D1%2581%25D1%258C%25D0%25BA%25D0%25BE%25D0%25B3%25D0%25BE_%25D0%25B7%25D1%2596%25D0%25B1%25D1%2580%25D0%25B0%25D0%25BD%25D0%25BD%25D1%258F_1.jpg)
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![Barrio de las Flores, La Coruña, Galicia, (Spain) (1960s).[22]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aBarriodelasflores5.jpg)
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