Boris Stoyanov
The Ideology of Avant-Garde Architecture in the Pre-Stalinist Soviet Union
UF SoA
Fall 2021
Professor Hui Zou
In the wake of an embarrassing World War One campaign, Imperial Russia was in turmoil- both internal and external. This made the Russia of the early 20th century ripe for revolutionary activity. The Germans saw this opportunity and acted upon it. Vladimir Lenin was exiled from Russia many years earlier for his potentially dangerous political rhetoric, taking refuge in Germany. As a way to get Russia out of the war, the Germans sent Lenin from exile back into Russia. Lenin made it into Moscow and staged the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks claimed power in 1917 when they overthrew the Tsarist regime, and immediately there became a vacuum in the world’s largest country. Needless to say, the early years of the Soviet Union were a hectic time.
The early Communist party was working in a panicked and frenzied state most times. They didn’t expect to hold power for very long, and looked to extract as much value from their time in power as they could. This, in part, is what fueled their will to destroy all that would remind people of the past. The official party line was that any symbols of the past were simply there to reaffirm the bourgeoisie’s superiority over the proletariat. Along with Marx’s views on religion being the cyanide of the masses, all old cultural elements and traditions were done away with. And it is precisely this abolishing of old ideals, styles, and traditions that lead to the need for something new to take its place. Russia’s architectural traditions were a culmination of all the best of the European traditions, started with Peter the Great in the late 17th century. The top specialists from a multitude of countries in Western Europe came to St. Petersburg for centuries to ply their trade. All new buildings in Russia, right up until the First World War, were all designed in a Neo-Classical style. The Russian tradition was an incredibly rich and storied one, and the Soviets thought that if they wanted to maintain power, they had to demolish as much of it as possible as quickly as possible and supplant it with something new.
Conceptually, the new form was to be one that was to be looking forward to the bright future rather than to a glorious past. Whatever shape this new form might look like, it needed to be thought up of and implemented quickly enough to take root and solidify the communist’slegitimacy as rulers of Russia. In these early years of communist Russia, up until the Stalinist period, which started in 1931, is when this experimentation for seeking a new formal and cultural identity exploded. The old Russian tradition of building classical structures based on Western European traditions was quickly and forcefully replaced with a new Soviet vernacular- one built on a seemingly imminent future. Often, the further from the past they strayed, the more success they had. A common critique of new city plans was that they were “too preservationist”.
While other historical modernist traditions took place over decades and in small circles, the early Soviet Union’s modernist transformation was almost as a supernova- all-encompassing and quick to burn out. From this supernova arose the prominence of many avant-garde styles, but the two which accelerated far quicker in their development than the rest were Constructivism and Suprematism. These styles were most developed in the Vkhutemas school in Moscow established in 1920, the Russian equivalent of the German Bauhaus.
Constructivism is perhaps the best-known of the avant-garde Soviet styles. It aimed to reflect industrialization in an abstract manner, all the while rejecting ornament in preference for the industrial nature of the assembly of the materials. The technological and engineering capabilities of the era were always being pushed by the Constructivists, often to lengths thatwould have been impossible to execute during their epoch. The Constructivist movement initially began as a purely formal pursuit. However, it needed to incorporate the party line conceptually to gain prominence, so the social purpose for their technological forms developed a strong communist tone, following 1917. By 1922, the movement had evolved into a socially utilitarian framework, and for the most part losing substantial amounts of the freedom and creativity it embodied just years prior.
Suprematism was an experiential movement, focused on the supremacy in pure artistic feeling, and achieving that through abstract geometries and colors rather than a literal depiction of the object. It was initially an exploration of the relationships between color and geometry. Although founded in 1915 by Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935), Suprematism became mainstream only after the Bolshevik Revolution. Although Suprematism was not initially an architectural movement, it eventually evolved in that direction. Perhaps the most important architect who took the concepts of Suprematism and developed them in an architectural direction was El Lissizky(1890-1941), especially from 1919 until 1923. He saw the fundamental concepts of the movement to be in line with the radical social changes that were taking place in Russia at that time. He viewed Suprematism as the artistic equivalent of the new society that was shaping up in front of him. He explored the grey area between art and architecture, viewing it as an unprecedented creative realm. He called this Proun, an acronym for “project for the affirmation of the new”. El Lissizky rejected the importance of color, preferring forms, and usually electing to use only one color besides blacks and greys. He developed volumetric and stereotoniclanguages in his formal aesthetic experiments (Figure 1). These systematic studies of the procession of form had a massive influence on how masses and spatial relationships were read in Vkhutemas. Many former Vhkutemas faculty made their way into Bauhaus, and El Lissizky’swork undoubtedly had an impact on their designs as well.
All this rapid development came to a grinding halt when the harsh realities of life under the new Soviet rule came to life. The Soviet Union in the 1920s was not the industrial powerhouse it later became. It was a peasant economy, struggling just to keep its population from starving. The technological, logistical, and engineering sophistication, as well as the economical might, necessary to achieve the desired forms of the Soviet avant-gardists would have been impossible to execute anywhere in the world in that era, especially not in the Soviet Union. Regardless of this reality, new ground was broken at an unprecedented extent in the 1920s in Soviet Russia, defining a new epoch in architectural thinking and imagination. The ideas started by the early Soviet avant-garde are some of the most influential architectural ideas of all time, regardless of the fact that most were never built. 101 Architectural Fantasies (1933), by Yakov Chernikov (1889-1951) was the culmination of a lifetime of architectural exploration and development of a modern architectural language, composed entirely of drawings. The necessity for rapid development rendered many of the ideas ahead of their time, with the mainstream architectural world catching up at the end of the 20th century. Chernikov’s designs are echoed in our modern world, nearly a century later. Although many of these designs were never realized, the romantic notion of them serving as the base of actualized buildings generations later, and how this prophetic vision of the future may, in fact, be more real than anything that existed in his present is intriguing, and can be extended to many other avant-garde architects of the early Soviet Union.
(Figure 1) El Lissizky, three-dimensional design for the electro-mechanical opera, Victory Over the Sun, The New Man, 1923. An incredibly fluid and dynamic study for an opera, the influence that works such as this had on the Bauhaus traditions is evident. Vaguely perspectival and field-like relationships define more of a feeling than something that can clearly or easily be built. It is also an early exploration of the architectural concept of gesture, based on a human body in motion.