Socialist architectures revisited

Socialist architectures

revisited

1. Politics of architectural and urban forms

Langdon Winner> "Do artefacts have politics?"

Do spaces has politics? Do politics have spaces?

2. Heterogeneity of socialist / communist architecture

and urbanism: cyclical processes, paradigm changes

3. Continuity of ideologies

According to original plans Magnitogorsk was to be inspired by Gary, Indiana and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the time the most prominent centers of steel production in the United States. It was to have followed the linear city design, with rows of similar superblock neighborhoods running parallel to the factory, with a strip of greenery - or greenbelt - separating them. Planners would align living and production spheres so as to minimize necessary travel time: workers would generally live in a sector of the residential band closest to the sector of the industrial band in which they worked.

However, by the time that May completed his plans for Magnitogorsk construction of both factory and housing had already started. The sprawling factory and enormous cleansing lakes had left little room available for development, and May, therefore, had to redesign his settlement to fit the modified site. This modification resulted in a city being more "rope-like" than linear. Although the industrial area is concentrated on the left bank of the river Ural, and the most residential complexes are separated and located on its right bank, the city inhabitants are still subjected to noxious fumes and factory smoke.

"Affirmation of the new Soviet culture"

"d'un pavillon conçu pour être observé passivement comme un spectacle a un système qui attire le visiteur a l'intérieur, ordonne ses pas comme une chorégraphie, programme son expérience visuelle et psychologique, qui transforme en un mot le mouvement de la foule en une partie intégrante de la construction."

"La cristallisation du tentative pour préserver dans l'architecture moderne les qualités dynamiques, expressives et théâtrales que la nouvelle religion du fonctionnalisme menaçait d'abolir"

1932. Government resolution "On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations"

Transition from Avantgarde to Socialist Realism

Helmut Lehman-Haupt: Art Under Dictatorship

> identical totalitarian societies in Russia and Germany in the 1930s

> the function of art in these societies were to "serve as a means for the total dissolution of the individual"

<> modern art is "a powerful symbol of anti-totalitarian impulses"

Adolf Max Vogt : Russische und franzozische Revolutions-Architektur 1917-1789

Revolution > economic crisis > construction crisis > architects think in abstract terms

Political stabilization > stabilizing economy > construction contracts > preference to representative forms

Vladimir Paperny: Culture Two

Culture One > horizontal: values of the periphery become more important than the

center > authorities are not concerned with architecture > architects are left alone

Culture Two > transfer of values to the center > authorities' interest in architecture as means for securing the population and as the spatial expression of a new center-based system of values > symmetrical architecture

Socialist Realism

1948. Sixteen principles of Urbanism in East Germany:

A radical alternative to the CIAM’s Athens Charter; it rejected the construction of urban motorways cutting through the urban tissue, proposed to abandon zoning, and offered to re-establish traditional urban forms, as streets and blocks.

1951. DDR's Communist Party declaration: International Style Modernism is "a plot to disassociate people from their native land, language and culture so that they adapt to the American lifestyle and join in the slavery of American imperialism."

1951. Deutsche Bauakademie Journal: "It is not possible to build communism without appropriating the knowledge and cultural legacy of all human history, including the artistic heritage."

Hans Hopp: "Political consciousness for many is not sufficiently developed to enable citizens to distinguish beautiful and good from ugly and bad. Only when such material education penetrates citizens in their most being including their dreams and fantasies, will changes bear fruit."

New towns

"The main goal of the architectural appearance of these towns was to demonstrate the socialist principles and to show the people 'the socialist modes of behaviour'.One of the most important functions of socialist cities was to turn their inhabitants into 'socialist people'." Sándor Horváth: Urban Socialism and Everyday Life in Sztálinváros.

Nowa Huta

„Already in the first phase of planning, it became obvious that the notion of the ‚planned town‘ is, under these circumstances, false. It became clear that a town, built at once, in a transitional historical period – in the first years of socialism –, has its own laws of growth, just as other urban organisms do, which were born in a historical process.“

„Is the plan able to take into account all the tones of individual life? The mood of people, the different temperaments? The planned city, according to the ideas of socialist humanism, should mean that a detailed analysis is possible: that we can create an environment satisfying all tones of individual life. The planned city should provide for at least the quality of life of the organic city, where the gradual evolution of times gave birth to the most diverse frames of moods: shining avenues with dizzying traffic, intimate homes, or corners of solitude and exasperation. If we plan a new town – is it possible to plan in these depths?“

Tibor Weiner

“The joyless monsters of skyscrapers in New York and in Chicago symbolise the slavery of soulless and mechanical ‘business’ [...]. The skyscrapers of Moscow serve the whole city: Their monumental and graceful forms fix the new architectural scale of the capital.” A. Arkin

1954. All-Union Conference of Builders, architects and Construction Industry Workers: Khrushchev denounces the formal excess of post-war architecture and calls for the introduction of the industrial method in all fields of construction

1961. Khrushchev's revision of the Party Program:

"We shall build a communist society within 20 years…by improving and developing social relations, disappearance of old life forms and the appearance of new forms."

Complex program: each apartment looks like extended stay hotel rooms (without kitchens but cooking plates); cafe and large shared kitchen at each floor; communal dining compensating for the lack of individual facilities; residents have access to sewing machines and other equipments at the central loan office

"to create a socially transformative atmosphere which will turn an atomized group of tenants into a collective."

"combining collective and individual forms of organization with the aim of forming a communist worldview in its members"

"a model, a microcosm for the Soviet Union's future communal palaces as future units in a "system of self-governing organizations"

When Westerners tour Eastern European cities, they often find their objects of interest either in the “architectural uncanny” or in the “architectural extraordinary”.1 Frédéric Chaubin, whose photographs, taken at the peripheries of the former Soviet Union, of buildings that are most often described as “eccentric”, “sci-fi” or “Cosmic Communist Constructions”, is one of the protagonists of the socialist architectural extraordinary. Similarly, Ursula Schulz’s photographs of bus shelters in Armenia stage their objects in fashion-show-like situations. Wolfgang Thaler, another photographer of the socialist architectural sublime, is an equally important mediator, in his case between the architectural history of the Balkans and the architectural scene of Central Europe. Be they sensationalist, it is with the help of these photographers and others whose images have been circulating across the art- and architectural world, that Eastern Europeans learned to appreciate a peculiar segment of their built heritage.

levente.polyak@kek.org.hu

Culture One > horizontal: values of the periphery become more important than the center > authorities are not concerned with architecture > architects are left alone

Culture Two > transfer of values to the center > authorities' interest in architecture as means for securing the population and as the spatial expression of a new center-based system of values > symmetrical architecture

Architecturel determinism

& social engineering

Walter Gropius: “The assemblage of standards was understood as an assemblage of functions, the arrangement of life in the community: its role was to have a stabilizing and civilizing influence on men's minds; the repetition of standards was to have the same effect of coordination and sobriety on our cities as uniformity in modern clothing had on social life.”

1935. Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev's experiments in the People's Park in Moscow: > determine how people spend their time

> to what extent does the park fulfill intentions and desires

> suggest ways to modify behavior and intentions through reconfiguring the design of the whole park

> develop "a polytechnic person that is in use of its subject, who has a broad range of interests and wider addition in the fields important for the industrializing country."

Le Corbusier: „The house that can be built for modern man (and the city too), a magnificently disciplined machine, can bring back the liberty of the individual–at present crushed out of exitence–to each and every member of society.“

Sztálinváros / Dunaújváros

Social engineering

Konstantin Melnikov, a prominent architect of the early Soviet Avant-Garde created plans for a building where sleep could be controlled. The 'Sonata of Sleep,' as Melnikov called the building, was to engender the perfect sleeping experience using pre-defined sounds, smells, temperature, humidity and air pressure. The design of the total environment was an extraordinary example of the “phantasmagory of control over the entire sensory experience.”

Mass-production of housing

Communal houses

Rehabilitation of the

avantgarde of the 1920s

Moisei Ginzburg's

Narkomfin Building

Ivan Nikolaev's dormitory for

the Moscow textile institute

Ginzburg:"constructivism presents the architect with the task of life-building, the organization of new forms of life."

1930.Model city

Magnitogorsk

Disurbanists

vs. Urbanists

1962-72. Natan Osterman's House of the New Way of Life

Remembering

Radicalism vs.

Classicism

In the decade following the October Revolution, the process in which the roles in the planned economy were distributed was largely influenced by debates on on the appropriate spatial equivalent of the socialist ideology. These debates divided urban professionals: the Disurbanists advocated a decentralized urban hierarchy with small towns and villages spread out in the country. On the contrary, the Urbanists‘ vision consisted of the creation of dense urban centers. Both of these concepts were informed to a great extent by Western concepts of urban planning: they represented different combinations of influences by various concepts such as the garden city theory or the Bauhaus‘ idea of a city.

"to create optimal conditions for the successful formation of the norms and regulations of a communist way of life."

Dutch embassy in Berlin

Statue Park in Budapest

Rediscovering constructivism

Popular culture

Photography

1960s: the legacy of constructivism reemerges as a subject of historical discussion through architecture journals

1962. Casabella > continuita

1964. l'Architecture d'aujourd'hui > George Candilis on constructivism

1965. Architectural Design

> Peter and Alison Smithson's survey on the heroic phase of modernism

Avenues

Representation

Konstantin Melnikov's Pavilion

at the 1925 Paris World Fair

Plac Konstytucji, Warsaw

Karl Marx Allee, Berlin

1932-34. Palace of Soviets competition

Western radical architects feel betrayed

Towers

Towers

Boris Iofan's plan for the Palace of the Soviets

Ivan Zholtovskii's residential building in Mokhovaia Street

Le Corbusier's plan for the Palace of the Soviets

Palace of Science and Culture, Warsaw

Moscow State University

Alexei Shchusev's

Hotel Moskva

Municipal Building,

New York

Tower for Sztálinváros

Towers for Nowa Huta

Ceasucescu's Palace in Bucharest

time

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010