The Vladimir Tatlin Monument to the Third International was supposed to be a victory for both industrial production and machine aesthetics.
Designed in 1919 as a celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution two years earlier, the building was a radical departure from Western architectural mores. Rotating the main steel structure of the tower by 23.5 degrees with all unnecessary supports removed, the colossus on the banks of the Neva was conceived as a symbolic monument and functional skyscraper of the newly formed International Communist Organization, or Comintern.
If it had been built, it would have been a modern marvel. But it was impossible to build the tower. Not only was there a shortage of steel in the Soviet Union, but in Petrograd there were barely enough nails to complete the maquette.
The context of Tatlin’s Tower reveals a broader tension in the new Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Russian artists and architects of the 1920s had an ambitious new social and aesthetic vision. On the other hand, the entire nation faced tangible physical constraints on production, which made this vision difficult to realize.
The Russian Civil War destroyed much of the building materials industries in the Soviet Union, drastically reducing the production of bricks, glass, timber and cement. Factories and industrial facilities were destroyed, while skilled industrial labor was scarce and dispersed. To remedy this situation, the New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced by Vladimir Lenin sought a mixed socialist-capitalist economy integrating central planning and decentralized forms of exchange of goods.
These limitations greatly affected the vocabulary of Russian art and architecture at the time. What we recognize today as Soviet construction is a unique product of both the ambitious vision of the new nation and the material limitations it faced when it was struggling to be born.
In the coming years, Tatlin would direct his energy into designing usable objects grounded in the daily lives of workers. The story of Tatlin’s transformation from contemplative design to the manufacture of practical and humble things is described in Christina Kierre’s remarkable book. Imagine No Possessions: Socialist Objects of the Russian Builder. Looking specifically at Constructivism – the Soviet art movement in which Tatlin was a leading figure – Kjaer argues that material constraints on production in this period radically affected Soviet society, including inspiring the creation of “socialist things”.
The main proponent of the production of socialist things was the movement’s thinker Boris Arvatov. In Arvatov’s thinking, socialist things would stand in stark contrast to the bewildering and “dead” nature of commodities under capitalism.
Rethinking the relationships with the things we encounter in everyday life – their functions, their importance, how they are designed, and the social relations to produce them – ultimately means a rethinking of how life is reorganized under socialism. Arvatov’s ideas intersected with the 1920s campaign to develop new daily habits, practices, and habits that would change home life in the Soviet Union – a project sometimes called Novi Byte, where Novi . means “new” and apartment Almost to “everyday existence”.
After failing to build his tower, Tatlin took to redesigning the traditional wood stoves that were part of ordinary life in Russian villages, refurbishing them with “maximum heat with minimum fuel” for workers. This project was a good outlet for his energies given the limitations on production, and also fit in with the broader trend of artists experimenting with socialist object design.
Likewise, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, in partnership with constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko, created politicized advertisements for chocolate, bread, and cigarettes, while artist Lyubov Popova designed very popular mass-produced dresses made of inexpensive textiles at the country’s first cotton printing factory. Moscow.
Tatlin may have turned his attention away from buildings for the time being, but Constructivist architecture was still very much alive and he discovered new ways of working with physical limitations that prevented the completion of Tatlin’s Tower.
As the Society of Contemporary Architects (OSA), the architectural branch of building, began designing emerging spaces for socialist home life, the architects worked with little. Such was the case with the denominational Narcomfen House of Moisei Ginzburg in Moscow. An experiment in architectural design that responded to what Alexei Jan argued was the inadequacy of capitalist spatial arrangements, Narkomfin was intended to be a prototype for residential communes that could be replicated across the Soviet Union.
Narcomfen itself will host two hundred people from different social and class backgrounds. His design challenged the domestic division of labour, where social reproduction had traditionally been imposed on women, through on-site communal childcare and common spaces for household chores.
While Ginzburg spoke of Narkomfin in the escalating Soviet rhetoric of industrial production and automated rationalization, the reality of construction was more specialized, reflecting the shortage of materials in Moscow. Narkomfin was the first apartment building in the Soviet Union to use a cast concrete frame. On the one hand, this was an innovation. On the other hand, it was born out of necessity given the scarcity of ordinary building materials.
Narkomfin blended avant-garde theory and cutting-edge design with inexpensive materials and technologies adapted to the social conditions in which they were built. Brick filler was used for the exterior walls, it was not mass-produced but hand-cast at the construction site using concrete slag and recycled scrap metal. These were influenced by modern architectural experiments in Germany, but also referred to traditional Russian “peasant” block building techniques.
The insulation was made of thatch, while all the inner walls were made of timber, and cement sawdust was used to cover the floors. The building talks more about primary manufacturing methods than metaphors for the smooth production of industrial machinery. The resulting building had a distinctly constructivist character, with a mixture of ambition and thrift.
The same tension between an expansionist vision and limited resources came to influence OSA town planning. In 1923, Yekaterinburg became the administrative center of the Ural Industrial Region. It was renamed Sverdlovsk, and entered an exciting phase of construction, during which the OSA significantly affected the formal and aesthetic characteristics of the development. Experiments in collective housing, office buildings, workers’ clubs, sports centers and cinemas seemed to replace traditional home life with modern, collective forms of apartment.
But as the city stagnated, architects had to turn to any and all available materials, and buildings in the 19th century were often recycled and reused for other purposes. Construction focused mainly on the city center, and as suggested by architectural historian Tatyana Budantseva, the existing buildings were mostly semi-demolished, with the ground floors becoming the basis for new structural designs. Churches were dismantled and bricks and wood were recycled.
Experimental “Constructive Capital” in its early days was not taken out of the factory, but rather pieced together and salvaged from the wreckage of the old. Once again, we see that the avant-garde aesthetic of the period was not only responsive to restrictions on material production, but was inseparable from them.
Meanwhile, workers’ clubs dedicated to the education, entertainment, and relaxation of workers sprang up across the country.
Often run by trade unions or political groups, these clubs have thrived through direct participation from members, reflecting widespread union activity. Architect and historian Anatole Cope has written about how clubs of workers often appeared spontaneously in homes, churches, and sheds, and how this position presented a challenge to architects who were designing new buildings and transforming existing spaces.
For example, the workers of the Putilov plant approached the engineer of the OSA Alexander Nikolsky to re-employ the church. Putilov’s workers agreed to hold “shop meetings everywhere”, close the church near their factory, and turn the building into a workers’ club. Removing the church’s bell and dome and stripping the interior, Nikolsky was able to miraculously get the glass to create a strange, multifaceted structure attached to the church’s front facade. The name of the new factory club, Club Red Putilovets, is painted on the front. In the process, the classic church has been transformed into a bold, modern and collegiate space.
The interior design of Alexander Rodchenko’s iconic Workers’ Club, built and exhibited at the 1925 Paris Exposition, included a range of spaces for workers’ education and relaxation. Return to it early spatial construction In the series, Rodchenko created a series of lightweight, convertible structures that included designs for bookcases, movable display units, screens for presentation, a chess table, and reading space. The furniture was made of cheap lacquered timber keeping in mind the constraints of the gallery’s budget.
As Kayer writes, these “are not well-meaning examples of the latest mass-produced technological invention” as displayed in the other pavilions of the exhibition but “represented the overall constructivist commitment to dealing with material scarcity in the NEP economy by eliminating waste and excesses.”
With the exception of Yekaterinburg, Constructivist architectural design was not prevalent in the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, most of the newer buildings were low-rise apartment complexes, schools, and cafeterias built in traditional ways. Large-scale commissions were rare. By the time the entire infrastructure of industrialization was in place, the socialist realism endorsed by Joseph Stalin had become the dominant Soviet aesthetic, superior to the avant-garde.
In the years that followed, the Russian avant-garde proved influential to a group of new avant-garde groups that often stripped the work of any extremist content. Masquerade constructivism has been a permanent feature of contemporary architecture in the West. The movement’s formal design methodology was adopted and propagated by architects such as Rem Koolhaas, and then endlessly simulated to the point where we are surrounded by Constructivist-influenced images without realizing their source.
However, the novelty of the Russian avant-garde cannot be reduced to a pure exercise in form. What makes the constructivism unique is its proximity to the experience of revolution – the challenging and exhilarating task of building a new world out of the wreckage of the old.