Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917-1937
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Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917-1937
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Overview
Using formerly secret Party archives made available by perestroika, Hudson finds in the rediscovered theoretical work of the avant-garde architects a new understanding of their aims. He shows, for instance, how they saw the necessity of bringing elite desires for a transformed world into harmony with the people's wish to preserve national culture. Such goals brought their often divided movement into conflict with the Stalinists, especially on the subject of collectivization. Hudson's provocative work offers evidence that in spite of the ultimate success of the Stalinists, the Bolshevik Revolution was not monolithic: at one time it offered real architectural and human alternatives to the Terror.
Originally published in 1993.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691606286 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1746 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Blueprints and Blood
The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917-1937
By Hugh D. Hudson Jr.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1994 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03349-5
CHAPTER 1
Revolution and Architectural Schools of Thought
ALTHOUGH rooted in the question of the role of art and the artist in a socialist society, the war among avant-garde and conservative architects and cultural bureaucrats to determine the path that the construction of a socialist society would take could not be contained in so narrow a social and cultural arena. To those engaged in the architectural struggle, striving for socialism meant first gaining control of the definition of such an environment, and that, fundamentally, was a political question. The combatants found themselves immersed in issues of nationalism, the appropriate power of central state organs, the prerogatives of professionals, the limits to bureaucratization, and the relationship of the individual to the collective. At the core of the architects' debate was not merely, as they first believed, the question of the true goal of revolutionary architecture, but essentially the genuine goals of the revolution itself. Having agreed on the need to transform society by rebuilding the environment, the avant-garde architects found themselves working with an artistic community and government that had already demonstrated considerable interest in the question of culture and education, and in opposition to traditionalist architects, who, despite all the talk of revolution in the arts, continued to dominate the professional associations of Moscow and Petrograd.
Unbeknownst to its participants, the struggle to control the building of the environment had already begun in March 1920, when a few dozen leaders of Moscow's avant-garde artistic community formed the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in an effort to determine a "scientific approach to art." Wassily Kandinsky wrote the program for INKhUK and incorporated into it his quest for "monumental art," announced eight years earlier in his Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Echoing his earlier concern for discovering the innermost tendencies that united all art, Kandinsky set the goal for INKhUK as researching the basic elements of the individual and the combined arts in an analytical and synthetic manner. As part of the study of "the theory of the separate types of art" the institute approached architecture as a psychological and formal problem, and determined that the research task in architecture was to ascertain its psychological effect as a form embracing mass, volume, and space. This initial approach at INKhUK would become the focus throughout the 1920s of the controversy over the function and nature of revolutionary architecture. INKhUK manifested its subordination of architecture to the visual arts and the reduction of architecture to a question of form and its psychological effect by applying Kandinsky's program for studying the effects of painting as the model for the analysis of architecture. Even when Kandinsky acknowledged the functionality of architecture, he stressed that this should not obscure concern with the more important issue of discovering new and invigorating architectural forms.
This existential perception of architecture as a problem of form provoked challenge during the reformation of INKhUK that followed Kandinsky's resignation from the institute in January 1921. The new INKhUK proclaimed the ideological foundation of research in all art, including architecture, to be veshch, meaning "the pure artistic thing." The journal bearing the title Veshch, appearing in 1922, elaborated the ideology. The editors, El Lissitzky and Ilia Ehrenburg, declared the triumph of the constructivist method in art, economics, industry, and psychology. Art thus had to construct new objects, not merely decorate existing ones. Moreover, art was charged with the duty of assisting people in organizing life, and in order to determine the best methods of doing this it had to turn to the example of industry. This functionalist/ constructivist appreciation of architecture constituted the alternative conception of architecture within the Soviet modernist movement and formed the basis for the conflict brewing among architects and urban theorists.
Although Veshch's declaration makes clear that those seeking the "pure artistic thing" were not blind to problems of functionality, many at INKhUK found the ideas of object theory expressed in the journal to be excessively abstract and too far removed from practical problems. Presenting their ideas at discussions held at INKhUK during the winter and spring of 1921, this group, led by Aleksandr Rodchenko, gradually developed its own theory of constructivism. They stressed the practical constructions of art, the functionality of form, and the social effectiveness of design. The participants in this emerging debate on the nature of revolutionary art included the future leaders of architecture Nikolai Ladovskii, Vladimir Krinskii, and Alexander Vesnin, who formed the Working Group of Architects within INKhUK. Already by 1921 the seeds of the two major trends within Soviet modernist architecture, Rationalism (centered organizationally in the Association of New Architects [ASNOVA]), headed by Ladovskii, and Constructivism (organized in the Union of Contemporary Architects [OSA]), led by Alexander Vesnin, had been sown at INKhUK. Within INKhUK these trends initially took the organizational form of the Working Group of Architects and the Architectural Students' Group.
During the summer of 1921 the center of the exposition of the new architecture moved from INKhUK to the Higher State Artistic and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS), and it was within the walls of this school that the struggle for control over the direction that revolutionary architecture would take was fought until discussion was terminated by a new Stalinist orthodoxy. Reflecting the period in Soviet history when artists were engaged in the search for a new, revolutionary style through the interaction of all art, VKhUTEMAS combined faculties of metalworking, graphics, ceramics, textiles, woodworking, sculpture, painting, and architecture. VKhUTEMAS inherited the earlier conflict as architects and artists from INKhUK joined the faculty and dominated the Basic Department, through which all students had to pass before beginning more specialized training.
VKhUTEMAS emerged as a consequence of the reorganization of art education in the fall of 1918, when the new Soviet government transformed the various schools and colleges into Free State Art Studios in which students chose their own tutors. In line with this new system, the prerevolutionary Stroganov Industrial Art College reemerged as the First Free State Art Studios, and the College of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture became the Second Free State Art Studios. This restructuring in and of itself reflected no victory for the modernists, for the traditionalists Ivan Zholtovskii, Aleksei Shchusev, and Ivan Ryl'skii dominated the Second Studios. Their preeminence was in no way surprising. The first task of the modernists was to pry loose Lunacharsky and the Peoples' Commissariat of Enlightenment (NARKOMPROS) from the embrace of the traditionalists.
When Lunacharsky formed the Department of Fine Arts (IZO) within NARKOMPROS's Division of Artistic Enlightenment in 1918, he divided the department into an Art-Pedagogical Section, a Section of Architecture, and a Section of Museums and Preservation. The head of the IZO, David Shterenberg, an artist who before the war had been in Paris, studying, painting, exhibiting, and making a living as a photographer, proposed organizing a top advisory body of specialists in the arts, the Kollegia, which soon came to play an important role in the formation of policy for the arts and for art education. The traditionalists won ground in the new institution when the architect Lev Rudnev and the academician Vladimir Shchuko joined the Kollegia. With the movement of the capital to Moscow in March 1918, a similar IZO Kollegia was organized in Moscow. Among the founding eighteen members were the modernist architect Viktor Vesnin and the traditionalists Shchusev and Zholtovskii, the latter heading the Moscow Section (renamed Department) of Architecture and leading the classicists.
As in many areas, however, the Party found itself following behind rather than leading the masses in the revolution. At the State Studios Zholtovskii attempted to impose his classicism on the students, an effort that had produced significant student dissatisfaction that coincided with the reorganization in 1920 of the First and Second Studios into the new structure of VKhUTEMAS, in which avant-garde architectural studios were now established. VKhUTEMAS sought to promote a revolutionary concept of education. In line with their intelligentsia vision of a classless community, the faculty and students erected a decentralized institutional structure in which students would elect their faculty and faculty in turn would be free from administrative interference. Much as workers wanted control over their factories, architects sought autonomy within their educational institution. Socialism, all socialists were supposed to agree, began in the workplace.
The architectural faculty of VKhUTEMAS formed the core around which groups combined to pursue their competing visions of a socialist built environment. Under the leadership of Ladovskii, the rationalist architects were the first to organize for battle through the founding of ASNOVA in 1923. Ladovskii, born in 1881, did not enroll at the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture until 1914. He had, however, already begun to work professionally in architecture before entering the college. Upon completion of his formal education, he quickly revealed his talent as a teacher and became the chief ideologue, theorist, and organizer of Rationalism. Ladovskii's ideology derived in large measure from Russian futurism, which had argued that art, by eliciting predetermined emotions, could organize the will of the masses for action toward desired goals. This belief was founded on the theory that "world-understanding" (consciousness) becomes a driving force determining human action only when it is fused with "world-perception," defined as "the sum of man's emotional values ... created by sympathy or revulsion, friendship or animosity, joy or sorrow, fear or courage." Only by "sensing the world" through the "feeling of matter" could one understand, and thus be driven to change, the world.
Organizationally, ASNOVA's origins reached back to 1919, when Krinskii, Ladovskii, Aleksei Rukhliadev, and Nikolai Dokuchaev joined with "Left" circles of artists who had been conducting experiments in painting, "leading from Cezanne to cubism, and from cubism to abstract constructions, and generating among Soviet 'Left' artists the idea of production art." Their professed goal was to move from the mere representation of objects to their actual construction based on unified engineering and artistic principles. These ideas led a number of artists toward architecture, while an interest in the newest paintings and their formal achievements led the architects to search for a new means of expression, culminating in the conception of a new synthesis of architecture and the other arts. In the second half of 1919, these objectives took the organizational form of the Collective for the Synthesis of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (ZhIVSKUL'PTARKh), led by the sculptor Boris Korolev. The synthesis, they held, was to absorb all the achievements made by painting, sculpture, and architecture in the areas of color, the plastic arts, and construction, and produce a new architecture based on the most recent construction techniques and possessing new plastic and color qualities. Although the group disbanded in 1920, many of its members continued to work at INKhUK and then VKhUTEMAS and gradually coalesced around Ladovskii.
The immediate impetus to the founding of ASNOVA in 1923 was the revival of the prerevolutionary Moscow Architectural Society (MAO) and its influence in the jurying of architectural competitions, including the competition in 1922–1923 for a Moscow Palace of Labor. In that competition, the jury favored the more traditional, neoclassical approaches. The project that had the greatest support among the modernist architects, that of the Vesnin brothers, received only third prize. Recalling in 1934 the jurying of that prize, Shchusev stated that Zholtovslcii demanded that the Vesnins not receive the prize "because their architecture is proceeding down a false path."
Although MAO was by no means a "traditionalist" organization — two of the three members of its journal's editorial board, Leonid Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg, were leaders within modernism — the appearance of such leading advocates of classicism as Ryl'skii and Shchusev on the editorial council of MAO's Arkhitektuia was sufficient to convince the majority of the Rationalists, then working primarily in the INKhUK Working Group of Architects and the VKhUTEMAS United Leftist Studios (OBMAS), that a center in opposition to MAO had to be created. The Rationalists' fear that Soviet architecture would be compromised by the classicists could only have been heightened by the appropriation of much of the language of modernism by such a confirmed traditionalist as Shchusev, who, writing in the first issue of Arkhitektuia, had declared, "The new conditions of life, new tastes, new ideals and aspects of view, all these must be reflected in architecture. The architect has before him an entire array of problems. The architect must create model housing for workers and peasants and arrange for the protection of the health of the town and the village; he must instill the life-giving spirit of power and strength into monumental architecture; he must make the achievements of engineering an instrument for the renewal of architectural form."
Those architects belonging to ASNOVA agreed with Shchusev that the new revolutionary architectural form could be created only on the basis of the newest discoveries of science and technology. But they also proclaimed their fundamental line to be the "struggle for architecture as art, the elaboration of the basic theses of an objective theory of the new architecture, and the development of a collective creative method." Although these architects thus had much in common, what separated them was the issue of what should be primary in the search for the new and "revolutionary." For ASNOVA the fundamental line of inquiry had to be within art, not technology. "Form" remained the watchword of ASNOVA. In presenting the demands of ASNOVA for a new architecture, Dokuchaev declared that there must be "laws of design for the expression of architectural form." The "failure" by other modernists, constructivists in particular, to pay sufficient attention to the possibilities of new forms, of deformation and abbreviation of perspective, had made their work merely interesting graphics, Dokuchaev continued. Worse yet, such work revealed only ferroconcrete carcasses and "glassomania."
How could this belief that by organizing the external form of the environment one could raise the emotional level of the "consumer" of architecture — making that person fully capable of feeling, understanding, and perfecting himself or herself — contribute to the victory of Stalinism? How did the debate among architects fuel the fires of intolerance that eventually consumed Soviet society? To answer these questions we must look at how ASNOVA and the other groups interpreted art, how they understood psychology, and how they construed Marxism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blueprints and Blood by Hugh D. Hudson Jr.. Copyright © 1994 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Ch. 1 Revolution and Architectural Schools of Thought
Ch. 2 OSA and the People's Dreams
Ch. 3 The Foundations of Stalinism in Architecture
Ch. 4 The School of Revolutionary Architecture: VKhUTEMAS
Ch. 5 Students and the Architectural Wars
Ch. 6 Stalin's Agents in Architecture: VOPRA
Ch. 7 The Deintellectualization of Architecture
Ch. 8 Mikhail Okhitovich and the Terror in Architecture
Ch. 9 Organizing a Victory Celebration
Ch. 10 The Victory Congress?
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index