Constructivist Architecture - The Everyday and The Utopian

The Everyday and The Utopian

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 the New Economic Policy. State buildings were constructed like the huge Gosprom complex in Kharkiv (designed by Serafimov, Folger and Kravets, 1926–8) which was noted by Reyner Banham in his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age as being, along with the Dessau Bauhaus, the largest scale Modernist work of the 1920s. 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 in Ivan Zholtovsky’s 1926 MOGES power station or Alexey Shchusev’s Narkomzem offices, both in Moscow. Similarly, the engineer Vladimir Shukhov’s Shukhov Tower was often seen as an avant-garde work and was, according to Walter Benjamin in his Moscow Diary, 'unlike any similar structure in the West'. Shukhov also collaborated with Melnikov on the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage and Novo-Ryazanskaya Street Garage. Many of these buildings are shown in Sergei 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 the Kauchuk, Svoboda and Rusakov clubs by Konstantin Melnikov, the club of the Likachev works by the Vesnin brothers, and Ilya Golosov’s Zuev Workers' Club.

At the same time as this foray into the everyday, outlandish projects were designed such as Ivan Leonidov’s Lenin Institute, a high tech work that bears comparison with Buckminster Fuller. This consisted of a skyscraper-sized library, a planetarium and dome, all linked together by a monorail; or Georgy Krutikov’s self-explanatory Flying City, an ASNOVA project that was intended as a serious proposal for airborne housing. Melnikov House and his Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage are fine examples of the tensions between individualism and utilitarianism in Constructivism. There were also projects for Suprematist skyscrapers called ‘planits’ or ‘architektons’ by Kasimir Malevich, Lazar Khikeidel and Nikolai Suetin. The fantastical element also found expression in the work of Yakov Chernikhov, who produced several books of experimental designs — most famously Architectural Fantasies (1933) — earning him the epithet ‘the Soviet Piranesi’.