Constructivist Architecture - The Sotsgorod and Town Planning

The Sotsgorod and Town Planning

Despite the ambitiousness of many Constructivist proposals for reconstructed cities, there were fairly few examples of coherent Constructivist town planning. However the Narvskaya Zastava district of Leningrad became a focus for Constructivism. Beginning in 1925 communal housing was designed for the area by architects like A. Gegello and OSA's Alexander Nikolsky, as well as public buildings like the Kirov Town Hall by Noi Trotsky (1932–4), an experimental school by G.A Simonov and a series of Communal laundries and kitchens, designed for the area by local ASNOVA members. Many of the Constructivists hoped to see their ambitions realised during the 'Cultural Revolution' that accompanied the first Five Year Plan. At this point the Constructivists were divided between urbanists and disurbanists who favoured a garden city or linear city model. The Linear City was propagandised by the head of the Finance Commissariat Nikolay Milyutin in his book Sozgorod, aka Sotsgorod (1930). This was taken to a more extreme level by the OSA theorist Mikhail Okhitovich. His disurbanism proposed a system of one-person or one-family buildings connected by linear transport networks, spread over a huge area that traversed the boundaries between the urban and agricultural, in which it resembled a socialist equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City. The disurbanists and urbanists proposed projects for new cities such as Magnitogorsk were often rejected in favour of the more pragmatic German architects fleeing Nazism, such as 'May Brigade' (Ernst May, Mart Stam, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky), the 'Bauhaus Brigade' led by Hannes Meyer, and Bruno Taut.

The city-planning of Le Corbusier found brief favour, with the architect writing a ‘reply to Moscow’ that later became the Ville Radieuse plan, and designing the Tsentrosoyuz government building with the Constructivist Nikolai Kolli. The duplex apartments and collective facilities of the OSA group were a major influence on his later work. Another famous modernist Erich Mendelsohn designed Leningrad's Red Banner Textile Factory, and popularised Constructivism in his book Russland, Europa, Amerika. A Five Year Plan project with major Constructivist input was DnieproGES, designed by Victor Vesnin et al. El Lissitzky also popularised the style abroad with his 1930 book The Reconstruction of Architecture in Russia.