Revolutionary Years (1918-1926)
In 1918, Lidwahl left for Sweden. Fomin stayed in St. Petersburg.
The Russian Civil War stopped all new construction; the few architectural jobs concentrated in monumental propaganda and city planning. Fomin managed to secure the chair of Petrograd (St.Petersburg) Zoning commission, and designed the Field of Mars landscape (1920–1923).
Fomin trained a new generation of architects at VKhUTEMAS/VKhuTEIN, at the same time developing his own concept of proletarian classicism. He asserted that a universal architecture must borrow essential principles from classicism, but the details of classicism are not important. As a result, the new architectural order can be simplified to a laconic set of basic elements, not bound by strict proportions. In practice, like all theories, it worked for good architects (like Fomin himself) but could not help mediocre imitators.
Read more about this topic: Ivan Fomin
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“I had lived over twenty years without the legal right to be alone one hour M to have the exclusive use of one foot of space M to receive an unopened letter, or to preserve a line of manuscript “from sharp and sly inspection.””
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)