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.
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Famous quotes containing the word years:
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)