A retrospective of the first exhibition of Modern Architecture in 1927 at Rozhdestvenka is a tribute to architectural continuity, a look from the architectural "today" to its origins.
Exactly 80 years ago, in this building, occupied by the legendary VKHUTEMAS, and now the Moscow Architectural Institute, for the first time the Soviet architectural avant-garde declared itself on an international scale as an established phenomenon. Thus, for the “new architecture,” the building on Rozhdestvenka became a landmark, as a place of its official presentation and recognition within the profession and in society. For the organizers of the current exhibition Genius loci, the spirit of the walls of the former VKHUTEMAS itself became decisive in creating the concept of this project. The task was not only to show the school of the 1920s, but also to build a bridge to the present day of the Moscow Architectural Institute. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the models for the exhibition were made by the students of the Department of Soviet Modern Architecture of the Moscow Architectural Institute according to the drawings published in the magazines "SA".
The very idea of such an exhibition was hatched for quite a long time, and, according to the head of the VKHUTEMAS gallery Larisa Ivanova-Veen, prompted a poster of the same exhibition in 1927 by A. Gahn and a catalog donated to the MARHI Museum by the President of the Institute, Academician A. P. Kudryavtsev … He inherited this exhibit from his grandfather, architect S. Chernyshev, by the way, one of the participants in the 1927 event. For the scientific and exhibition department of the Moscow Architectural Institute under the leadership of L. Ivanova-Veen (Tamara Muradova, Maria Troshina, Vasily Bantsekin), the preparation of the exposition turned into a long and fascinating research that required the involvement of domestic and Western museums and archives. It turned out that the well-known catalog of the 1927 exhibition did not collect all the works and not all the names. The rest were tracked by the magazines "SA" of that time, since the exhibition was widely reflected in them, after all, it was OSA (whose press organ was this magazine) who set the tone for the event, being both the organizers and the majority of the exhibitors.
Then the studied catalog was sent to other institutions, in particular, to the Bauhaus, which in 1927 was the main foreign guest. There, the idea of a retrospective exhibition was treated with great interest, they asked to send photos from the magazines "SA" with the published works of the Bauhaus architects, they found similar ones in their archives, which they did not suspect earlier, and sent copies to Moscow. This is how the exposition was assembled piece by piece: at the Museum of Architecture named after Shchusev found about 6-7 works by I. Golosov, A. Shchusev and others, from the Museum of the History of the city of St. Petersburg sent the educational work of a third-year student of the League A. Ladinsky. In the Museum of the Moscow Architectural Institute itself, unique sketches and a project of the building of the Izvestia newspaper by G. Barkhin have been preserved, both versions, high-rise and final. Materials were also found in private workshops, for example, the studio of Ilya Utkin provided works by G. Wegman from a private archive.
Searching for the miraculously preserved originals from the publications of "SA", the organizers of the exhibition found about twenty such works, which was an undoubted success of the project. The originals (and there are fewer of them in the exposition than it was planned, since things from MUAR are still presented in copies), as the most valuable and attractive material, were allocated to a special zone. Most of the projects that have been identified are presented in facsimiles in the next room. By the way, almost all foreign material at the 1927 exhibitionwas also shown in copies sent by European colleagues.
Meanwhile, the tasks of the current project did not include exactly repeating the exposition of 1927 - this is impossible, since only a few originals, models did not reach at all, and publications in "SA" still could not provide exhaustive information. The authors of the decoration and "architecture" of the exhibition Tamara Muradova and Vasily Bantsekin presented the material as a result of the research and only formally designated the main sections of the "First SA exhibition" in the exposition.
It is known that the exposition was held on the 3rd floor of the main building of the current Moscow Architectural Institute and occupied several halls. In the photo library of the MUAR, documentary photos of the exhibition premises have been preserved, and although the layout has changed over a long time, it was possible to establish exactly where the photographs were taken from, and at the same time the location of specific departments. The main hall was occupied by projects from the OCA, and the room overlooking Rozhdestvenka was occupied by the work of universities. A special auditorium was given over to a foreign department, and next to it was a housing hall, where experimental projects of communal houses by M. Ginzburg, A. Nikolsky, and others were exhibited.
The 1927 exhibition did not “discover” constructivism, but rather presented it as a mature trend, as an established system of new architectural thinking and teaching. The first achievements of the avant-garde in the early projects of the Vesnin brothers, N. Ladovsky and other leaders of the "new architecture" by this time had already become a historical fact. The organizers of the First SA Exhibition wanted to present constructivism as the dominant understanding of the “modern” in the architectural environment, as architecture adequate to the era, which, in addition to theory, they tried to substantiate in practice. That is why the exposition united both the projects of meters - the Vesnin brothers, the Golosov brothers, A. Shchusev, G. Barkhin, M. Ginzburg, and university works (VKHUTEMAS, MVTU, LIGA, Kiev Art Institute, Odessa Polytechnic Institute, Tomsk Polytechnic Institute), thereby, showing how deeply rooted new constructive thinking in the profession.
Claiming to show a wide cross-section of modern architectural reality, the exhibition of 1927, nevertheless, was limited mainly to the work of the OCA, which was commissioned by the initiator of the event, the rector of VKhUTEMAS and the head of the department of the People's Commissariat for Education P. Novitsky. Perhaps this was due to the fact that many constructivists, like I. Golosov, A. Vesnin and others, were teaching at the VKHUTEMAS at that time. However, the same N. Ladovsky, who has the highest authority among students, was not represented at the exhibition, the competing ASNOVA was not invited for political reasons. On the other hand, the international department collected a wide range of works by foreign architects from Germany, France, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, etc., which raised the exhibition to a qualitatively new level, as an event of a pan-European scale. By the way, the Bauhaus participated not in its student projects, as in domestic universities, but in the school itself, in their buildings in Dessau, built according to the projects of V. Gropius.
The semantic centers of the exhibition then were two projects, both - phenomena in the world of architecture - the Palace of Labor of the Vesnin brothers and the Lenin Institute of I. Leonidov. These were links in one chain: in 1923, the Vesnins first brought architectural constructivism to the professional arena as an established system of principles of new architectural thinking. At the same time, in 1927, an unknown student of VKHUTEMAS, Ivan Leonidov, showed constructivism the way to the distant future with his project. The original Leonid's model, made of improvised and short-lived materials, has not survived - it was reconstructed especially for the exhibition, along with the models of A. Nikolsky's residential buildings, M. Ginzburg's "house A". A video presentation was made from the photographs collected during the research. This is how the organizers of the exhibition tried to look from 2007 at the architectural "today" of 1927, seen through the eyes of the constructivists themselves.
