The exhibition was brought from St. Petersburg, where it was exhibited in the Peter and Paul Fortress as part of the Russian Avant-Garde Week and the 8th Russian-German Forum Petersburg Dialogue. The idea is to show the fate of the monuments of the 1920s in time, the birth and triumph of a new form, decline and destruction during the period of domination of a different style, the revival or loss of these monuments as a result. Dozens of tablets with photographs and brief descriptions tell in detail about the use of buildings, restorations, alterations, and losses. When preparing the exposition, materials from the MUAR and the Museum of the History of the City of St. Petersburg were used.
The fact that researchers often compare the German and Soviet schools of the avant-garde is not surprising - in the 1910s. these were the two most powerful sources of the form-making ideas of modernism, and after the revolutions it was in these countries that “testing grounds” were formed for testing these ideas in construction. Since 1919 - since the emergence of the Weimar Republic in Germany - unique opportunities have opened up for housing construction on completely new principles, the same process is observed in the 1920s and in the USSR. There are new layouts of quarters, unprecedented types of housing based on communal life - communal houses and housing complexes, and finally, types of settlement on the scale of districts and the whole city. The Neue Bauen (New Construction) movement in Germany and Soviet constructivism left behind a whole layer of constructively unique buildings and neighborhood planning projects.
The German section of the exhibition is presented by the most interesting housing estates of the 1910-30s, designed by Bruno Taut, and along with it - by the expressionist and later architecture of Erich Mendelssohn. Neatly restored German siedlungs (siedlung - "settlement") coexist with constructivist quarters of Leningrad architects, distorted by rough restructuring. Among them, the most famous one is on Traktornaya Street, rebuilt according to the project of Alexander Nikolsky, as well as quarters in Shchemilovka, Polytechnic and Kondratyevsky districts, etc.
By the way, a separate exposition is devoted to Nikolsky, which is part of the large project “From Experiment to Practice. Leningrad Constructivism "by St. Petersburg art critics Ivan Sablin and Sergei Fofanov on the post-revolutionary development of Leningrad, demonstrated at the same" Petersburg Dialogue - 2008 ". True, they did not manage to take the main thing to Moscow - the unique models that had been lying in the storerooms of the Museum of the Academy of Arts for 80 years and have not left their native walls, you can get acquainted with them only from photographs. Nikolsky is a genius of avant-garde thought with a special feeling for architectural plastics. His works can be compared with Mendelssohn, but the nature of the architecture of the Leningrad architect is somewhat different than that of the German expressionist - along with Lazar Hidekel, Nikolsky was one of those architects who took Malevich's planetary Suprematism and brought some of his ideas into architecture. Nikolsky did not build much, his legacy is in the projects in the drawers of the writing desk, the more valuable are his layouts, which make it possible to at least partially appreciate the whole originality of creative thinking. The gigantic glass dome of public baths in the Narva region, the layout of a dining room or a Suprematist tram stop with a hairdresser's and a toilet are unmatched in terms of form creation. Unfortunately, the already small realized heritage of the architect is being actively destroyed - the public baths are almost destroyed, a new stadium is going to appear on the site of the grandiose Kirov stadium, designed by Kisho Kurokawa.
Moscow buildings of the 1920s are presented side by side, and it is clear that they are lighter, glass, they have less harsh plastic and more obvious designs - in the spirit of the leaders of the Vesnin brothers' school. Meanwhile, the monuments of the Moscow architectural avant-garde are somehow better known, there has been a lot of hype around them lately … In St. Petersburg, it is more difficult to raise people to defend the avant-garde, says Ivan Sablin, because the archetype of the city of classical values affects. There is no need to rely on the authorities, as the recent demolition of the Kapranov Palace of Culture shows, the status of a newly discovered monument, which some constructivist buildings have, is not able to protect them. It is even more difficult to follow the renovations, as a result of which less and less of an authentic building is saved. Fortunately, good restorations also happen - in particular, the building of the school named after the 10th anniversary of October, built according to the design of the same Alexander Nikolsky on Stachek Avenue, is lucky.
The idea of the value of the heritage of the architectural avant-garde is difficult for our society to assimilate. Perhaps one of the reasons is that most of these monuments now look very bad - they are dirty and shabby, which for many takes these buildings beyond the boundaries of aesthetics. The beauty of the combination of space and function, bold but thought out to the smallest detail layouts, laconic plastic facades today help to appreciate old photographs. In which houses of culture, kitchen factories, department stores, schools, clubs, scientific institutes and factories stand proudly in the midst of the half-slum development of working-class districts, embodying the best intentions (and hopes) of the builders of the new society. Today they have ceased to be the most important urban planning accents, having turned into rudiments of a bygone era. Quite often, these buildings have completely extraneous functions, the expressiveness of the volumes is recessed in the later extensions, the facades are peeling, the glass is dull - and it is difficult for passers-by to appreciate the greatness of the past daring, invested by the builders of a new life in these houses. However, we must admit we cannot (without preliminary preparation) appreciate the former greatness.
Most of the monuments of the turbulent and short-lived avant-garde era are built of cheap and short-lived materials, they are really difficult to restore and require frequent renovation. However, it is quite possible to return these monuments to their attractiveness (while preserving their authenticity) - as the scrupulous Germans again convince us. Perhaps that is why a strange question mark was formed in the title of the exhibition: if we take care of the monuments of a key era for us, we will be of global importance, and if not, well …
