The period of the 1920s turned out to be extremely fruitful in terms of new constructive and formal solutions, and the search for both is going on simultaneously in several countries, based on a similar ideology, but in different economic conditions and surrounded (as Soviet propagandists used to say) different political systems. The architects of Berlin, Moscow, Rome solve similar problems, but they turn out a little differently.
The 1920s is a period of mass housing construction. It was in the residential architecture in those years that the basic principles of new architectural thinking were eloquently embodied - saving materials, assembling buildings from ready-made parts, and, importantly, the ideal of a healthy home, taking into account the psychological characteristics of space, the effects of insolation, colors and shapes, thus compensating scarcity of appearance.
The core of the exhibition came from St. Petersburg, where it was shown as part of the Petersburg Dialogue between Russia and Germany in the fall of 2008 - these are 6 housing estates in Berlin, materials on which were prepared by the Berlin Development Department - and 6 quarters of Leningrad echoing them, studied by St. Petersburg art critics Ivan Sablin and Sergei Fofanov, plus a separate section dedicated to the works of Alexander Nikolsky. For the exposition at VKHUTEMAS, the Moskonstrukt project, a joint project of the University of Rome La Sapienza and the Moscow Architectural Institute, prepared two more parts - in Rome and in Moscow.
The German section, unlike the others, is a story not only about the history and innovative structure of the Ziedlung quarters themselves, but also about the precedent of their study and about the restoration carried out over the past few years with the support of the Berlin authorities. As a result, last year all 6 quarters, built according to the designs of the famous modernist architects Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Hans Scharoun and Martin Wagner, were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Fueled by the idea of social utopianism, the German Ziedlungs provided a model for life in the new economic conditions of Germany, after the establishment of the Weimar Republic there. This model turned out to be suitable for the USSR, which was building communism. Especially obvious were the connections with the German school of Leningrad architects, who, by the way, were under the influence of Erich Mendelssohn, who worked in Leningrad at one time. One can even say that the 6 Leningrad residential areas are a kind of addition to the Berlin picture, revealing the potential of the planning and compositional passages found by the Germans in other social and urban planning conditions.
The exhibition focuses on two architects, whose work defines the face of the Leningrad school of the 1920s. One of them is Alexander Nikolsky, a brilliant theorist comparable to the leader of ASNOVA Nikolai Ladovsky or the founder of constructivism Moisei Ginzburg, a master of formal search and experiment. The second hero is a practicing architect Grigory Simonov, the author of four out of six presented housing estates. Their peculiarity lies in the fact that for all their avant-garde they are associated with the layout of the old city. This is unusual for modernists who think in terms of utilitarian buildings with the inevitable separation of residential areas, like independent settlements. In Leningrad, it is different: the quarters on Traktornaya Street, in the Polytechnic District, on Troitskoye Pole, etc. are built up according to the principle of a street, they do not break with the traditional St. Petersburg scheme and, on the contrary, borrow it seemingly archaic solutions, like a baroque beam layout.
Their independence is manifested in another - in social autonomy, since each such quarter was provided with infrastructure - canteens, baths, schools, etc., as a separate village within the city. This was, perhaps, their main innovation in comparison with Germany, which did not know the extremes of social experiment, socialization of everyday life, etc., but on the contrary, preserved even scraps of the past bourgeois life, such as setting up a pub on the corner of a house.
There are not so many innovative quarters in Moscow - on Krasnaya Presnya, Shabolovka, on Preobrazhensky Val, etc. As a center of creative thought, a place of action for advanced architectural groups gushing with theories, ideas, dreams, holding the loudest competitions, Moscow has realized very little. It so happened that the capital perceived the constructivist experiment with apprehension, and if it did decide, then on large, significant and noticeable buildings, like the Palaces of Culture, Labor, and clubs. Mass construction goes to the city of plants and factories - proletarian Leningrad.
Material on 6 Moscow housing estates was collected by Moskonstrukt. Moskonstruktovtsy, in parallel with the Moscow Heritage Committee and the Research and Development Institute of the General Plan, are now studying the buildings of the avant-garde, trying to add them to the lists of monuments. It turns out that some of the buildings from the six quarters presented do not appear on the lists, which is tantamount to a threat to their existence - at best, the quarters can be modernized, and at worst, they can simply disappear.
Another such precedent arose just the other day, when they started talking about the demolition of the complex of residential buildings "Budenovsky settlement". Today, cramped apartments without lifts and baths have become obsolete, and the urban planning significance of the experimental quarters has also been lost - but in the context of the city's development in the 1920s, they were the most important city-forming nodes, symbols of advanced architectural thought, working to organize the life of the progressive class of proletarians. Some of them had a unique, nowhere else repeated layout - for example, a "comb" of a block on Shabolovka or two parabolas of a residential area on Preobrazhensky Val.
If the mutual influence of the German and Soviet schools is widely known, then the Roman architecture of the same time seems to be developing outside the avant-garde process, continuing to look quite classical. Nevertheless, the authors of the Italian part from the University of Rome La Sapienza classify these not widely known, but important monuments as "transitional", since internally they are transformed, leaving only the facade classical. Thus, parallel to the heyday of the avant-garde in Germany and the USSR, changes are also taking place in Italy, preparing the onset of rationalism in the 1930s associated with fascist construction.
The theme of the exhibition covers a wide range of monuments, because only in the former Soviet space there are many cities where "traces" of residential buildings of the 1920s have been preserved. The curators have an idea to bring the exposition to the regions - in the minds of Yekaterinburg and Samara, during which it can continue to grow with new materials. In the meantime, in addition to two new sections from Moskonstrukt, an Austrian part has been outlined in the exposition - it will be the presentation of the book "Big Moscow, which did not exist", published by the Austrian publishing house.
