For some time now I have become a fan of Soviet modernist architecture. More precisely, the style that existed between 1955 and 1985. One of his pioneers, Felix Novikov, called this style Soviet modernism. Novikov fascinated me with this architecture out of friendship, and I, captivating others with it, find new like-minded people and friends.
At first glance, Soviet modernism should not be of much interest. Today's architecture, with its sophisticated concepts and the use of the latest technologies and materials, has gone far ahead. Nevertheless, the third (after constructivism and Stalinist empire) architectural style of the Soviet empire attracts more and more attention. Articles, books, dissertations, exhibitions, lectures, round tables and even international congresses are devoted to him. Last year, the first such congress was held at the Vienna Architecture Center. The accompanying exhibition "Soviet Modernism 1955-1991: Unknown Stories" attracted more than 13 thousand visitors and broke the attendance record for the entire 20-year history of the Center. And in May this year, another exhibition, Trespassing Modernities, dedicated to Soviet modernism, opened at the SALT Galata architectural center in Istanbul. And again - with a conference (it took place on May 11), at which researchers from Russia, Armenia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Austria, Canada and the United States spoke to an international audience.
How did it happen that Soviet architecture, so frankly disliked in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, attracted such great interest? There is no mysticism here. Perhaps there was no other historical period during which it was possible to build so many structures in a single, truly international style, which often ignored the cultural, climatic, geographical and topographic features of different regions of the huge empire. We all remember the film "The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!", The intrigue of which is tied to the amazing, but typical for Soviet everyday life, the fact that the heroes live, albeit in different cities, but in completely identical apartments with the same interiors, in the same houses and identical neighborhoods.
Of course, such a monotonous architecture is of interest not so much aesthetic as social. It is hardly possible to find another style in which architecture and ideology are so closely intertwined, and today it is with the help of the architecture of Soviet modernism that one can personally imagine the life of one of the most closed societies of modern history.
And yet, despite the strict economy of building materials, the catastrophic backwardness of the building complex, almost universal standardization and the absence in socialist society of many types of buildings (then almost no corporate headquarters, temples, banks, museums or private single-family houses were built), Soviet architects rarely managed to create outstanding works. Others can be put on a par with the masterpieces of world architecture.
If we turn to these examples in chronological order, then an interesting progression will be built - from some general, rather anonymous and non-associative objects to unique, iconic buildings, whose architecture is based on vivid, memorable images. These buildings can be called iconic. This consistency is especially important to recognize today, when there is a reverse movement: projects in which imagery, fantasy, artistic idea prevail, are replaced by more pragmatic, purely functional, with an emphasis on energy saving.
This happens for two reasons. First, in connection with the economic crisis of recent years, it has become somehow unethical to spend large sums of money on expressive architectural forms. Secondly, new computer programs, which are widely used by architects, are capable, on the basis of the given parameters (such as setting on super-economy of building materials or achieving the most rational layout inside and a spectacular view from the outside), to easily "spit out" an infinite number of options. project. And although such pragmatic projects sometimes lead to interesting compositional solutions, a super-rational approach leads architecture away from the manifestations of artistry, intuition and individuality that are more natural for an artist.
But back to Soviet modernism. As you know, the initiative for the transition from Stalinist architecture to modernist in the Soviet Union belonged to N. S. Khrushchev. The transition was very dynamic and assumed the achievement of two main goals: social - to provide each Soviet family with a separate apartment, and economic - buildings had to be built quickly and cheaply from standardized elements. All sorts of, as they were then called, "excesses", all these spiers, arches, columns, capitals and patterns that served as an integral part of Stalinist architecture, were now excluded. The foreman was put over the architect and could cancel any of his ideas if they did not fit into the rigid construction budget. Architecture was excommunicated from art.
At first, even the most important cultural structures were built as abstract containers of glass and concrete. Thus, the Soviet pavilion of 1958 at the World Exhibition in Brussels was devoid of any architectural features, contrary to the long tradition of creating Soviet pavilions for world exhibitions in the form of heroic and ideological icons (remember the pavilions of Konstantin Melnikov at the Paris Exhibition of 1925 or Boris Iofan there in 1937 -m).
One of the first projects of the new style was the Palace of Pioneers in Moscow (1958-62), on which a group of young architects worked. It embodies many innovations: open composition, clean geometric shapes, blurring the boundaries between interiors and landscapes, lightweight structures, deep canopies, new materials and claddings. Many solutions were found right at the construction site, during construction, in an atmosphere of true creativity.
At the opening of the complex, Khrushchev said: “Beauty is a subjective concept. Someone likes this project, some don't … but I like it. The approval of the head of state stimulated the pursuit of a new course. Not the most original in terms of form, the building of the Palace of Pioneers, nevertheless, became one of the brightest signs of the early 60s, a symbol of the Khrushchev thaw. The concert hall of the palace appeared as a refined and minimalist glass block.
The Yunost Hotel, also in Moscow, is another example of a clean, minimalist volume hovering over the landscape. The Kremlin Palace of Congresses (designed by Mikhail Posokhin, 1961), which invaded the group of Kremlin cathedrals of the 14th - 19th centuries, can be attributed to the buildings of the same type. Again, despite its abstract form, the building became an icon of its time. In the historical complex of the Kremlin, it remains the only modernist structure.
In the same years, there was a rapid construction of new residential buildings. They were needed by millions, still huddled in barracks, communal apartments and dilapidated private houses. In the first nine years of the new course, 54 million people, that is, a quarter of the total population of the country, moved to separate apartments. But these buildings - unlike the first large public projects, such as the Palace of Pioneers or the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, were identical expressionless blocks. As critic Alexander Ryabushin writes in his book Monuments of Soviet Architecture, 1917-1991, published in New York in 1992, “In the 1960s, it seemed that all aspects of the diversity of architectural form - regional, national and local - had disappeared from architecture. forever and ever. The massive assembly line flattened the city. The number of dwellings increased, but the impersonality and lack of expression became ubiquitous and terrifying. This happened not only in individual cities - the architectural character of the whole country was lost”.
However, already in the mid-60s, interesting changes began to take place in Soviet architecture. Vivid images-metaphors are replacing the general and not associated with anything. The Palace of Arts in Tashkent, appropriately symbolizing a classical temple, is being built in the form of a cut of a Doric column, and the Soviet pavilion EXPO-67 in Montreal, with a model of the Tu-144 supersonic liner presented inside, resembles a springboard aimed at the sky. When the exhibition closed, the pavilion was dismantled and recreated in Moscow as a kind of trophy-icon.
By the second half of the 60s, Soviet architects were creating more and more overtly iconic buildings. Whether it was a protest against the excommunication of architecture from art or just an impulse of time, but the imagery to which Soviet architects strove in their works is obvious. Apparently, the desire to bring an artistic image into architecture is a natural state of the creator and no attitudes from above are able to eradicate this.
Most often, Soviet masters turned to the space theme for inspiration. This is understandable: since the late 50s, the Soviet Union has been a leader in space exploration. Many student works, like the futuristic architectural fantasies of the artist Vyacheslav Loktev, resemble orbital stations. The Ostankino television tower, the tallest structure in the world at the time of completion, evokes a number of associations - from a rocket to a syringe, and the base resembles an inverted lily with ten petals. Next to the domes of the nearby Church of the Life-Giving Trinity in Ostankino, the tower looks like a modern cathedral of technology.
The Museum of the History of Cosmonautics in Kaluga is an unusual composition with an asymmetrically placed, elongated planetarium dome, reminiscent of a launching spacecraft. The administrative building in Rapla, Estonia, despite its modest size, is associated with the stepped pyramids of the pre-Columbian civilization, and the area in front of the building, along with a reflecting pool, seemed to be under construction for a launch pad for spacecraft of the future.
Several circuses were built in those years in the form of flying saucers. The most interesting is the circus in Kazan. Its inner domed space, 65 meters in diameter, has no columns. The upper "plate" is in contact with the lower one only along the line of the circle. The city authorities did not believe in the success of the daring project and, just in case, asked the designers to gather under the building suspiciously hovering above the ground, while two and a half thousand soldiers filled the stands of the circus. The experiment took place without casualties.
The Intourist Hotel in the very heart of Moscow was built as a Soviet version of the Seagram Building. This architecture did not find understanding among the masses and did not become an icon, unlike the famous prototype in New York. In the early 2000s, the building was demolished, and in its place was built a new Ritz Carlton hotel in a pseudo-historical style.
Examples of iconic buildings in Soviet modernist architecture can be continued. Some of them are based on abstracted images, the appearance of others is associated with the function of the buildings themselves. The latter fit into the category of “ducks” buildings, according to the theory of Robert Venturi, who divided buildings into “ducks” and “decorated sheds”. Thus, the four office towers of Posokhin on Kalininsky Prospekt in Moscow resemble open books. The same image appears in another work of the same architect - the building of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). The dynamic and effective form of the book opened on the Moscow River symbolizes openness to cooperation. And Evgeny Ass and Alexander Larin created a building in the shape of a red cross for a pharmacy in Moscow. The building of the Ministry of Roads in Tbilisi, designed by Georgy Chakhava, is designed as a road junction and resembles the projects of horizontal skyscrapers by El Lissitzky. The spectacular cantilever shape of the building made it possible to minimize the area occupied by it and reduce the number of floors, which made the project more economical.
Other projects resemble ships and aircraft carriers, flowers and mountain ranges, and Igor Vasilevsky's fantastic sanatorium Druzhba in Yalta is a giant clockwork, and if Le Corbusier called his houses machines for living, then the sanatorium in Crimea seems like a machine for relaxation.
Today, many critics were quick to announce the demise of the iconic building, especially after the failure to come to a successful solution for the new World Trade Center in New York. And yet the icon-building will not sink into oblivion. The key to this, in particular, is the growth of power and capital in the hands of international companies and governments, which will not miss the opportunity to perpetuate their ambitions in architecture. But more importantly, architects have a natural urge to create memorable and unique buildings.
Iconic projects bring variety to our lives and attract large masses to architecture. And this can awaken interest in the modernist heritage in Russia itself. It is obvious that it is time to create an international alliance to popularize Soviet modernist masterpieces. Such an alliance is necessary as soon as possible, as long as there is something to popularize and preserve.
Vladimir Belogolovsky's article is based on his report "Soviet Modernism: from the General to the Significant", presented at the SALT Galata architectural center in Istanbul on 11 May. The Trespassing Modernities exhibition will run until August 11.
Information on the website of the Center >>
