The aesthetics of Soviet residential architecture is something far from obvious. So, for example, "dull monotony" has actually become an obligatory definition when talking about post-war Soviet housing. As a researcher of 20th century architecture, I have to prove over and over again even to the architects themselves that there is something to talk about.
The poor quality of construction and the "facelessness" of Soviet typical housing in the 1950s and 1960s gave it a bad reputation. However, these houses mark a global modernist project for the transition to industrial construction, the aesthetics of which are rooted in the social and economic policies of the Thaw. One of the main "thaw" priorities was the elimination of the housing shortage that began with collectivization and active industrialization in the 1930s, aggravated by the destruction of World War II and was never resolved in the Stalinist second half of the 1940s - early 1950s. Nikita Khrushchev, having come to power in 1953, relied on the housing issue. The 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 set the task of ending the housing shortage in 20 years. The development of projects for economical and mass housing construction was carried out at the highest level. It is no coincidence that Mikhail Posokhin, who became the chief architect of Moscow in 1960, made his career largely due to his passion for industrial housing construction and work on the typification of housing. Gradually, he won the trust of Khrushchev, who instructed him to transfer housing construction to an industrial basis.
Searches for engineers and architects crystallized in several series of residential buildings, developed in the second half of the 1950s and later nicknamed "Khrushchevs". Housing reform was carried out under a technological imperative. In the development of projects, the main focus was made on "rationality" and "scientific basis", and in housing construction, from this point of view, quantitative indicators turned out to be the yardstick and "justification" of projects. It was important to do as much work as possible in the factory, some projects even suggested manufacturing ready-made apartment blocks with all communications at the factory. These series of block houses were shown to the public in models as an ultramodern achievement of Soviet industry, as, for example, at the 1959 Soviet Exhibition in New York, a global show of the achievements of Russian science, technology and culture. Along with other successes of the USSR engineers - the first artificial earth satellite, the icebreaker "Lenin" and the world's largest passenger aircraft TU-114 at that time, the exhibition showed a typical apartment with three rooms for four people with a small kitchen, on which, however, had everything we needed. On the models, where no seams and defects of hasty construction are visible, the "Khrushchev" looked like a completely worthy achievement of social modernism.
In discussions in the 1960s, new homes were judged in terms of "rationality" and "value for money," which at the time was synonymous with cheapness and simplicity, and how the project justified the cost. The publications often indicated the final cost of the house, as well as methods for lowering it in the future. For example, the cost of a house in Khoroshevo-Mnevniki was estimated at 944 rubles per square meter of living space, which favorably distinguished his houses in Novye Cheryomushki worth 1,053 rubles. "Economy" - the word thrown by Khrushchev in his report on "excesses", solidifies and becomes the key in the official discourse. It is adopted by the press, where "cost-effectiveness" becomes synonymous with the extremely positive quality of the project. Over time, this imperative will lead to the reduction of architectural forms to complete elementarity. At this time, the aesthetic aspect of construction was clearly less important in accounting estimates. More variety in development appeared only in the late 60s, when the reduction in the cost of living space was provided by an increase in the scale of construction.
After the war, most of the USSR was not yet urbanized. This vast, almost unexplored and uninhabited area of the north and east of the country came to the fore in the 1960s. In the light of "thaw" ideas, the colonization of this space was seen almost as the discovery of a new continent devoid of civilization. “… Under the wing of the plane the green sea of taiga is singing about something. / The pilot over the taiga will find the exact course, / He will land a plane right on the clearing, / Will go out into an unfamiliar world, stepping like a boss … "- sang Lev Barashkov in 1963. The massive nature of the economic industrial production of housing made possible the utopian idea of Soviet urban planning: to build entire cities" turnkey "in a short time in these uninhabited places - on virgin soil, beyond the Arctic Circle and among the taiga.
There was no talk of capital construction in such a situation. In contrast to the "serf" Stalinist architecture, all the thinning inexpensive floors of new housing form its "membrane" aesthetics. The new house resembles a tent, and its inhabitant is open to the environment.
It is thanks to economic minimalism that the urban planning reform has been implemented so extensively and totally. The development proceeded in two directions: in the expansive combing of vacant territories under the modernist urbanistic comb, and in the territories occupied by old houses. In the second case, largely due to the arrogant position of architects, who often designed remote objects from Moscow, on the one hand, and primitive construction methods, on the other, the modernist grid in most cases did not want, and could not be combined with historical buildings. therefore, houses and even entire villages with churches were categorically demolished in order to make way for the typed grid of the plan of new districts.
“Rational use of space”, “efficiency of distribution of the means of production” - these were the terms of the discourse of the 1960s. Behind these phrases are ideas developed by the Soviet mathematical and statistical science related to the planned economy. The projected society was carefully modeled, its needs and ways of meeting them were calculated. A large network of institutions was involved in the process: data were supplied by Soviet statistical organizations such as the State Statistics Service, and research, often repeating each other, was carried out by a number of institutions. TsNIIEP dwelling with the help of mathematical models carried out calculations of the "matrix of labor interdistrict relations" in order to formulate a unified theory of resettlement as a result. Formulas were created to determine the diverse needs of the population: optimal routes to workplaces, schools, clinics, shops, etc. Studies in the 1960s substantiated the need to use cybernetics to build models of ideal cities. In this belief in technological progress, in attempts to scientifically predict and model the future, there is an echo of the technological utopia of the avant-garde of the 1920s.
Justifying housing decisions through rationalization is an important method of the 1960s. In a commercial for the new housing of the Khrushchev era, the announcer says that in order to cook borscht in an old apartment, you need to walk 500 steps, and in a new, small kitchen of 5.6 m² everything is close by, you can literally reach for anything. In turn, the small size of the apartments forced the industry to produce smaller furniture. This is how a special aesthetics of small, compact things appeared with typical buildings.
You need to understand that the Soviet living space was lined with non-existent threads of regional ties. The clear logic of their organization set the tone for Soviet urban planning. Moving a person in space, providing him with the necessary services, his convenience - this is the basis of the Soviet modernist settlement project.
The reflection of the very idea of rationality directly affected the form. We can note the special mechanism in our architecture of those years. The adherence to clear, logical plans and a rigid grid, as if a morbid love of structure, seems to reveal psychological constriction, but in fact it is the result of the sluggishness of bureaucratized Soviet institutions. As a result, this led to an amazing monotony: at its core, Khrushchev's residential construction was a project of global typification. Within its framework, architecture was primarily thought of as a unifying force that unites the vast expanses of the Soviet Union. Architecture forms a homogeneous modernist environment, which, through sculpture or slogan, is marked as ideologically correct. But the central idea of the housing program was precisely the universal equalization, the provision of a single quality of life and a single set of vital benefits in the heterogeneous territory of a giant country. In the literature of that time, aesthetics is expressed precisely in the uniformity and the sameness of housing for all. Unification in the housing conditions provided was supported by the same culture brought down from above, which was broadcast through typical cinemas and houses of culture.
The Brief Encyclopedia of Household, a two-volume edition published by the Big Soviet Encyclopedia in 1959 with a circulation of 500,000 copies, is a huge catalog of everything that can be produced by light industry: from children's clothing to items and methods of interior design. Typical apartments were combined with typical furniture and wallpaper of a typical pattern, and it was assumed that in these identical interiors, millions of Soviet citizens would simultaneously do morning exercises according to the announcer's instructions, which were broadcast on the radio through a standard radio socket preinstalled in the apartments. The same books are being published on architecture: in the late 1960s, in the catalogs of projects developed by government agencies, a variety of typical infrastructure facilities created on an industrial basis are given. A district and even a whole city is assembled from these components - as a single ready-made mechanism.
The figure of a new architect emerged in the 1960s in reformed institutions such as the Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture, which was transformed from the Academy of Architecture (simply) “exposed” in 1956. The new academy existed only until 1964, but during this relatively short period the architect as a connoisseur and creator of the form was discredited, and the new architect, freed from "aesthetics" and "embellishment", approached the figure of a scientist working together with sociologists.
Researchers were behind the architectural and engineering team. This team was designed to meet the needs of the population through the achievements of science and technology. It is important to emphasize that the Soviet man was again placed at the center of this new system: the authorities again declare the connection between humanism and progress, however, due to the high degree of bureaucracy of the Soviet system, both are interpreted with a significant degree of abstraction.
The design process of Soviet districts provided architects with a unique chance to implement functionalist principles of urban space organization - from the drawing board to its full implementation, both at the level of regional planning and at the level of individual apartments. This significantly distinguished our designers from most Western intellectual architects, who were primarily concerned with architectural concepts.
Modernist architecture of the second half of the 50s departs from the work with form and space characteristic of architecture as a whole. Its new beauty lies in finding the exact balance, trying to find the perfect combination of architectural means for an ideal life. After the "excesses" were recognized as harmful, expressive means were simplified: these are concrete, glass, greenery. The beauty lay in their right balance. “The task of an architect is to organize not only the space of a building, but also the open space between buildings,” wrote the architects of the 1960s. A well-thought-out organization of this space, a balance between its elements and correctly placed accents - this is what was required for the city to work correctly. In this paradigm, a separate house ceases to be understood as an inherently valuable architectural object, becoming a part of a district - a "social machine", and a part of a city - an aggregate of predetermined parts. At the same time, it is important to remember that the city, as a ready-made urbanistic unit, had to produce something as part of the all-Union industrial system. The Soviet project is distinguished by a special kind of functionalism - the attitude to people, "human resources" as a natural "filler" for factories and factories working according to a plan to increase production.
Aesthetically, the composition of new districts could be formed with the help of the difference in the height of the houses and their location; with the advent of rotary blocks in the catalog of typical parts, it became possible to make curved volumes. But nevertheless, the aesthetic significance of the microdistrict is difficult to understand from the ground, moving from house to house. Beauty lay in the modernist plan of the Soviet housing estate, which could only be appreciated when viewed from above - from an airplane (which, of course, was difficult to realize at that time) or on a model. It was the layouts, not the photographs of the constructed objects, that were shown and discussed in the press of the 1960s, it was them that were shown at exhibitions to high-ranking officials: sometimes behind this was the satisfaction of the bureaucratic ambitions of the architects. The gap that existed between the built micro-districts far from the samples and their projects and layouts was not particularly talked about.
"Will architecture be able to create a diverse, unique aesthetic space for a settlement, while maintaining the unity and simplicity of the technical standards of mass construction?" - the architects of that time put the question. Therefore, all the microdistricts of Moscow are different, and from a bird's eye view or when viewed from the Ostankino TV tower, they cannot be confused with any European city, with all the similarities between Soviet and European technical methods of producing residential buildings of those years.
In the mid-1970s, public criticism of mass development began to sound in the USSR. Popular films make fun of these typical neighborhoods, and it is becoming the norm to scold them for being monotonous. In Irony of Fate (1976), for the first time to the general public, the adjective "faceless" is used to refer to new housing. "Now almost every Soviet city has its own" bird cherry trees "… A person finds himself in any unfamiliar city and feels at home in it … Typical staircases are painted in a typical pleasant color, typical apartments are furnished with standard furniture," says a voiceover in the beginning of the film.
At about the same time, the traumatic nature of modernist transformations was finally realized - after several large-scale projects were implemented (Novy Arbat in Moscow, reconstruction of Kaliningrad), which destroyed the historical urban environment.
Criticism of the massive demolition of old buildings began to sound, including in the works of artists. In the work "Eve" by Ilya Glazunov, the silhouette of Novy Arbat against the background of a bloody sunset is interpreted as hostile to the Russian people and culture. This view of typical development as a disgusting phenomenon triumphed in the 1980s.
Another artist who closely followed the process of Soviet urbanization is Mikhail Roginsky. Against the background of total criticism, he was one of the first to try to find a positive aesthetic resource in it. He himself spent most of his life in the area of block houses - in Khoroshevo-Mnevniki. Roginsky's paintings of the 1960s depict small workers' townships with typical buildings. “For me, these rectangular identical houses with their rhythm of identical windows are, of course, abstractions … After all, a house can be viewed as a plane, windows as quadrangles. That is, I did such a courageous Mondrianism, but projected onto reality. Because unreality is something I couldn't, I still can't do it."
In addition to the facades, Roginsky worked with typical colors in which the porches were painted; his aesthetics are distinguished by the particular slovenliness with which these residential projects were implemented. The polar positions of Glazunov and Roginsky show how the acceptance or rejection of the aesthetics of typical housing took place, how the methods of aesthetic vision were developed. In the post-Soviet period, contemporary art increasingly began to return to Soviet memory. So, Dmitry Gutov, in "Used" and his other projects, appeals to the Soviet design and methods of furnishing apartments in "Khrushchevs".
As a result of the post-war housing project, a typical Soviet city was formed. By the end of the 1980s, about 70% of the territory of large cities was occupied by typical buildings. This was the result of the largest construction campaign in the world unfolded in the USSR; Soviet housing construction, this social housing project, was the most total and massive in history. Free own apartment for each family is the main utopia of this program. These plans were not fully realized: by the 1980s, their fulfillment became less and less realistic, and soon such promises completely cease. Nevertheless, the residential areas of the second half of the 1950s - 1980s are the last solid layer in the urban development of the territory of the former USSR: this is a project that the post-Soviet era could not oppose with something more convincing.
Now the post-war mass housing construction in the USSR is recognized as an important stage in the development of technology, planning, urbanism, as well as social ideas, but so far no serious efforts have been made to see architectural qualities in it and learn to accept it aesthetically. It remains to be hoped that such a gap will be closed in the study of this historical phenomenon of international significance.
