I. Introduction.
Futuro-archaic stylistics of Ivan Leonidov's late work as a peculiar and internally natural phenomenon was identified and analyzed in the article “Ivan Leonidov and the“Narkomtyazhprom style”, first published in 2013 [1], and again, in an expanded form, in 2019 [2]. In a study published on the Archi.ru portal in 2020, the signs of an obvious and significant influence of Leonidov on objects created in his presence, but recorded by other authors, were considered. These signs force us to raise the question of their re-attribution, taking into account the creative contribution of the architect.
After that, you can take the next step and turn to a number of objects created without any participation of Leonidov, marked by an author's handwriting that is different from his manner, but bearing clearly distinguishable traces of his formal influence. The authors of these objects systematically operate on well-recognizable elements of Ivan Leonidov's formal vocabulary. Taking into account the level of these authors - and this is the leader of constructivism Moses Ginzburg and close to him Ignatius Milinis, one of the most prominent masters of constructivism - Leonid's stylistics outgrows the local scale of individual creativity, passing into the category of major stylistic phenomena that are significant on the scale of Soviet architecture of 1935-1940 in the whole. This prompts us to attend to the appropriate terminology.
I.1. Terminology
Since the 1980s, the term "post-constructivism" has taken root to denote the entire array of architectural practice of 1932-1941, formed on the model of the then fashionable Western "postmodernism". The term, convenient for its comprehensiveness, but does not carry any other information besides chronological information. In our case, we will talk about a completely definite phenomenon both in the sense of a certain circle of authors and the specific stylistics they practice. A phenomenon that in both aspects is directly successive to "constructivism" in its narrow and precise understanding - the activities of a group of avant-garde architects and artists under the leadership of the Vesnin brothers and Moisei Ginzburg from 1923 to 1932. Since 1925, they have formed the OCA - the "Association of Contemporary Architects". The close collaboration and active work of this creative community did not stop at all in 1932. Even after this turning point, his “products” have retained their characteristic features, distinct from other trends. Therefore, the widespread opinion about the "death of constructivism" in 1932 seems to be somewhat exaggerated. Accordingly, the term “late constructivism” is quite reasonable and more accurate than the dimensionless “post-constructivism”. The direct subject of our interest will be the role of the influence of the formal language of Ivan Leonidov in the formation of the stylistics of late constructivism, and this influence should also be given an appropriate name.
Mass imitation of the graphic style of the great architect in 1928-1931 ended with a campaign against the "Leonidovism" [3], which cost Ivan Leonidov a lot of health and a break in his professional career. Many art history terms of the past appeared first as negative labels, then acquiring a neutral, and later a positive meaning. "Gothic" and "Baroque" are among them. And in search of the name of the phenomenon of systematic borrowing of formal motives of Leonidov after 1935, nothing better comes to mind than the same notorious "Leonidovism" - already as an objective and neutral art criticism term. It would be appropriate to recall here an interesting essay by Pyotr Kapustin, who saw an important methodological problem in the phenomenon of Leonidovism, the significance of which goes far beyond the specific event of 1930–1931 [4].
As a designation of a certain Leonidov motive used by another author, it is possible, by an understandable analogy, the term "Leonidovism", which we will dwell on until other, more successful proposals appear.
I.2. Objectives and specifics of the study
Today's perception and assessment of the work of avant-garde masters is characterized by a deliberate preference for their works of the avant-garde period, formed by generations of researchers (the most prominent of them is Selim Khan-Magomedov), which constituted the international glory of “Soviet constructivism”. Later, the work of these masters was in the shadow of this brilliant period and, in its own way, became a victim of its popularity, in the light of which all differences from the canonized avant-garde standard began to be assessed as undesirable deviations, the result of a violent distortion of creative intentions, significantly reducing the value and significance of the architectural practice of this period.
Apart from this background neglect, a practical problem is the lack of a language to describe and analyze the architecture of late constructivism. An architecture that does not fit into the Procrustean bed of the dogmas of orthodox functionalism, but to the same extent differs from academic neoclassicism - two varieties of formal language that have been fully mastered by today's researchers. From the standpoint of these scholars, the architecture of late constructivism is equally, but for different reasons, perceived as a departure from the canon, as having crossed the boundaries of "good taste." It baffles me with the extravagance of forms and motives of unknown origin, for understanding and describing which it is difficult to find suitable words and concepts. As an example, I will cite the phrase of Khan-Magomedov concerning the late project of Ginzburg (about it in detail - below), with the help of which the researcher saved himself from the need to go into further details of the project alien and incomprehensible to him: “Interestingly solved from the point of view of the functional organization of the entire complex and separate buildings, the project bears the traces of laboratory work on experimentation with various kinds of volumetric-spatial compositions unusual in form”[5].
Looking through the available monographs on architects of the 1930s, it is easy to notice the difference between a detailed analysis of their avant-garde works and a passing mention of their later works, which obviously causes confusion among researchers.
A valuable attempt to develop an analytical language that makes it easier to understand the architecture of the late 1930s is contained in the recent study by Alexandra Selivanova "Postconstructivism" [6]. However, considering “post-constructivism” as a whole and testing it with patterns of Western Art Deco, the researcher concentrates on the general “style of the era”, inevitably leveling the diversity of stylistic trends, different in genesis and creative nature. The goals of this work are less ambitious and broader: to reveal and understand only one, albeit important, course of Soviet architecture in 1935-1940 - the design practice of the workshops of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry under the leadership of Moisei Ginzburg and, to a lesser extent, the Vesnin brothers. And the working hypothesis, which we will try to prove, is the essential importance of the formal-stylistic language of Ivan Leonidov for the formation of the style of “late constructivism”: the fact that it is precisely Leonidov's later work that is the sought-after key for an adequate understanding of this architecture.
Finally, a few words should be said about the immediate object of consideration - design and illustrative materials. The originality of the attitude to the architecture of this period could not but be reflected in the degree of their preservation and publication. Under current conditions, access to archival collections is difficult and a complete study of the entire corpus of available material is a matter of the future. Therefore, we will have to confine ourselves to the few that were published in the professional press of the 1930s and a few editions of the last decades. Some images that were not previously published in the USSR and Russia can be found on Western resources. The quality of these materials, as a rule, requires significant graphic processing, which is a common procedure, starting with the work of Selim Khan-Magomedov on redrawing magazine illustrations of the 1920s, the original quality of which did not allow their republishing. For myself, I worked out a format for superimposing a new drawing on a weakened original to demonstrate the fidelity of its reproduction.
II… Leonidovisms in the late work of Moses Ginzburg
The architect created most of his projects together with one or several colleagues, and the change of the co-author was often reflected in the style of the project. Heading the 3rd workshop of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry, Ginzburg became the "head of the team of authors" specializing in large-scale ensemble and urban planning projects, some parts of which had specific authors. So, for example, only with the acquisition of the Museum of Architecture. A. V. Shchusev of the archive of Ignatius Milinis became aware of his authorship of residential buildings in the project "Red Stone" in Nizhny Tagil. Therefore, pointing out the authorship of Moses Ginzburg, it is necessary to take into account the conventionality of such attribution and the continuing possibility of its clarification.
II.1. Competition project of the Izvestia newspaper combine (1936)
The complex of buildings of the plant was designed on the Bersenevskaya embankment and the square of the Kievsky railway station in Moscow. The materials of this extremely important but still underestimated project still await their full identification, study and publication. For the limited purposes of this study, illustrations from the architectural press of the 1930s and Khan Magomedov's monographs dedicated to Ginzburg are sufficient, substantially supplemented by a package of photographs of the layout and sketches recently posted on thecharnelhouse.org. They make it possible to confidently speak about the presence of characteristic Leonid motives in this and, as we will later show, in the subsequent works of the workshop of Moses Ginzburg.
In the course of work on the competitive project, at least three variants of the plant's solution were implemented. Of these, we will be interested in options 1–2, which differ in the presence of a three-beam office tower and a multifaceted prismatic volume of the club (Fig. 1).
For the convenience of further analysis and in order to avoid problems with the copyright holder, the author of the article performed perspective views of the parts of the ensemble based on photographs from the layout. The reader can evaluate their compliance with the original in the original source:
here - for the tower, and here - for the club building.
II.1.1. Administrative tower
The type of office building on a three-beam plan was probably first proposed by Hans Pölzig in 1921. However, given that, since 1927, the design practice of Moses Ginzburg, like his entire environment from the OSA, has developed in close connection with the work of Le Corbusier, the most likely prototype of the Izvestia plant tower is his "Carthusian skyscraper." In its three-beam version, it first appeared in 1933, in projects for Stockholm and Antwerp [7].
In fig. 2 shows the Le Corbusier project (1933) (A) reduced to one scale, Ivan Leonidov's three-beam tower from the Narkomtyazhprom project (1934) (B) and the Izvestia tower project of the Moisei Ginzburg group (1936) ©. Here one can appreciate the gigantism of Corbusier's designs (with, we note, the complete absence of stairs), and such elements of his architecture as the lower and crowning colonnade or the multi-storey two-column loggia along the axis of the facade, transferred by Ginzburg to the Izvestia tower. Beginning with the League of Nations project, the monumental aspects of the Moscow Tsentrosoyuz also intensified in Corbusier's work. These tendencies were keenly captured by the Soviet followers of Corbusier and came in handy after 1932 and the emergence of demand for more representative architecture.
Details of the facades of the Izvestia tower reveal a close connection with the formal language of Leonidov.
A: Hyperbolic bay windows and balcony railings with super graphic features. To the hyperbolic elements should be added the crowning of the building in the form of a half of a hyperboloid surrounded by an openwork mesh of intersecting strands.
B: cantilever plastically designed platforms for monumental sculpture. Unlike the stands (balconies, decorative consoles), Leonidov's are semicircular (an element of the decor of the hall of the sanatorium in Kislovodsk is shown), Ginzburg makes his own faceted.
C: characteristic Leonid Egyptian columns. The illustration shows the lower colonnade of the tower with columns similar to the exedrams of the stairs in Kislovodsk. Similar columns of slightly different proportions are also used in the upper colonnade and the two-column loggia of the Ginzburg Tower (Fig. 3).
Of the well-known sketches for the project, the façade and perspective that match each other are interesting, showing these Leonid motives almost more clearly. The hyperbolic bay window along the axis of the facade is larger here and its supergraphics are seen much more clearly. The wedding was done in the form of a columnar rotunda with Leonid's Egyptian columns, and the cantilever faceted bases for the sculptural groups were moved from the basement to the level of the top of the main volume (Fig. 4.).
II.1.2. Clubhouse
The building in the form of a multifaceted prism until that moment had no precedents in the practice of Moses Ginzburg, but it was one of the favorite forms of Ivan Leonidov. Applied by him for the first time in the project of the Pravda newspaper club (1933) (Fig. 4-A) as a decahedron, it was repeated in the project of a collective farm club with a hall for 180 seats (1935) as a pentahedron (Fig. 5-B), and in the form of a six-sided club building in Yalta in the project for the development of the South Coast of Crimea (1936) (Fig. 5-C). All multifaceted clubs of Leonidov have a common structure with a glazed bottom, where there is an entrance hall surrounded by club rooms, and an auditorium from above, expressed on the facade by a deaf volume with a Corbusian pattern cladding and rare decorative loggias.
The club building in the project of the Izvestiya combine by Ginzburg fully reproduces this Leonidov scheme, giving its representative, metropolitan version - with a ceremonial colonnade surrounding the first glazed floors. Even the upper pergola, which from now on will become Ginzburg's favorite technique, reproduces the effect of the coliseum-like openwork construction of velum in the project of Leonidov's Pravda newspaper club (Fig. 5).
The close connection of Ginzburg's project with Leonid's style finds numerous confirmation in the detailing of the building.
The colonnade surrounding the building at the bottom is similar to the same tower colonnade. Its columns are also similar to the columns of the Leonidov staircase of the Narkomtyazhprom sanatorium in Kislovodsk. The same columns of more slender proportions adorn the loggias of the upper part of the club building (Fig. 6-C). Painted vases are installed in the gaps of the parapets of the loggias and the upper terrace: the same and completely analogous to how Leonidov used them in the project of a house in Klyuchiki (1935) and on the southern facade of the 1st building of the sanatorium in Kislovodsk (Fig. 6-A). Thus, the “Leonidov's” character of the Izvestia club turns out to be almost more complete than the previously considered office tower (Fig. 6).
The multifaceted prism, like other elements of Leonid's style, will not be an isolated episode in Ginzburg's work. I think the assumption that the polyhedron of the Mir cinema on Tsvetnoy Boulevard (1958, architects L. I. Bogatkina, M. I. Bogdanov and others) is a kind of result of the development of the Leonidov-Ginzburg type of a multifaceted club building, it will not be too risky.
At the end of the conversation about the project of the Izvestia combine, let us take a closer look at a fragment of a large cartoon by Konstantin Rotov from The Crocodile of 1937, dedicated to the forthcoming 1st Congress of Soviet Architects. It reflects the perception by contemporaries of the stylistic searches of the late constructivists: Moses Ginzburg is depicted behind the counter, with a tower resembling a giant bottle on the left, and with the club's polyhedron, also reminiscent of a perfume package, on the right. Along the axis of the bottle tower there is a vertical inscription “My Dream” with the TZ logo at the bottom. TZh stands for Trust Fat, the main producer of soap and perfumery in the pre-war USSR. In front of the counter with his back to the viewer, according to the caption to the cartoon, "the architect Melnikov personally tries the methods that he used in his projects."
To be continued.
[1] Architectural Bulletin. 2013. No. 2 (131). S. 46–53. [2] Project Baikal. 2019. No. 62. S. 112-119. [3] Mordvinov A. G. Leonidovshchina and its harm // Art to the masses. 1930. No. 12. S. 12-15. [4] Kapustin P. V. Thesis about "Leonidovism" and the problem of reality in architecture and design (Part I) [Site] // Architecton: news of universities. 2007. No. 4 (20). URL: https://archvuz.ru/2007_4/8 [5] Khan-Magomedov S. O. Moisei Ginzburg. Moscow: Architecture-S, 2007. P. 58. [6] Selivanova A. N. Postconstructivism. Power and architecture in the 1930s in the USSR // Moscow: Buxmart, 2019. pp. 102–174. [7] Le Corbusier. L'Ouvre Complete. Vol.2. Basel: Birkhauser, 1995. P. 154-159.
