Anarchy in the USSR

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Konstantin Melnikov’s Gosplan garage.

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Palace of the Press, Baku, Azerbaijan, Semen Pen, 1932.

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Centrosoyuz Building, Moscow, by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Nikolai Koli, 1929-36

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Zuve Workers Club, Moscow, by Ilia Golosov, 1926

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Gosprom, Kharkov, Ukraine, by Sergei Serafimov, Mark Felger and Samuil Kravets, 1929.

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Multitiered diving boards of the Dinamo Sports Club, Kiev.

10 August 2007


By David Brady


Richard Pare’s photographs document what remains of a brief period of post-revolutionary architectural freedom

The Lost Vanguard: SOVIET Modernist Architecture 1922-32

Museum of Modern Art, New York. www.moma.org, Until October 29
4/5

“Nothing,” wrote Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye, “ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool.” One of the most haunting of Richard Pare’s photographs now on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, shows the multitiered diving boards of the Dinamo Sports Club in Kiev. Weeds sprout between the cracked and stained tiles of the wrecked pool where smiling Soviet high divers paraded for propaganda photographs. Long abandoned, the Dinamo pool was designed by Vasily Osmak in 1935, just when the sort of avant-garde architecture Pare celebrates was already on the wane due to political pressures.
In the natural order of things any vanguard stands a good chance of being lost. This DoCoMoMo-style exhibition at MoMA goes a long way towards reassessing, and perhaps reclaiming, some of the obscure architects and designers of experimental Soviet architecture’s all-too-brief flowering, before the “people’s commissar for enlightenment”, Anatoli Lunacharsky, crushed all experimental styles in favour of socialist realism.
After the seismic shock of the 1917 revolution and the narrow victory of the Bolsheviks in the ensuing civil war of 1920, there followed a period of absolute freedom, not to say anarchy, for the arts in the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen, professor in the history of architecture at New York University, published a book in 1987 about the mystique of the new USSR and the fascination that it exerted over Le Corbusier. Twenty years later he has returned to the topic to provide a scholarly commentary to accompany Richard Pare’s photographs.
Pare, who was born in England but works at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, set out to document the remains of early Soviet architectural projects after the collapse of Communism in 1991. He made many arduous journeys in search of surviving structures in several cities around the former USSR. The photographs on show are of uniformly stunning quality. Pare’s large-format camera pitilessly documents the peeling paint, crumbling concrete and rusting railings of the “great Soviet experiment”.
Forbidden from building

“Pare pitilessly documents the peeling paint, crumbling concrete and rusting railings of the ‘great Soviet experiment’”


A few of the buildings may already be familiar to the non-specialist. The traveller and writer Bruce Chatwin called in on the aged architect Konstantin Melnikov one afternoon in 1973. Melnikov, long forbidden from building, was still living in his striking but much dilapidated house in the outskirts of the Soviet capital. That building, with its curious plan of two intersecting circles, now restored, occupies a key place in the exhibition, and Chatwin’s interview is even quoted in the caption.
Melnikov built five workers’ clubs in the late 1920s, and used the fees to build his own house. Melnikov also created the extraordinary Gosplan garage of 1934-36 with a tilted circular facade reminiscent of the visionary projects of Etienne-Louis Boullée in late 18th century France.
The only one of the Moscow workers’ clubs not designed by Melnikov is perhaps the most famous. The Golusov Club, as it is sometimes called in books about the period, is actually the Zuev Club, designed by Ilya Golusov and built 1927-29. It is arguably the most dramatic of them all in architectonic terms, with a large circular glass tower rising through the projecting, sharply arissed, corner volume.
Some of Pare’s views, like that of the Zuev Club, are deadpan images, recording a structure before it disappears entirely; others are reworkings of the inventive experimental photography of the time. One of these latter views shows the Gosprom office complex, Leningrad, of 1926-29, a showpiece of Communist achievement. Pare’s shot could be by Aleksandr Rodchenko, if Rodchenko had used colour film, that is. Another photograph that would not have shamed the most experimental photographer of the time depicts the Radio Tower looming over the Shabolovka suburb of Moscow. Pare has somehow managed to clamber inside the cage-like structure, built by the engineer Vladimir Shukhov as early as 1922, and gives a worm’s-eye view of the latticework frame.
Hammer and sickle

Occasionally a human face looks back at us: schoolchildren walk along the corridor in the grandly titled Tenth Anniversary of the Revolution Secondary School, built in 1927-29 by Grigory Simonov. Simonov’s school has a symbolic, hammer-and-sickle plan, which must create interesting circulation patterns. In another image a lady sits, armed with her thermos flask, beside a gigantic binding machine, amid grimy flaking paint and rusty pipes in a printing plant. This was built as the Palace of the Press, Baku, in 1929 by Semyon Pen.
The exhibition only has room for a tiny fraction of the 10,000 photographs Pare took on his pilgrimages in search of the avant-garde. Many more are reproduced in a book that accompanies the show. If you are not among the hordes of Brits heading across the pond this summer, you could content yourself with the book. But, if you will be anywhere near MoMA, this show should not be missed.


Postscript :

David Brady teaches architectural history in London.
The lost vanguard. The accompanying book is published by Monacelli Press, 348pp, HB, £50.

Fonte: bdonline