This link has been bookmarked by 14 people . It was first bookmarked on 15 Apr 2008, by dave sgonechina.
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17 Mar 09
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06 Feb 09
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A history of the Soviet avant-garde could be written through its aspirations to the interstellar. It would run through, after Shklovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov's 'Trumpet of the Martians' to Iakov Protozanov's 1924 film Aelita, Queen of Mars. This was one of the first Constructivist built environments, housing the Martian despotism that the earthlings bring to revolution. The set by Isaac Rabinovich is made up of angular, glassy polygons, with the painter and Constructivist architect (for a temporary pavilion erected in 1923) Alexandra Exter's costumes adding an inorganic sexuality to the proceedings. This was socialist space opera, with robotic guards, romantic heroines and class struggle in the Martian City. It could go from there to Georgy Krutikov's Flying City four years later, a comprehensive plan for an architecture capable of traveling through the air; or Kasimir Malevich's Planits, an abstract interstellar architectonics of Suprematist forms in abstract space. Even the Soviet space program, long after the vanquishing of the avant-garde, fulfills many of these utopian promises.
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Nonetheless, let's leave reality behind for a bit and return to the productions of Red Planet Mars. J Hoberman described Aelita as 'interplanetary Trotskyism', and maybe the best book to document the paper projects is El Lissitzky's Russia: an Architecture for World Revolution, written in German in 1929. Drawing heavily on the experiments of the 'Soviet Bauhaus' Vkhutemas/Vkhutein, this was quite in contrast to the Stalinist policy of nationalism and secrecy. As the title implies, this was an internationalist tract, showing the Soviet examples as exemplars of what a revolutionary architecture could be like everywhere.
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The sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich had converted Moisei Ginzburg, a member of CIRPAC, the CIAM's central committee, and most of the OSA Group, to a radically dispersed notion of city planning. This was a response to a situation in which the city and country were virtually at civil war, and huge primitive accumulation led to cities acquiring favela-like makeshift outskirts. Instead of designing new cities or expanding the old, Okhitovich wanted them exploded into vast networks connected by advanced transportation, stretching all the way across the countryside. 'The network would win, the centre would die'.
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At this point it's worth looking closely at the disurbanist proposals. While the International Style planning approach, with its zoning and edifices, was purist and Platonic, disurbanist theory was based on fluidity and changeability. In the OSA group journal Sovremennaia Arkhitektura Alexander Pasternak wrote that the fixed house was an 'anachronism, apathetic and out of place, no longer an active participant in an active and fast moving life'.
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When these proposals were across at the Green City exhibition in 1930, Le Corbusier was asked to give his views on the projects: this would become the Response to Moscow, later retitled The Radiant City. The final form of this book dwells often on the follies of Soviet disurbanism. Private letters between himself and Moisei Ginzburg from 1930 showed that this was a debate in which Corbusier was the collectiviser and the Soviet architect the individualist, even though Ginzburg wrote that 'you want to cure the city, because you are trying to keep it essentially the same as capitalism made it'. While the Response to Moscow eulogised the Plan, seeing it as a despotic force, a Napoleonic 'tribune of the people', the Soviet disurbanists eulogised a kind of democratic planning in the tradition of council communism. When the collective networks of industry and transport were provided and property was eliminated, then people could live wherever they decided to put their pod. Okhitovich wrote that 'the stronger the collective links, the stronger the individual personality'. This is a conception far from the familiar opposition of on one side the fixed, monolithic plan, as in the CIAM's postwar outgrowths, and on the other the capitalist anarchy of leaving the free market to remake the city in its image. At the same time it suggests an approach to the divide between city and country that has been resolutely untried, despite a few superficial similarities with the LA approach to urban cohesiveness.
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When, on the other hand, the alien enters everyday life, when it can't be ignored but has to be lived with, then the boundaries between the alien nation and the alienated cities of late, late capitalism can start to fall apart.
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14 Nov 07
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17 Oct 07
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16 Oct 07
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15 Oct 07
Eric Trautmann"Excavation and Space Exploration in Constructivist Architecture"
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14 Oct 07
dave sgonechinaShklovsky writes of an avant-garde work being 'worthy of my brothers, the Martians'. This is what much of the Russian Avant-Garde saw themselves as. Like Tatlin's Third International Tower, whose iron legs and perpetual motion are akin to the Martians' wa
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12 Oct 07
"Excavation and Space Exploration in Constructivist Architecture"
architecture culture history movies russia scifi toread articles space via:ethan_t_hein
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