magazine of "fair enough" exhibition

ESTETIKALTDLISSITZKYTHERUSSIANCOUNCILFORRETROACTIVEDEVELOPMENTYOUNGPIONEERPALACEATELIERVKH

UTEMASTRAININGCHERNIKHOVCREATIVESOLUTIONSSHAPINGINSPIRATONDACHACOOPARCHIPELAGOTOURSARKSTROYSHCHUSEVARCHITECTSMOSCOWMETROWO

RLDWIDEKHIDEKELELEMENTSCIRCULARITYLOMOFFU–VDNKHPREFABCORPNARKOMFINNEWBYTLABESTETIKALTD

LISSITZKYDACHACOOPYOUNGPIONEERPALACEATELIERVKHUTEMASTRAININGCHERNIKHOVCREATIVESOLUTIONSSHAPING

INSPIRATONFINANCIALSOLUTIONSTHERUSSIANCOUNCILFORRETROACTIVEDEVELOPMENTARCHIPELAGOTOURSARKSTROYSH

CHUSEVARCHITECTSKHIDEKELELEMENTSCIRCULARITYMOSCOW

Pavilion of the Russian Federation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia

2 · Fair Enough · June 4-8 2014

June 4-8 2014 · Fair Enough · 3

ContentsFAIR MAP 8

EDITOR’S LETTER

Russia’s Past, Our Present 10

THE BIG PICTURE

Disaster and Displacement 13Architecture’s Digital Dependence 14The Consumerist Childhood 17Industrial Impersonal 18Russia Around the World 21

PEEP SHOW

Eternal Russian 22

Re-Use 25

Pure Form 26

Develop by reviving 29

Architecture of Enlightenment 31

Motivation in Motion 32

ELEVATOR PITCH

Ark-Stroy 34

Dacha Co-op 38

New Byt Lab 40

TESTIMONIAL

The Art of Real Life 42

Enlightenment, Not Entertainment 46

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH

Personal Hygiene is a Public Affair 50

Eternal Russian 55

Revive by Developing, Develop by Reviving 76

Collectivity For Any Context 82

Khidekel Elements 89

EXPERT ASSESSMENT

Lissitzky 94

BACKGROUND CHECK

VKhUTEMAS Training 100

CASE STUDY

Motivation in Motion 113The Same, but Better 127

75 Years of Success 133

HOW I DO IT

Iakov Chernikhov on How to Bridge Fantasy and Functionality 150

Curator Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design

Anton KalgaevBrendan McGetrickDaria Paramonova

Comissioner Semyon Mikhailovsky

With the support of The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation

General Partner Gazprombank

PartnerState Corporation Rostec

Project team CEO Strelka Institute Varvara MelnikovaProducer Natalia BoykoExhibition Designers Anton Kalgaev Brendan McGetrick Daria ParamonovaHead of Graphic Design Maria KosarevaPerformance Director Philipp GrigoryanProject Assistant Vera Antonova

With special thanks toBoard of Trustees of Strelka Institute and personally Alexander Mamut, Sergey Adonyev, Sergey Gordeev, Dmitry Likin, Oleg Shapiro

Pavilion of the Russian Federation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia

Concept collaborators Kiril AsseAnna BronovitskayaVadim BassSvetlana BoymYuri GrigoryanIlya MukoseyTatiana EfrussiMarianna EvstratovaDmitry FesenkoSteven E. HarrisOndrej JankuAndrey KaftanovNikolay KalashnikovEkaterina KalemenevaOlga Kazakova Igor Kazus’Mark KhidekelRegina KhidekelRoman KhidekelKonstantin KhrupinMarina KhrustalevaSergey KoluzakovElena Kozlova-AfonasievaDmitry KozlovJulia KosenkovaNina KraynyayaSergeyKulikov-ShuyskyAlexander Lozhkin Yana LisitsynaNikolay MalininSteven MarksMark MeerovichAlexey Muratov Nicolai OuroussoffVladimir PapernyEduard PutintsevGrigory RevzinDenis RomodinIvan SablinWendy SalmonAndrey ShcherbenokAlexander ShipkovDmitry ShvidkovskyPeter SigristAnastasia SmirnovaKuba SnopekAlexander StrugacVladimir TankayanYuri VolchokAlexander VelikanovVladimir VerkhovinKsenia VytulevaErica WolfGalina YakovlevaAlexander Zukerman

Consultants and Researchers

Victor RubenNikita LomakinSergey BondarenkoMarkus LahteenmakiTobias Rupprecht

Performers Juliya ArdabyevskayaVasily AuzanDaria BocharnikovaAnna BokovAnna BronovitskayaKonstantin BudarinMaria FadeevaAnton IvanovRoman KhidekelAndrey KorshunkovIvan KuryachiyMarkus LahteenmakiOdin Lund BironElena MartynovaSergey NebotovEvgenia NedosekinaPavel NefedovAlexander OstrogorskyDaliya SafiullinaElena TsykhonDmitry Zadorin

Gazprombank is proud to stand as Gen-eral Partner of the project for the Rus-sian Pavilion at the 14th International Architectural Biennale in Venice.

Promoting cultural programmes, both in Russia and abroad, takes a special place in the activities of Gazprombank. The Bank has always been actively involved in bringing various projects to life in the sphere of culture. Working together in partnership with the curator of the Russian Pavilion at the Biennale — the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design — will constitute yet another step along the way to implement Gazprombank’s pro-grammes in support of the advancement of Russian culture in the world at large.

Gazprombank (an open joint-stock company) is one of Russia’s foremost universal financing institutions, offering a wide range of banking, financial and investment products and services to cor-porate and private clients, financial institutions, institutional and private investors. The Bank figures among the top three largest banks in the country on all basic indicators, and comes third in the list of Central and Eastern European banks in terms of its capital net worth.

The Bank occupies a strong position in domestic and international financial markets, being a Russian leader in the organisation and underwriting of corporate bond issuance, in assets management, and in the sphere of private banking services, corporate financing and other areas of investment banking.

General Partner

Materials and assistance

Agey Tomesh / WAM Publishing GroupArchive of A.M.Schusev Central Scientific-Technical Library on Construction and ArchitectureChildren’s creative studio at Union of Moscow Architects (Alisa Pasternak, Olga Garmash)Garage Museum of Contemporary ArtThe homeowners association “Na Tulskoy”Iakov Chernikhov International Foundation — ICIFJSC “Mosproekt” Archive Lazar Khidekel International Society sposored by GC Metan Energy, Möhr Law OfficeLibrary of All-Russian Exhibition CentreNational Film Foundation of Russian FederationOnline community “Contemporary prefabricated architecture”Schusev State Museum of Architecture

Graphic Designers Natalia SerikovaTimur AkhmetovAlexei SebyakinAndrei Goncharov

Photography Yuri PalminKonstantin BudarinEkaterina NagibinaPavel Nefedov

IllustratorsJuliya ArdabyevskayaAlina Kvirkvelia Alexandra BogdanovaEvgeny Katin (Bang! Bang! Studio)Julia MalyshevaMaja WronskaVictor Ruben

Video Artists Alexander LobanovYury Corneo

Cameramen Dmitry BoykoAlexei Platonov

Costume Designer Galya Solodovnikova

Drawings, Models and Plans by

Sofia SverdlovaMaria TsentsiperDaniil KhlebnikovOlga PankovaNadezhda KorbutAnastasia VaynbergTamara Muradova Arkadiy Smirnov

Translators and EditorsEmily Catherine EylesOlga GrinkrugAnastasia Lipatova Ekaterina LobkovaBen McGarrPolina MinorNina Nazarova

Construction

General Construction Baeren GmbH Internationaler Messebau

Directing of pre-installation

Th&Ma architettura srl

Pre-installation Edilmar srlPeroni S.p.AMinto Francesco srlAlessandro Gasparini

Light Equipment Baeren GmbH Internationaler MessebauImpianti elettrici Riato snc

Audio & Video Equipment

Baeren GmbH Internationaler MessebauSave Technology srl

Exhibits productionBaeren GmbH Internationaler MessebauBogdan Zavalei Workshop Certus Art Bureau (Oleg Griko, Sergey Smirnov)OTT art srlRIA LuzhnikiVladimir Trulov Workshop (Alexey Maksimov)Sergey Nebotov Alexander Shepelev

Printing officePapergraf

Print Manager Katja Scholz

Fair Enough AppOlga PolischukSergey SurganovZoreslav Khimich

Audioguide performed by

Sergey ChonishviliSteve Elliott

WebsiteWhitescape

Fundraising & event management

v confession agency

Thanks to Olga AntonovaMaria Biryukova Oleg BriukhanovskyOlga DovgorukVadim GalitsynMelania GranzoNatalia GrebenchikovaJoseph GrimaLidia GumenyukEkaterina Guseva Giacomo Di ThienneLeonid Ignat Liza KarimovaKsenia Kharitonova Aliya KhatypovaOliver KnightAnna KrasilshchikAnna Krasinskaya Stas KuznetsovArseny Limanov Gleb Makarevich Andrey MatveevRory McGrath Justin McGuirkYulia MironovaLarisa MolodykDmitry MordvintsevAnna Novikova Ekaterina IvanovaAnna OrlovaAlexander Ryabsky Yulia RudenkoSofia SavelievaPolina SavinovaRoman SedykhNataliya Shlyakhovaya Alla Shvydkaya Anna Shirokova-KoensGiulia TavoneTatiana TikhonovaMaurizio TorcellanAsya Ukhova

Partner

In 2014, the partner of the Russian Pavilion at the Biennale is Russia’s Rostec Corporation.

Rostec consolidates 62% of the Russian industrial activity. Formed to promote the development, production and export of high-tech in-dustrial goods for civil and military purposes, Rostec now comprises 663 organizations. Located in 60 constituent subjects of the Russian Federation, these entities employ some 900 thousand people and supply over 70 countries worldwide with their products.

The corporation’s enterprises are thoroughly integrated into glob-al economy. Rostec is proactively engaged in the development of international cooperation, attracting foreign partners - both poten-tial investors and technologically innovative companies - into the sphere of interests of the Russian machine-building complex.

www.rostec.ru


B4

B3

B1 B2

A6

A2

A1

C1

A3

A4

A5

D3

B5D1

D7

D2C2

Entrance

Reception

Garden

Exit

D4

D5

D6

Hallway

Balcony

Fair Map


B4

B3

B1 B2

A6

A2

A1

C1

A3

A4

A5

D3

B5D1

D7

D2C2

Entrance

Reception

Garden

Exit

D4

D5

D6

Hallway

Balcony

A1 Estetika LtdA2 LissitzkyA3 Dacha Co-opA4 YPPA (Young Pioneer

Palace Atelier)A5 VKhUTEMAS TrainingA6 Chernikhov Creative

Solutions

B1 Shaping InspiratonB2 Financial SolutionsB3 The Russian Council for

Retroactive DevelopmentB4 ArchipelagoToursB5 Ark-Stroy

C1 Shchusev ArchitectsC2 Moscow Metro

Worldwide

D1 Khidekel ElementsD2 CircularityD3 LomoffD4 U–VDNKHD5 Prefab CorpD6 NARKOMFIN™D7 New Byt Lab


Editor’s Letter

Thank you for visiting Fair Enough, Russia’s contribution to Venice Biennale 2014 as curated by the Strelka Institute in Moscow.

Fair Enough is our response to Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014, the theme of the biennale’s national pavilions, as prescribed by its curator Rem Koolhaas. For Koolhaas, Modernity is defined by the spread of modernization and globalization, and, in his view, its influence has reduced international architectural diversity and replaced it with a kind of global generic.

Rather than attempting to prove or disprove Koolhaas’s claims, Fair Enough answers them by taking the form of what is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of global modernity — the international trade fair, a truly universal typology in which million dollar medical equipment, airplanes and artworks, imitation mobile phones, chemicals, canned foods, and curtain wall are all exchanged. As they relate to architecture, the international exhibition and commercial expo share much in common; in the case of Arch Moscow they have essentially merged, with visions for urbanizing the Russian interior presented in a context of carpet samples and molding catalogs. At the Venice Biennale, we present an exhibition as an expo, adopting the look and logic of the trade fair in order to acknowledge its influence and take advantage of its efficiency as a design.

Russia’s Past, Our Present

June 4-8 2014 Fair Enough 11

This magazine functions as a kind of program: like the exhibition, it attempts to expose the enduring value of Russian architecture, while acknowledging the globalized, free market environment in which its mostly socialist ideas are now be sold.

Rather than presenting a linear story of Russia’s modernization, Fair Enough applies architectural history to meet contemporary needs. The exhibition takes urban ideas from the past century — some celebrated, some obscure; some seemingly outdated, some supposed failures — and gives them new purpose. To maximize its utility, each exhibited project is stripped to its conceptual essence. To illustrate their continued relevance, the concepts are updated and applied to challenges now confronting architects around the world. To make the exhibits more believable and the exhibition more surreal, we’ve invented companies to sell updated versions of old ideas. This magazine functions as a kind of program: like the exhibition, it attempts to expose the enduring value of Russian architecture, while acknowledging the globalized, free market environment in which its mostly socialist ideas are now be sold. Taken together, the articles, advertisements, infographics, and interviews that make up this issue offer an inventory of the ways in which design is now communicated — to clients, the press and the public.

The magazine closes with a slogan: Russia’s Past, Our Present. These words adorn the pavilion’s balcony and define the exhibition inside: Russian architecture, drawn from the past century, updated and reactivated for a global audience. This is the spirit of our show: engaging the past as a means of better understanding the present and generating ideas for the future.

Welcome to Fair Enough.


The Big Picture The needs and desires that inspire our exhibitors


TACLOBAN, PHILIPPINES

Disaster and Displacement According to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre, approximately 144 million people in 125 countries were forced from their homes between 2008 and 2012. 98% of those displaced live in developing countries. Improvements in ear ly warning systems and other lifesaving measures have decreased disaster mortality rates, but increased the number of survivors in desperate need of housing. A technology created by a former suprematist artist could provide a vital new tool. (Photo: AP/ Aaron Favila)

More: Khidekel Elements, pg. 89, booth D1


SAO PAULO, BRAZIL

Architecture’s Digital Dependence Academics at Oxford University predict that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades. It is only a matter of time before architecture, a practice filled with replication and uncreative grunt work, undergoes automation. An immersive training course, focused on the fundamental architectural concerns of space, color, volume, and graphics, and conducted entirely without computers, aims to en courage the kind of creative sensitivity that cannot be simulated by a machine. (Photo: Candusso Arquitetos)

More: VKhUTEMAS Training, pg 100, booth A5

THE BIG PICTURE


THE BIG PICTURE


HONG KONG, CHINA

The Consumerist Childhood Today’s youth exist in a commoditysaturat ed environment in which many of the cultur al forms designed for them — children’s TV, advertisements, amusement parks, social media, and so forth — aspire to entertain, rather than to challenge. At a time when the western consumerist model is being questioned by weary, postcrisis populations everywhere, the Soviet Union’s socialist approach to youth center architecture and programming is being rejuvenated. (Photo: Diomedia)

More: Young Pioneer Palace Atelier, pg. 42, booth A4


SPRINGFIELD, UNITED STATES

Industrial Impersonal Selfstorage firms offer spacestrapped customers a secure nest in which to store things they don’t need right now, but can’t bring themselves to throw away. The practice began in America, where one family in ten uses one of the country’s 50,000 facilities. In recent years, the self storage sector has been booming, with an increasing amount of space offered across Europe and East Asia. However, the typical storage facility is a cold, unwelcoming industrial space. Most prohibit customers from living in their units, regardless of size or price. The dacha, Russia’s iconic country house, could breathe fresh air into this often stale sector. (Photo: Eastway Storage Center)

More: Dacha Co-op, pg. 38, booth A3

THE BIG PICTURE


THE BIG PICTURE


MAZAR, AFGHANISTAN

Russia Around the World Russia’s contribution to the world’s modern architecture is extensive but endangered. Many important works, such as this stillfunctioning bread factory in Mazar, Afghanistan, are in poor condition and require repairs. The local government may not be willing or able to pay for them, leaving masterpieces of Russian diplomatic design to gradually fall to ruin. Archipelago Tours, the world’s first provider of global study tours dedicated exclusively to Russian modern architecture, combines tourism with preservation by directing a part of the cost of every tour it organizes to maintaining the sites visited. (Photo: Peretz Partensky)

More: Archipelago Tours, booth B4


Peep Show

Eternal RussianEstetika Ltd.

Estetika Ltd. is a supplier of Russian and neoRussianstyle architectural elements. Its products are based on traditional design motifs found in peasant dwell ings throughout the Russian countryside. Estetika Ltd. ornaments are crafted from modern materials that can fit any structure, at any scale, transforming everything from an unfinished apartment to a glassclad skyscraper into an expression of proud, modern, quintessentially Russian architecture. The Estetika booth presents a number of examples of smallscale ornaments and proposes a neoRussian skyscraper as an alternative to the generic high rises that currently define financial districts in Russia and around the world.

Bursts of beauty from the Fair Enough booths


VISIT ESTETIKA LTD. AT BOOTH A1


PEEP SHOW


Re-UsePrefab Corp

Prefab Corp is an imaginary company, based on a hypothetical merger of all existing Russian prefabricated housing suppliers into a single monopolistic entity capable of providing every possible service required for mass housing. The Prefab Corp booth’s main wall is dedicated to ReUse — its visionary proposal for a wholly sustainable supply chain of prefabricated construction, based on recycling as much as possi ble from deconstructed prefab buildings, in a single system only possible through total monopolistic synergy.

VISIT PREFAB CORP AT BOOTH D5


Pure FormShaping Inspiration

Shaping Inspiration is a book created specifically for Fair Enough. Based on extensive research into Russian avantgarde, modern, and postmodern architecture, it presents an inventory of some of the most inventive and inspirational forms ever devised. Drawing from a wide range of designers, including Konstantin Melnikov, Leonid Pavlov, and Alexander Skokan, Shaping Inspiration provides an overview of formalistic experimentation from the 1920s, ‘60s, and ‘90s, in the hope that it may inspire a new generation of architects, in Russia

PEEP SHOW


VISIT SHAPING INSPIRATION AT BOOTH B1

28 · Fair Enough · June 4-8 201428 · Fair Enough · June 4-8 2014

PEEP SHOW


VISIT THE EXIBITOR AT BOOTH D-4


Develop by revivingThe Russian Council for Retroactive Development

The Russian Council for Retroactive Development is a hypothetical international cultural organization dedicated to a purposeful revival of lost architectural and town planning values as a means of redressing the urban traumas of modernization. The Council’s booth presents three examples of demolished landmarks that were recently rebuilt in Moscow and proposes possible sites for retroactive development in Paris, Berlin, and New York.

VISIT THE RUSSIAN COUNCIL FOR RETROACTIVE DEVELOPMENT AT BOOTH B3


Palace of Pioneers, Moscow. Picture by Daniil Naga-vitsin, aged 13

Palace of Pioneers, Chelyabinsk. Picture by Masha Filipova, aged 11

Obraztsov Puppet Theatre, Moscow. Picture by Alevtina Mironova, aged 7

Palace of Pioneers, Chelyabinsk. Picture by Alevti-na Mironova, aged 7

PEEP SHOW


VISIT YOUNG PIONEER PALACE ATELIER AT BOOTH A4

Architecture of EnlightenmentYoung Pioneer Palace Atelier

Young Pioneers Palace Atelier is a design studio specializing in the architecture and programming of socialist youth centers. YPPA’s slogan is “enlightenment, not entertainment”: it offers Soviet modern architecture as an alternative to the entertainment and consumptiondriven youth culture embodied by Disney palaces. Its booth includes a book of drawings of YPPA projects, created by contemporary children.

Theatre Globus, Novosibirsk. Picture by Sasha Gorelova, aged 8

Theatre Globus, Novosibirsk. Picture by Danila Nogovitsyn, aged 13

Theatre for Young Spectators, St. Petersburg. Pic-ture by Dunya Buykovskaya, aged 11


Motivation in Motion Moscow Metro Worldwide

Metro Moscow Worldwide is an interdisciplinary studio that designs underground stations and artworks. Based on the socialist artistry of the Moscow metro system, MMW offers cities around the world decorative solutions to stimulate civic pride. The MMW booth presents a set of new works inspired by the stained glass portraits of Novoslobodskaya metro station. Like the Moscow originals, the images attempt to express a societal ideal, providing an image both beautiful and inspiring, specific to its city.

PEEP SHOW


VISIT MOSCOW METRO WORLDWIDE AT BOOTH C2


Ark-Stroy

Elevator Pitch The essence of an architectural idea


VISIT ARK-STROY AT BOOTH B5

Within a context of ever increasing environmental, social,

and technological threats, an extra strength housing scheme

designed for the USSR’s Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry

could offer added protection and existential peace of mind.

The House at Tulskaya (Moscow, 2014)


The solutionArk-Stroy is a prototype for a global net-work of affordable above-ground shel-ters, designed to combine disaster sur-vival with social housing. Created during the cold war for the USSR’s Min istry of Atomic Energy and Industry, the Ark-Stroy approach offers added protection and existential peace of mind.

The needMillions of people believe that we are liv-ing in the end times. Many are looking for a viable solution to survive forthcom-ing catastro phes. Disasters are rare and un predictable, but once we extend our event hori zon beyond a few years in the future, they appear inevitable.

The standard solution to most threat scenarios is to find underground shel-ter. This strategy is outdated and huge-ly expensive. The public shelters of the twentieth century tend to be inadequate-ly stocked, poorly maintained, and insuf-ficient to accommodate the needs of our expand ing cities. The cost of building a person alized bunker is prohibitively high for the vast majority of people. Without deliber ate action, the future will become what the present increasingly is — an environ ment of precarity, in which only the richest people have security, while the rest of us are left to struggle.

ELEVATOR PITCH


What we offerArk-Stroy embraces its socialist inher-itance by arguing that wealth shouldn’t be the ultimate arbiter of safety. Our above-ground communal safety com-pounds apply the best science and en-gineering to provide housing that can withstand any threat scenario, includ-ing a pole shift, super volcano eruptions, solar flares, earthquakes, asteroids, tsu-namis, nuclear attacks, bio-terrorism, chemical warfare, and even widespread social anarchy, in the form of modern-istic communal housing that is pleasant and affordable.

If you’d like to know more, come see us at booth B5.

Who we areArk-Stroy is a fantasy based on the House at Tulskaya, a high safety hous ing complex built for employees of the Min-istry of Atomic Energy and Indus try of the USSR. Designed at the height of the Cold War, the building was distin guished by its strength and size. It was built of extra reinforced concrete, and was 400 meters in length and over 50 meters in height, ca pable of housing 1000 families.

Deter mined to design the ultimate im-pervious residence, the original Ark-Stroy engi neers introduced a number of innova tions to protect residents, in-cluding air filtering windows. They also applied novel methods to improve the integrity of the structure, including ele-vating the building from street level with a combination of straight and trapezi-form legs. Between these legs, they in-serted services — a post office, bank, laundry, cafe, and exhibition hall — that provided for the residents while con-necting their monolithic building to the city. The combination of innova tive en-gineering, safety focus, and com munity engagement that defined the House at Tulskaya is the essence of Ark-Stroy.

Who we areDacha Co-Op is a business built around the dacha. Dacha is a Russian word for seasonal or year-round second homes, usually located in the exurbs of cities. During Soviet times, dachas provided a unique opportunity for city dwellers to construct and decorate their own homes and to garden and even trade. In the post-Soviet era, dachas continue to play a crucial role, as a refuge, place of rec-reation, and repository for possessions from a previous time.

As a repository for one’s possessions, the dacha is analogous to the industri-al self-storage units that we rent in or-der to store our excess belongings. The crucial difference is that a dacha is also a residence, adaptable by the owners, al-lowing them to live and age with their possessions, rather than simply storing them in a high security industrial build-ing. Dacha Co-op is a marriage of the in-creasingly popular international practice of self-storage with the distinctly Rus-sian phenomenon of dacha living.

What we offer • A range of unit sizes from 5 m2

to 2,500 m2

• Short term and long term lease options

• Convenience with settlements around every major Russian city and every climate

• Access 7 days a week• Secure units with the option of neigh-

bors who can monitor your unit when you’re away

• Expert advice• Change your unit size or look at any

time, no transfer cost• Extensive gardening options • An informal, village-like atmosphere

unavailable in the city • Boxes, bubble wrap and sticky tape

on site


Dacha Co-op The needSelf-storage is useful but painful. The practice began in America, where one family in ten uses one of the country’s 50,000 facilities. In recent years the self-storage sector has been booming, with an increasing amount of space offered across Europe and East Asia. In Australia, there is already 1.1 square foot of storage space for every person, and the number is growing. But the typical storage facil-ity tends to be a cold, industrial space. Most prohibit customers from residing in their unit, regardless of size or price.

Sources: 2013 Self Storage Associ-ation Fact Sheet, The Australasian Storage Association

The solution In 2014, we started Dacha Co-op with the belief that all people deserve storage space that they can live in, that’s cus-tomizable to their own tastes and locat-ed in a relaxing atmosphere outside of the city. We established a system of set-tlements across Russia and dedicated ourselves to providing a new way for our friends and neighbors to store the be-longings that have shaped their lives — furniture, clothes, old electronics, fine art, etc. — in an environment that they design, curate, and holiday in.

Kottedzh50–100 m2

M

Dom25–50 m2

S

XS

Saray, Avtobusnik, Cisterna 5–15 m2

Pomestye1000–2500 m2

XL

L

Osobnyak300–500 m2

ELEVATOR PITCH


VISIT DACHA CO-OP AT BOOTH A3

Dacha storage: friendly, personal, flexible

water dispenser 1980s

awning 1990s

lamps 2000s

storm windows 2000s

gutter 1990s

chimney 1930s

roof 1990s

boiler 1980s

photos 1960s-2000s

bucket 1980s

cat 2010s

shovel 1970s

babushka 1940s

tent 2000s

Chandelier 1910s

Religious icons 1910s

Linoleum flooring 1990s

Chair 1930s

Bag 1960s

rags 1970s

fence made of water pipes 1970s

faucet1980s

original windows 1930s

curtain rod 1980s

lamp 1980s

mirror 1990s

newspapers 1950s

mandoline2000s

microwave oven 1990s

toaster oven 2000s

microwave food cover 2010s

garden gnome 2000s

chandelier1910s

food processor 2010s

crockpot2010s

chairs1930s

bag1960s

metal shaped artwork2010s

door1980s

religious icons1910s

calendar2000s

TV set2000s

oil lamp1920s

tablecloth1990s



ELEVATOR PITCH

New Byt Lab



VISIT NEW BYT LAB AT BOOTH D7


The needGovernments and developers seekinsights about housing, and increas-ingly rely on big data analytics to pro-vide them. However, big data and stan-dard market research tools can’t reveal residents’ true expectations and experiences.

The solution The human sciences — anthropology,sociology, political science, andphilosophy — can. New Byt Lab’smultidisciplinary professionals applya human sciences-based approachto illuminate the domestic experience.The resulting insights can transformarchitectural design, real estatedevelopment, organizational culture,and even family life.

Who we areNew Byt Lab is an innovation and strate-gy consultancy. The anthropologists, so-ciologists, economists, journalists, and designers who make up NBL employ the methods of social science to study hu-man behavior and provide hidden in-sights into how we use our homes.

Our work stretches back the late 1950s, when the leaders of the Soviet Union started to apply the human sci-ences to assist architects in designing new forms of social housing. At the time, the country was undergoing an unprec-edented campaign of housing construc-tion, and the authorities wanted to ex-plore how residential architecture could affect the mindset and behavior of its inhabitants. They commissioned the ar-chitect Nathan Osterman to develop a new kind of housing, based on principles of communal living but equipped with the amenities of modern life. His build-ing, completed in 1969 and called the House for New Life (Dom Novogo Byta), was both a prototype for modern so-cialist housing and a laboratory for so-ciological investigation. Over twenty re-search institutes, studying all aspects of human life, from physiology to econom-ics, collaborated on the House’s devel-opment. After completion, researchers spent two years examining how resi-dents experienced the building.

In the post-Soviet era, our practice has evolved from communist social en-gineering to applied business anthro-pology: New Byt Lab now combines methods from two domains — social sci-entific practices from ethnography and market analysis from traditional busi-ness practice — to offer unique insights into domestic life in any market, so that architects, planners, and developers can foresee what lies ahead and construct accordingly.

What we offer At the core of our approach is New Byt™ Analytics. This is the innovation that lets our clients confirm or deny insights generated through Big Data collection and drill down to the real motivations that prompt customer behavior.

For architects, developers, and gov-ernments, New Byt Lab provides social science and design intelligence that en-ables innovative housing development strategies.

Our Architecture platform helps de-signers develop rational approaches to innovation in dwelling design and to test new schemes through prototyping and phenomenological analysis.

Our Development platform offers the means to qualitatively assess architec-ture — already built or only proposed — by making sense of the complex, subtle, often unconscious ways in which cus-tomers interact with their surroundings.

Our Government platform helps housing authorities maximize their in-vestments by providing key decision makers with the empirical evidence and expert analysis needed to choose the right strategy for the future.


The Art of Real Lifeby Shchusev Architects

Narkomzem Building (Moscow, 1928)

Testimonial Op-eds from our exhibitors


VISIT SHCHUSEV ARCHITECTS AT BOOTH C1

The Shchusev MethodAt Shchusev Architects, we endeavour to continue the work of our founder, the great Russian architect and patriot Alexey Shchusev.

In his writings, lectures, and design work, Alexey always stressed that architecture should respond to the needs and desires of everyday life. This obligation, he argued, is a defining feature of the discipline, one that distinguishes the architect from his peers in other creative fields. Writing in 1923 for the Moscow Architectural Society’s monthly magazine Arkhitektura, Shchusev explained that “alongside all the other branches of the arts, architecture reflects the life that surrounds it; however, the role of the architect is somewhat more complex than that of other artists. Forced to take his creative motive from without, in an externally defined task, the architect must inescapably reflect in his art all the sum of phenomena characteristic of a given historical moment.”

During Shchusev’s time, the siren song of the new was felt especially strongly by Russian architects seeking to lead, or at least keep up with, their revolutionary, rapidly modernizing society. Shchusev shared their desire to innovate, but, unlike many of his peers, he believed that the best new ideas spring not from wild speculation, but from a deep understanding of the past. This embrace of heritage define his work, and shaped his approach to office culture. In a 1933 article for the journal Stroitelstvo Moskvy, Shchusev describes the work process that he developed and that we continue to use to this day:

Each commission is to receive preliminary discussion involving all members of the studio and, in dependence on that location or street in which the object is to be erected, the situation and architectural approach taken to remodel-ing the street, square or entire urban complex should be worked out in advance. The studio shall solve its tasks according to the principles of contemporary architecture, armed with all the knowledge and theoretical achievements of the architecture of past ages.

The creation of new forms from ancient ideals is possible only through a combination of historical knowledge and technical competence. Without the latter, architecture can easily drift off into abstraction and

"Architecture is not a pretty picture," Shchusev once

wrote, "It is a combination in outline and form of all the

prerequisites of a building’s program, dictated by the

economist, technician and sanitary officer."

Above: Opera and Ballet Theatre (Tashkent, 1933)

Below: Marfo-Mariinsky Convent (Moscow, 1908)


lose its essential connection to real life. In laying out his “Principles of architectural construction,” Shchusev emphasized this point: “The tasks of forecasting for architectural work consist not of beautiful quotations, analogies, prophecies, or abstract definitions,” he wrote, “but involve a grasp of the essentials of the works themselves in the sense of their form and construction.” A Shchusev Architect, in other words, must be fluent in the language of modern building. “He must know the organizational bases of construction, study building materials, their production and working, and he must understand the tasks of painters and sculptors, from the plastic arts that are so closely related to architecture.” Our founder’s passion for intimate interdisciplinarity continues to define our firm — and today it extends far beyond the “the plastic arts”.

“Architecture is not a pretty picture,” Shchusev once wrote, “It is a combination in outline and form of all the prerequisites of a building’s program, dictated by the economist, technician and sanitary officer.” A truly skilled architect must be able to balance these interests, to communicate effectively with every stakeholder, and to produce work that satisfies the client while achieving the architect’s artistic ambitions.More than anything, though, Alexey Shchusev taught us that these should not be the architect’s ultimate concerns. The smoothness of its interdisciplinary collaborations, or the satisfaction of its patron, the originality of its concept, and strength of its aesthetics do not ultimately determine the success of an architectural project. The people do. Shchusev saw architecture as a public service, and encouraged all those who worked for him to get to know this public personally. “The Russian architect must love his own native architecture,” he once wrote, “and just as […] Tchaikovsky produced Russian works based upon a knowledge of folk music, so must the architect be aware of the nature of the country in which he builds, and the life of the people with whom he is dealing. The Russian architect must lead from the front, without isolating himself away in the circles of narrow interests.”

Today, our practice is global and covers almost any conceivable project. Still, Alexey Shchusev’s principles guide our work, setting a standard of artistic imagination, professional competence, and social engagement that allows us to expand and explore without ever losing our way. During moments of confusion or conflict, we turn to these principles — known in the office as The Shchusev Method — for refocusing perspective and deepening pride. They provide professional guidance and creative inspiration. They remind us that we are not simply an office — we are the fulfillment of a personal philosophy. We are Shchusev Architects.

Lenin’s Mausoleum (Moscow, 1929)

All

imag

es c

ourt

esy

of t

he A

rchi

ve o

f A.M

. Shc

huse

v

TESTIMONIAL


Memorial Church on Kulikovo Battlefield (Tula region, 1904)

Lenin’s Mausoleum (Moscow, 1929)

Narkomzem (Koopinsoyuz) Building, People’s Commisariat for Land (Moscow, 1928)

House on the Rostovskaya Embankment (Moscow, 1935)

Komsomolskaya Metro Station (Moscow, 1952)

Shchusev was an enormously flexible designer who managed

to create masterpieces over decades, regardless of the prevailing political order

or aesthetic.

All

imag

es c

ourt

esy

of t

he A

rchi

ve o

f A.M

. Shc

huse

v


Enlightenment, Not Entertainment by Young Pioneer Palace Atelier

How to use architecture to instill values? How to design a building that embodies a desired future and provides the means to bring it about? A building at once open to and separate from the wider world; a building where teamwork, pride, and social consciousness are embedded in the archi-tecture. A building with walls that teach…

At the Young Pioneer Palace Atelier, we be lieve that children require their own spe cial space, separated from, but embed-ded in, the adult world. Our mission is to define and program these spaces, to generate environments that devel op children’s initiative, self-reliance, and community commitment.

Moscow State Palace of Child and Youth Creativity. Moscow, 1990.

TESTIMONIAL

(Pho

to: V

ladi

mir

Vya

tkin

, RIA

Nov

osti


VISIT THE EXIBITOR AT BOOTH A4

Our Past: The Young Pioneer Organization YPPA takes its inspiration from the traditions of the Young Pioneers. For 70 years, the Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union was the world’s preeminent socialist youth group. In structure, the Young Pioneers were similar to their capitalist counterparts, the Scouts. But in perspective and approach, they were as different as the US and the USSR. The Young Pi oneers were a socialist organization, charged with bringing up future citizens, fit in mind and body; nurturing their allround talents; and developing their political consciousness, patriotism and team spirit. The Young Pioneer Palace Atelier works to extend this legacy into a new age.

Our Present: The Young Pioneer PalaceLike the camps, our Young Pioneer Palaces, Theatres, and Camp complexes combine protection with exposure; freedom of discovery with discipline and ritual; and promotion of selfreliance with the tight bonding of a collective. These dichotomies are central to the design and programming of every one of our projects.

Promoting self-realization while developing collective spirit Palaces occupy a special role in children’s culture: they are the enchanted space of fairy tales, where miraculous transformations take place, and nothing is quite as it seems. In contemporary capitalist society, palaces are most often associated with Disney and its entertainment, as well as consumptiondriven approach to youth culture. In this world, children are pacified with entertainment and amusement rather than activated by enlightenment and challenged by it.

At YPPA, we design to instill a different set of values. Ours is an architecture that seeks to challenge the status quo by inspiring children to invent and inhabit a new, more equal world.

Emphasizing aesthetic and scientific education, play and fantasy

Our work is based on Modern principles: we believe that a rational, harmoniously designed physical envi ronment, close to nature, can help shape young people and, ultimately, our future society. Our projects reflect this: more than just a build ing, the Young Pioneer Palace is an entire environ ment — a ‘Pioneer Republic’ — designed to ease the socialization of children and facilitate their aesthetic and scientific education, play and fantasy. Although they possess monumental qualities, each YPPA project is, above all, about flexibility: our buildings aspire to freedom,

truth to function, transparency, and the dy namic use of space. They are experienced in move ment — as much through art, music, and other aes thetic cues as through actual, physical barriers and openings.

Irradiating the adult world around it Great monumental art and architecture creates a “force field” around it. Like children playing amidst the frescos in Campanella’s City of the Sun, anyone located within this force field comes under the influence of a piece of monumental architecture. In addition to our Palaces’ internal function of educating young pioneers and bonding them into a community, they also exert outwardreaching, inspirational influence. We call this the “Pioneer Effect”.

An enclave of the future, the Palace’s good example irradiates the adult society that surrounds it. From there, we work to catalyze the transition toward a less consumerbased society. “Pioneer Action Zones” are developed around schools and clubs, where the Pioneer Effect is exerted directly, through environmental and social work, and indi rectly, through shining example.

More than just a building, the Young Pioneer Palace is an entire environment — a ‘Pioneer Republic’ — designed to facilitate aesthetic and scientific education, play and fantasy.

(Pho

to: V

ladi

mir

Vya

tkin

, RIA

Nov

osti


Moscow State Palace of Child and Youth Cre-ativity (Moscow, 1959-1962) Considered one of the most important experiments in Soviet modernism. Currently offers over 1200 groups and classes for children up to age 18.

Pioneer Palaces: open architecture, inside and outA Young Pioneer Palace is designed to be open, inside and out. A combination of great expanses of glass and facades decorated with mosaics, sculptures, and other forms of monumental art communicates to the area around it and welcomes Young Pioneers. Once inside, a Pioneer enters a highly adaptable microenvironment scaled to child size. Educational spaces, gardens, theatres, workshops, and play areas accommodate an educational program designed to cultivate a child’s interest in labor and creativity. For large scale performances, interior spaces are designed to join together through the removal of partitions. Moscow State Palace of Child and Youth Creativity is our most celebrated example.

The design of every Pioneer Palace, Camp, and Theatre is inspired by a passionate belief that a rational architecture, close to nature, can stimulate a better, socialist society of the future.

Pioneer Theatres: serious architecture for magic and emotionPioneer Theatres create an active engagement with the performing arts. Our buildings populate their surroundings with sculptures and monumental artworks. The interior is equipped with rooms for speeches and conversations prior to the show, providing children with an intimate, emotional connection to the performance and performers. Although designed for children, the architecture of our Pioneer Theatres is not childish; we insist on using modern building materials that create an atmosphere of refinement and respect. At the same time, we include in every theatre a collection of “magic spaces” — such as balconies or aviaries — to stimulate wonder. Our Natalia Sats Musical Theatre in Moscow is exemplary.

Pho

tos

cour

tesy

of I

nstit

ute

of M

oder

nism

, Mos

cow

; Nat

iona

l Arc

hive

of t

he A

mur

Reg

ion

TESTIMONIAL


Pioneer Camps: An architecture of health and education, at one with its environment Our Pioneer Camp complexes are designed to encourage physical development and teamwork by maximizing the climatic possibilities of the surrounding landscape and providing specialized outdoor zones for public meetings and performances. Our buildings have large, full opening windows that eliminate the border between inside and outside and provide natural ventilation. Their light and functional design defers to the environment, while their prefabricated materials allow for fast construction, specially tailored to the site. The Artek camp complex in Crimea is one of our best known examples.

Artek Camp Complex (Crimea, Gurzuf, 1959-1964) A world camp complex, consisting of ten camps accommodating over 30,000 children per year.

Natalia Sats Musical Theatre (Moscow, 1975-1979) The world’s first professional theatre for children, the birth-place of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

V. V. Beloglazov instructs a young dancer

Pho

tos

cour

tesy

of I

nstit

ute

of M

oder

nism

, Mos

cow

; Nat

iona

l Arc

hive

of t

he A

mur

Reg

ion


Personal Hygiene is a Public AffairRussia’s post-revolutionary bath boom

According to the United Nations, 7 of the 10 fastest growing cities lack adequate water and sanitation. The challenge for planners the world over is how to provide a basic standard of hygiene for large, newly urban-ized populations when the water supply is insufficient. Faced with a similar conflux of enormous need and limited resources, Soviet architects developed mega-scale energy and water-efficient public bath facili-ties that remain relevant today.

Exhibitor In Depth An intimate look at our lesser-known exhibitors


VISIT CIRCULARITY AT BOOTH D2

I mproving hygiene was one of the central priorities of the early Soviet Union. After the revolution, large scale public bathing facil

ities were constructed throughout the country. The effort was overseen by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the government unit also responsible for water supply, sewerage, construction of slaughterhouses, crematoria, incinerators, laundry, as well as urban planning and cartography.

These Soviet baths were designed primarily at Kommunstroy, a division of the NKVD, created in 1928 on the basis of a preexisting design and consultancy bureau. Designing buildings for providing better hygiene was considered important to the larger effort of modernizing the Soviet population. The architects of Kommunstroy, including N.I. Gundorov, S.V. Panin, and others, developed radically new technological schemes for these facilities. They were productive: according to contemporary accounts, in 1931 Kommunstroy constructed 44 public bathhouses with a total capacity of nearly three million people. But even this was inadequate for the society’s needs.

Mass production meets personal hygieneThe construction of Soviet baths initially re

flected regulations adopted by prerevolutionary organizations, such as a sanitarytechnical consultation on urban improvement established at the AllRussian Union of cities, which was still in effect when the Bolsheviks came to power. In 1920, the new government established Sanstroy, the Committee on Sanitary Construction. Its staff built socalled sanitary inspection rooms, temporary structures for a quick wash used by military and civilians, and for the treatment of clothing lice infestations.

In the years that followed, the architecture of public baths came to reflect the “strategic” importance of hygiene in the still impoverished country. Architects designed opulent, experimental structures designed to turn hygiene into the highest virtue and bathing into a pleasure. Their buildings were scaled to the scope of need: many where huge, comparable in size and aesthetic to opera houses. In the context of material scarcity that defined the 1920s, however, few of these designs could be realized, with the important exception of the experimental round baths of Leningrad architect Alexander Nikol’sky.

Circularity is a hypothetical designer of large scale public bath facilities. The company works to address two of the most pressing problems of the 21st century — water scarcity and rapidly urbanizing populations — by providing water and energy efficient facilities for the expansion of hygiene on a mass scale. Circularity’s signature round bathhouses are modernist machines for providing hygiene for huge numbers within an environment that remains aesthetically original and socially pleasant. Here’s how it works:

Instructive Architecture The Circularity experience consists of 5 steps that each visitor must follow: 1. Undressing2. Rinsing3. Steaming4. Washing5. Dressing

Saint-Petersburg Tyumen

1st fl. 1st fl.

2nd fl.2nd fl.

Two circularity models, based on existing buildings in St. Petersburg and Tyumen

A poster from an early Soviet sanita-tion campaign urg-es readers to “Have a wash after work.”

A line outside of a Soviet banya, 1920

Project for a Bath-house, by Aleksandr Nikolsky, 1927; origi-nal drawing.


The term public bath is somewhat misleading. The facilities constructed in Russia from 1920s30s provided not only changing rooms, bathing and shower rooms, but also a swimming pool and spaces for physical education. Industrial workers and residents of apartment houses and barracks without showers flocked to public baths — for hygiene, exercise, and community. A 1929 article explained the added values of the Soviet bathhouse: “The construction of public bathing places of a new type is part of a communal works program. The new type of bathing establishments differs from previous ones mainly in the fact that, along with sanitary purposes, it aims at the development of a physical culture. Thus, the possibility of bathing in more sophisticated and convenient ways provides the public with the opportunity to use public baths year round.”1

The architecture of these public baths suggests that developing collective processes for improving hygiene was as important to the government’s agenda as were encouraging collective accommodation and teamwork. As a result, the baths became sites for some of the new society’s most radical architectural and social experiments. Many initially had no clear division between male and female branches, for example. These experimental “family baths” proved highly controversial: a commentator for the newspaper Working Moscow complained in 1926 that “baths, these powerful bodies of sanitation, convert into disgusting brothels, from which venereal disease pours in a dirty stream.” The approach proved too radical for even a revolutionary society. In 1926 the Moscow City Council eliminated such family baths, retaining only those with male and female divisions.

Almost a century later, a company inspired by the experimental architects of the early Soviet Union could reintroduce a forgotten scheme for providing hygiene for huge numbers in an environment that is efficient, educational, and architecturally original.

Public Bath, St. Petersburg, by Aleksandr Nikol’sky

Public Bath, Tyumen, by Anatoly Ladinsky

1 B. Victorov. “Concerning the design of bathrooms, showers and swimming pools,” Kommunalnoe khozyaystvo (Municipal Economy), 1929. No7-8.

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH


Its facilities are designed to ensure that visitors follow these steps in the correct sequence. Bathers enter and become part of a ‘bathing loop’ that begins with removing soiled clothes and takes them through a multi-step cleaning process that concludes when their clothes are returned to them, freshly sanitized.

This hygiene loop is designed into the very architecture of the buildings. All Circularity public bath facilities are round. Although it gives its buildings a unique and visually appealing quality, their roundness is not an aesthetic choice. It is simply the most efficient solution for providing the most with the least.

The Circularity approach applies socialist thinking to provide an integrated solution to our current urban and ecological crises.

Water savingsOn average, bathing a person requires 1/3 the amount of water that showering does.

Material savingsThe round building typology is far more efficient than a right-angled one: the wall area of Circularity’s round baths is 24.7% less than their orthogonal equivalent.

Energy savings A round building for mass bathing saves energy. Heat loss from Circularity’s round bath buildings is 27% less than traditional facilities of similar size.

Urban scaleThe scale of Circularity’s facilities creates an urban density that not only serves the largest numbers, but introduces newly arrived city dwellers to the ways of urban life. Life in a city offers new opportunities and requires new habits: consistent hygiene, assiduous rule following, and fellowship with strangers being three of the most important.

Sources: BBC, Construction Industry №8 (1925), Alexander Nikol’sky

Men in the swimming pool of the Trust for Baths and Laundries, 1931


Details of the design of a wooden country house, 1870s.

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH

Imag

e co

urte

sy o

f Tot

alA

rch


Eternal RussianA quest to find our own modernity

Estetika Ltd is a leading supplier of Russian and neo-Russian-style architectural elements. Our prod-ucts are based on traditional design motifs found in dwellings throughout the Russian countryside. Estetika Ltd ornaments are crafted from mod-ern materials that fit any structure at any scale, transforming every-thing from an unfinished apartment to a glass-clad skyscraper into an expression of proud, modern, quint-essentially Russian architecture. Our work is part of a centuries-long effort by Russian designers to define a modern style that is recognizably our own. Today, against the backdrop of generic, globalized architecture, when one city’s CBD can’t be distin-guished from another, this effort is more important than ever.

VISIT ESTETIKA LTD AT BOOTH A1

Imag

e co

urte

sy o

f Tot

alA

rch


T he “Russian style” stretches back to time immemorial, but it emerged as a coherent creative movement only with the emancipation

of Russia’s serfs in 1861. The granting of citizenship to millions of peasants triggered an explosion in folkthemed literature and art, particularly among the painters of the Itinerant movement. Architects responded through the establishment of a “Russian style.”

“The old gentry style of the country manor house with columns and porticos, borrowed from the West, is now a thing of the past,” explained the wife of artist Vasily Polenov. “They no longer seek models for their constructions among the estate buildings of the aristocracy, but take them now from the peasants’ village.”

An aesthetic infused with sacred symbolismFor “Russian style” architects, the izba or traditional Russian log cabin became a source of inspiration, with prototypes for ornamentation taken from the embroidered towels of the peasantry, adjusted and then implemented through the craft of woodcarving. In ancient times, this beauty had a sacred function, a talismanic quality, protecting the house from the forces of evil. Late nineteenth century architects applied it as decoration. They wove the ornamental motifs of the log cabin into the fabric of major public buildings,

such as the Historical Museum and Upper Trading Rows(the GUM department store) on Red Square, thus turning them into national symbols.

Melding ancient with modern Opinion was not united about what best symbolized “Russian style,” however. Critics accused the most elaborate buildings of evoking paternalism and took the rich beauty of elaborately turned balusters, bulging columns and suspended drop ornaments as mere decoration. “Patriotism in art is a good thing. I have no further word to say on the matter,” wrote the young Anton Chekhov, “except one of scorn: snap off the cockerels, and it’s no longer Russian style.”

Artists seeking a genuine, organic Russianness found inspiration in the Russian north – there beyond the reach of the Tatar Yoke and serfdom, where schismatics had fled, and where the traditions of deepest antiquity were preserved untouched. The artist Viktor Vasnetsov built a modest little church in Abramtsevo in 1883, on the model of Novgorod’s Church of the Savior at Nereditsa. It differed from its “Russian style” contemporaries sharply: instead of a profusion of detail, Vasnetsov created an architecture of simplicity, compactness, and picturesque asymmetry. It announced the establishment of the “neoRussian style” – a nationalromantic version of Art Nouveau.

Left: Alexander Pomer-antsev and Vladimir Shukhov’s Upper Trad-ing Rows (now GUM de-partment store)

Opposite page, top:Postcard of Pochozer-skiy churchyard (pogost) by Ivan Bilibin, 1904

Opposite page, below: Fedor Shekhtel’s Rus-sian pavilion at Glasgow International Exhibition

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH


Conveying artisanal quality Once established, neoRussian style became a powerful tool for communicating a modern Russian aesthetic capable of distinguishing itself among the architectures of the world. At World Fairs in Paris and Glasgow, the neoRussian style represented the country and offered a persuasive defense of traditional craftsmanship in a context of giddy industrialization. “The best native Vladimir carpenters adopted the techniques of purely northern architecture,” an observer of the Russian contribution to the Glasgow International Exhibition noted, “joining timbers by cutting them ‘into a paw,’ ‘into a darkness,’ or ‘into a corner’ [the English dovetail, halfblind dovetail and half lap joints, respectively], and all the main parts of the buildings were constructed virtually without nails.”

The cult of the artisan also remained a defining feature of the Russian style throughout the 20th century, opposing the industrial and conventional styles, and being regularly brought to life in such masterpieces of naive architecture as the blacksmith Kirillov’s house in Kunara.

Eternally Russian In the early 20th century, the Russian and neoRussian styles began to merge and dissolve in the building of dachas, a return of sorts to their origins in the private and unofficial zones of the country house. The Soviet state ignored this theme, save when riding the wave of postwar patriotism, which saw the building of Moscow’s “seven sister” skyscrapers, whose tiered silhouettes evoke Russian ecclesiastical architecture.

Today, against the backdrop of globalization, recognizable national architectures are ever harder to find. As Russia continues to define itself as a culture simultaneously modern and traditional, the Russian and neoRussian styles are more important than ever. They provide a rich catalog of motifs drawn from the recesses of the Russian architectural imagination. Over time, they have established themselves as the most organic expression of our aesthetics: strong, beautiful, eternally Russian.

Today, against the backdrop of globalization, recognizable national architectures are ever harder to find. The Russian and neo-Russian styles are more important than ever.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Celebrating 60 years of modern housing



Prefab Corp is a sustainable building company. We deliver products and services that support governments and residential developers all around the world.

We are focused on empowering developers—large and small—to provide modern housing for people of all incomes, while maximizing their return on investment and conserving more of our world’s resources. We do this by providing a fully integrated system of services essential to the planning, creation and care of prefabricated housing assets—from finance and development, through design and project management to construction, marketing, maintenance, deconstruction and upcycling—either alone or by integrating local supply chains.

We strive to advance residential development throughout the world by offering a fully integrated service set that includes manufacturing and construction, support services and real estate investments. Our seven businesses draw on 60 years of experience to deliver improved quality, safety and technical expertise to our clients, principally in the Russian Federation, with an extensive portfolio of projects Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America.

2014 is a special year for us. It marks the 60th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev’s historic demand for extensive prefabricated housing construction throughout the Soviet Union. His speech, delivered at the National Conference of Builders in December 1954, triggered a revolution in the industrialization of residential building in Russia. In the decade that followed, almost one hundred million people—nearly half of the population of the country—were provided new homes.1 In 1960 alone, 52,000,000 square meters of housing were built—twice what had been built in the first ten years of Soviet rule taken together.2 The manufacturing, transportation, construction, and publicity companies that eventually merged to form Prefab Corp have their origins in this period. We owe our existence to Nikita Khrushchev’s visionary leadership and so, on the occasion of its 60th anniversary, we present his historic speech.

1 N. Petrushkina, Sovetskaia Rossia (3 June 1961): 1; translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 13, 23(1961): 32.

2 Zhukov, “Tekhnicheskaia estetika,” 1-2. Gregory D. Andrusz, Housing and Urban Development in the USSR (London: Macmillan, 1984), 178, table 7.5.


ON THE EXTENSIVE INTRODUCTION OF INDUSTRIAL METHODS, IMPROVING THE QUALITY AND REDUCING

THE COST OF CONSTRUCTIONNikita Khrushchev, 1954

Comrades!It is a long time since we last had a National Confer-

ence of Builders and there is now great need for such a con-ference. It is my opinion that the present meeting will be to the great good not just of construction, but of all our work both in industry and in other sectors of our national econo-my. [...]

Urgent issues concerning the industrialization of construction

[...] At the present time conditions exist for the exten-sive industrialization of construction. What are these condi-tions? First and foremost, we now have a large pool of qual-ified workers and specialists. Our building organizations and construction-material-manufacturing industry employ many thousands of fine craftsmen and innovators in production. We have factories capable of supplying our builders with mod-ern equipment that makes work easier and improves productivi-ty. We have expanding manufacturing facilities that allow us to supply the construction industry with prefabricated rein-forced-concrete structures, parts, and construction materi-als. [...]Extensive expansion of manufacture of prefabricated rein-

forced-concrete structures and parts will give enormous eco-nomic benefits. Our builders know that until recently there was debate over which of two paths we should take in construction – use of prefabricated structures or monolithic concrete. We shall not name names or reproach those workers who tried to direct our construction industry towards use of monolith-ic concrete. I believe these comrades now realize themselves that the position they adopted was wrong. Now, though, it’s clear to everyone, it seems, that we must proceed along the more progressive path – the path of using prefabricated rein-forced-concrete structures and parts. (Applause.)What are the consequences of using monolithic concrete

in construction? Increased dirt on building sites. The use of moulds of all kinds and shapes. Unnecessary expenditure of iron. Wastage of cement. Losses of inert materials and concrete.And what are the effects of using prefabricated parts? Use

of pre-fabricated reinforced concrete will allow us to manu-

– 1 –

Exce

rpts

from

a s

peec

h by

Niki

ta K

hrus

hche

v at

the

Natio

nal C

onfe

renc

e of

Bui

lder

s, A

rchi

tect

s, W

orke

rs in

th

e Co

nstru

ctio

n M

ater

ials

and

Man

ufac

ture

of C

onst

ruct

ion

and

Road

s M

achi

nery

Indu

strie

s, a

nd E

mpl

oyee

s of

Des

ign

and

Rese

arch

and

Dev

elop

men

t Org

aniza

tions

, 7 D

ecem

ber 1

954

facture parts as is done in the plant-construction industry – will make it possible to switch to factory construction meth-ods. (Applause.) [...]Wall panels and ceiling/floor sections must be decorated on

the factory floor. These products must arrive at the building site already finished, completely ready for installation. Oth-erwise, what advantage do we get in using prefabrication if we manufacture a part at the factory, install it on the 8th floor, and then start thinking how to go about cleaning or reworking its surface?Concrete structures must be light, with no superfluous

weight. [...]Brick, the main building material, has always been, and con-

tinues to be, used in cases where construction is mainly car-ried out by hand. In such cases great importance attaches to the weight of the material used in the walls, the weight of the brick. In our age – given the availability of concrete, electric motors, cranes, and other mechanisms – we have no ex-cuse for continuing to employ the old methods of working. Ev-eryone knows how much time and labour is need to make brick. Clay has to be dug out of quarries, worked by clay-pounder to produce raw brick. Then this material is dried, loaded into a kiln, baked, and the finished bricks are transferred to the warehouse, transported to the building site, raised onto scaf-folding, and laid on the wall. And all this has to be done many times over with each brick being manipulated like the pieces of a mosaic.Instead of brick, wouldn’t it be better to make concrete

wall sections of a size that will be convenient for the lift-ing mechanisms at our disposal – i.e. weighing two, three, five tons? The advantages of using sections are high levels of pro-ductivity and high output. It’s no accident that many other countries make extensive use of concrete, not brick, in con-struction. [...]There can be no serious thought of industrializing construc-

tion if we are going to continue to increase the number of building organizations. Everyone surely realizes that it is not in the power of small – and, consequently, weak – build-ing organizations to employ industrial methods of working. We must set about decisively strengthening our building organiza-tions. Without this there can be no question of industrializ-ing construction.Highly instructive in this respect is the reduction of num-

bers of building organizations in Moscow – where a single or-ganization, Glavmosstroy has been set up on the basis of the 56 Mossoviet building trusts and various ministries and de-partments. When the establishment of Glavmosstroy was being

– 2 –


discussed, there was much talk of Mossoviet not being able to handle such a large organization, and there were fears that sidelining the ministries would lead to disruption of the plan for construction of residential buildings. It might have been supposed that during the first year’s of Glavmosstroy’s existence there would be some organisational problems that might prevent fulfillment of the plan. However, all such fears proved groundless. [...]Our country is engaged in building industrial enterprises,

residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and other struc-tures on a large scale. This construction program is of vital importance. We have an obligation to significantly speed up, improve the quality of, and reduce the cost of, construction. In order to do so, there is only one path – and that is the path of the most extensive industrialization of construction.

Eliminating design flaws; improving how architects work

[...] Given the scale on which we are building industrial enterprises, residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and cultural and services facilities, any delay in design work is unacceptable. Our entire country is covered in building sites. Every year the Soviet state allocates many billion ru-bles to construction. Literally each one of us is interested in construction work proceeding smoothly. It is unacceptable that building work often drags on as a result of the slowness of our design organizations and that sometimes design of even simple buildings lasts two years or longer.The interests of industrialization of construction dictate

the necessity of reorganizing how our design organizations work, of making production of standard designs and use of al-ready existing standard designs the main element in their work. [...]Many employees of planning and design organizations under-

estimate the importance of standard design.Evidence of this is to be seen in the following facts. Of

the 1,100 construction-design organizations in our country, only 152 are partly engaged in producing standard designs. From 1951 to 1953 a maximum of one per cent of resources al-located for design work was spent on production of standard designs. In 1953 only 12% of the total volume of industrial buildings erected were built using standard designs. And this year there has been only a slight improvement in the situa-tion. [...]They [architects] are all agreed that use of standard de-

signs will significantly simplify and improve the quality of construction, but in practice many architects, engineers, and

– 3 –

“Our country is engaged

in building industrial

enterprises, residential

buildings, schools, hospitals,

and other structures on a

large scale. This construction

program is of vital importance.

We have an obligation to

significantly speed up, improve

the quality of, and reduce

the cost of, construction.

In order to do so, there is

only one path — and that

is the path of the most

extensive industrialization of

construction.


– in industrial construction – technologists too aspire to create only their own one-off designs.Why does this happen? One of the reasons, evidently, is

that there are flaws in the way we train our architects. Led on by the example of the great masters, many young architects hardly wait to cross the threshold of their architecture in-stitutes or find their feet properly before wanting to design nothing but unique buildings and hurrying to erect a monu-ment to themselves. If Pushkin created for himself a monument ‘not made by human hand,’ many architects feel they simply must create a ‘handmade’ monument to themselves in the form of a building constructed in accordance with a unique design. (Laughter, applause.) [...]Why are there 38 standard designs of schools in current

use? Is this expedient? The reason for this is evidently that many workers approach their jobs in construction with no re-gard for cost-saving.We must select a small number of standard designs for res-

idential buildings, schools, hospitals, kindergartens, chil-dren’s nurseries, shops, and other buildings and structures and conduct our mass building programs using only these de-signs over the course of, say, five years. At the end of which period we shall hold a discussion and, if no better designs turn up, continue in the same fashion for the next five years. What’s wrong in this approach, comrades?[...] I want to share with you my impressions and comments

I have regarding how architects work. Above all, I want to address the President of the Academy of Architecture, comrade Mordvinov. Comrade Mordvinov, we have often met in Moscow on matters of work. I know you as a good organizer: you showed your skills in the high-speed conveyor-belt construction project during development of Bol’shaya Kaluzshkaya ulitsa. High-speed conveyor-belt construction was then being carried out for the first time and comrade Mordvinov was among those taking part. After the war, however, comrade Mordvinov under-went a change. He became a different man. As in the song from the opera ‘The King’s Bride’: ‘This isn’t the Grigory Gryazn-ov I used to know!’ (Laughter, applause.)A common feature of construction in this country is wastage

of resources, and for this a large part of the blame rests with the many architects who use architectural superfluities to decorate buildings built to one-off designs.Such architects are a stumbling block in the way of indus-

trializing construction. In order to build quickly and success-fully, we must use standard designs in our building, but this is evidently not to the taste of certain architects. [...]If an architect wants to be in step with life, he must know

– 4 –

“If Pushkin created for

himself a monument ‘not

made by human hand,’ many

architects feel they simply must

create a ‘handmade’ monument

to themselves in the form of

a building constructed in

accordance with a unique design.


and be able to employ not only architectural forms, orna-ments, and various decorative elements, but also new pro-gressive materials, reinforced-concrete structures and parts, and, above all, must be an expert in cost-saving in construction. And this is what comrade Mordvinov and many of his colleagues have been criticized for at the confer-ence – for forgetting about the main thing, i.e. the cost of a square metre of floor area, when designing a building and for, in their fascination with unnecessary embellishment of facades, allowing a great number of superfluities.The facades of residential buildings are sometimes hung

with a multitude of all kinds of superfluous decoration that point to a lack of taste in the architects. Builders some-times even have difficulty executing these decorations.In this matter much influence has been exercised by the

construction of high-rise buildings. In designing such buildings, architects have mainly been interested in creat-ing a silhouette and have failed to take thought of what the construction and exploitation of these buildings would cost.When a wall is given a complex contour simply for purpos-

es of beautification, the consequence is unnecessary expendi-ture on the building’s use as a result of large heat losses. This is the reason why the annual excess expenditure on fuel for the building on Smolenskaya ploshchad’, for instance, is 250,000 rubles. This is for one building on its own.Let me give you some figures for the proportions of floor

area in high-rise buildings.Total floor area: 100%.Building at Krasnye vorota: work rooms 28.1% subsidiary rooms 23.1% infrastructure and services 14.9% construction 33.9%Building on Smolenskaya ploshchad: work rooms 30% subsidiary rooms 24% infrastructure and services 11% construction 35%These figures clearly show how little space in high-rise

buildings is occupied by primary functions and how much is given over to so-called ‘constructional structures’. By ‘constructional structures’ we mean walls and other struc-tures. In high-rise buildings such space far exceeds the norm as a result of the emphasis put on giving buildings an impressive silhouette. This is space that can be looked at only; it’s not for living or working in. (Animated reaction, laughter, applause.) [...]

– 5 –

When comrade Mordvinov was speaking, I asked him about the cost of the high-rise Hotel Ukraina, of which he was the ar-chitect. It should be said that comrade Mordvinov is no lag-gard, but is right in step with those who permit superflui-ty in the architectural decoration of buildings. The cost of one square meter of space occupied by primary functions in Ho-tel Ukraina is 175 percent of the cost of such space in Hotel Moskva.Can it really be permissible that in one and the same city –

Moscow – the difference in cost of construction of residential buildings designed by different authors is 600-800 rubles for every square meter of living space. [...]Certain architects have a passion for adding spires to the

tops of buildings, which gives this architecture an ecclesi-astical appearance. Do you like the silhouette of churches? I don’t want to argue about tastes, but for residential build-ings such an appearance is unnecessary. It’s wrong to use ar-chitectural decoration to turn a modern residential building into something resembling a church or museum. This produces no extra convenience for residents and merely makes exploitation of the building more expensive and puts up its cost. And yet there are architects who fail to take this into account.Architect Zakharov, for instance, submitted plans for de-

veloping Bol’shaya Tul’skaya ulitsa in Moscow with the con-struction of houses whose contours differ little from those of churches. Asked to explain his reasons for so doing, he re-plied: ‘Our designs fit in with the high-rise buildings; we have to show buildings’ silhouettes’. So this, it emerges, is what comrade Zakharov is most concerned about: he needs beau-tiful silhouettes, but what people need is apartments. They don’t have time to gaze admiringly at silhouettes; they need houses to live in! (Applause). In his designs for houses on Lyusinovskaya ulitsa, Zakharov decided to put sculptures at the corners of his buildings, from the 8th floor upwards. On the top floor he sliced off the corners, and in these slant-ing corners put windows, outside which, on the windowsills, sculptures were supposed to stand. A five-wall room with an an-gled window is inconvenient for living in, not to mention the fact that the residents of this room must spend their entire lives staring at the back of a sculpture. Of course, it’s not particularly pleasant to live in a room like this. It’s good, then, that these houses were never built and that comrade Zakharov was restrained from his art.And all this is called architectural and artistic decoration

of buildings! No, comrades, this is architectural perversion that leads to the spoiling of materials and to unnecessary ex-penditure of resources. Moscow’s organizations have taken the

– 6 –


right decision in dismissing comrade Zakharov from his post as head of an architectural studio. But for the good of all of us this should have been done much earlier. [...]The serious mistakes being made by design organizations and

particular individual architects largely have their explanation in the incorrect guidance issuing from the Academy of Architec-ture and many leading architects. Consider the kind of guidance that has been given until recently:A.G. Mordvinov, President of the Academy of Architecture, in

an article entitled ‘Artistic problems in Soviet architecture,’ published in Arkhitektura No.1 (1945), writes:‘Architecture serves the purpose of satisfying the people’s

aesthetic requirements … The creation of important works of ar-chitecture calls for constructional volumes not dictated by di-rect practical need (porticoes, monumental halls, towers) … I doubt whether there is a single city that, if it wants to be beautiful, can do without high-rise compositions.’Professor A.V. Bunin in his article ‘On the use of the urban

legacy in post-war restorational construction,’ likewise pub-lished in the above collection, asserts:‘In order to embellish the city there is a need for entire

buildings – including with domes and towers – that are not jus-tified by any utilitarian function … The Soviet city is undergo-ing a crisis of vertical development … City centres with their public buildings, towers, and domed structures must be unique designs without any recourse to standardisation.’I could give many more examples of such sayings. [...]Certain architects try to justify their incorrect principles

and the superfluities in their designs by referring to the ne-cessity of fighting Constructivism. But the fight against Con-structivism is a flag that is waved to conceal wastage of state resources.What is Constructivism? This is how, for instance, the Large

Soviet Encyclopedia defines this tendency: ‘Constructivism …. substitutes for artistic creation ‘the execution of construc-tions’ (hence the name ‘Constructivism’), i.e. naked technical-ism. While calling publicly for functional, constructive ‘expe-diency’ and ‘rationality,’ the Constructivists in fact moved in the direction of aesthetic admiration of form divorced from con-tent … A consequence of this was that anti-artistic, depressing ‘box style’ that is typical of modern bourgeois architecture … Examples of Constructivism have been subjected to harsh criti-cism in many instructions and resolutions issued by the Party … ‘ (Large Soviet Encyclopedia, 1953, vol.22, p.437)This definition of Constructivism is not, of course, exhaus-

tive. But even this characterization of Constructivism shows the bankruptcy of some architects who, shielding themselves

– 7 –

“If an architect wants to be

in step with life, he must

know and be able to employ

not only architectural forms,

ornaments, and various decorative

elements, but also new progressive

materials, reinforced-concrete

structures and parts, and, above

all, must be an expert in cost-

saving in construction.


with phrases about fighting Constructivism, in fact sacrifice to facades, i.e. to form, convenience of internal floor plan and building exploitation and thus show contempt for people’s essen-tial needs.Certain architects who argue for the need to fight Construc-

tivism are guilty of the opposite: they decorate the facades of buildings with superfluous and sometimes utterly unnecessary dec-orative elements that require expenditure of state resources.These architects call buildings that have no towers, built-on

porticoes, or columns or whose facades are not decorated with bits of stage scenery ‘boxes’; and they accuse them of relaps-ing into Constructivism. Such architects could perhaps be called ‘inside-out Constructivists’ in as much as they themselves are on the slippery path to ‘aesthetic admiration of form divorced from content’. [...]The fight against Constructivism must be conducted using rea-

sonable means. We must not get carried away with architectural decoration or aesthetic embellishment, nor should we crown our buildings with completely unjustified towers and sculptures. We are not against beauty, but we are against superfluity. The fa-cades of buildings should be of beautiful and attractive appear-ance, and this should be achieved as a result of the entire ed-ifice having good proportions, well-proportioned window and door apertures, well-positioned balconies, correct use of the tex-ture and colour of facing materials, and a proper presentation of wall parts and structures in buildings made from large sec-tions and panels. [...]In this connection I would like to tell you of the impres-

sions we formed after our conference in the city of Sverdlovsk. Sverdlovsk is a large, fine city where the might of the Sovi-et Union is plain to see. It has important factories that pro-duce fine machinery. But when it comes to urban construction and improvement, this major centre has some large failings. For ex-ample, during reconstruction of the building of the City Execu-tive Committee the main facade was fitted with a tower and spire. Construction of the spire alone cost almost two million rubles and reconstruction of the whole building cost nine million. The larger part of this expenditure was probably due to work in-volved in readying the facade for the high-rise part of the building and in constructing the tower. Money spent on building the spire would on its own have sufficed to build two schools for 400 pupils each.On one of Sverdlovsk’s streets there is a large five-story

building.- ‘This is a mill,’ comrade Kutyrev, Secretary of the Region-

al Committee, explained to us, and then added: ‘But we want to build a new mill and convert this building into a hotel.’

– 8 –

- ‘Convert it – how?’ we asked him.- ‘Yes,’ said comrade Kutyrev. ‘Our plan is to convert it into

a hotel.’- ‘But why rebuild a mill as a hotel?’ we said to him.

‘Wouldn’t it be better to build a new hotel?’Judge for yourselves. Can it really make sense to convert a

building currently in use as a mill into a hotel and then build a completely new mill? (Laughter, applause.)This money could be used to build a good new hotel, which

would be better and cheaper. Where’s the common sense, where’s the economic expediency?Then we continued on our way round Sverdlovsk. The Regional

Committee Secretary said:‘This roadway we’re also thinking of redoing.’- ‘And what do you want to do with it?’- ‘Tarmac it over.’The roadway was made of granite cobblestones. It would outlive

our grandsons, while tarmac wouldn’t last more than ten years. Why, we have to ask, the desire to spoil a granite carriageway?When we drove up to the Party Regional Committee building, the

Committee Secretary announced:- ‘Here’s our committee building. We’re thinking of recon-

structing it.’- ‘What kind of reconstruction? For what purpose?’- ‘We don’t like the facade. It must be completely changed.’What is meant by ‘changed’? What will be the cost of modify-

ing a six-story building? It’s clearly cheaper to put up a new building than to reconstruct an old one.When you hear proposals of this kind, you can’t help remem-

bering Shchedrin ridiculing the governor who knocked down ev-erything built by his precursor. It turns out that the habits mocked by the great Russian satirist Shchedrin are still alive among us today! (Applause.) [...]

Improving quality: the most important task faced by our builders

Comrades, special attention should be paid to improving the quality of construction. We must build not merely quickly, but unfailingly well and sturdily, and we must value our reputation as builders. Buildings should be convenient for living in and convenient in exploitation. Badly built buildings have to be re-paired after short periods of time, which means having to spend extra money. This applies to all types of construction.First and foremost, I would like to talk about quality of con-

struction in residential buildings. Are the walls and ceilings of our buildings well made? I think they are very well made. In our residential buildings, schools, hospitals, and other

– 9 –


buildings the walls and ceilings are constructed in such a way that they will perform their functions for hundreds of years. There can be no doubt about this since we use reinforced con-crete for construction. But it has to be said that the decora-tion of buildings is often done badly. What’s more, many workers put up with clearly unconscientious work in decorating build-ings. This has been said in full fairness by many comrades at the conference.Recently comrades Bulganin and Mikoyan and myself had to vis-

it many cities in the Far East, Siberia, and the Urals. We were looked after well. Which is understandable – given that we’re demanding guests and that we have the power to criticize – and in fact do even more than just criticize. So naturally they tried to ensure the best conditions for us. (Laughter, ap-plause.) In the city of Sverdlovsk we lived in a hotel. This ho-tel was well and sturdily made. It has to be supposed that we were given by no means the worst rooms. (Laughter.) And in this hotel we saw that the bathroom and toilet blocks were very bad-ly built and that the quality of decorative work was poor. We asked for the hotel director and the city leaders and said to them: ‘Look how poor this work is!’Evidently, there was a failure to require proper standards

during construction. The quality of the tiling was poor and it had been carelessly laid. The pipes in the toilets and bath-rooms were covered in rust and had been hurriedly painted with some sort of grey paint before our arrival, with more paint be-ing splashed onto the walls at the same time. The way that these pipes had been joined together was very bad and I, as an ex-plumber, was very indignant: even in re-Revolutionary times pipe joints down the mine were done better and more cleanly than in this hotel in Sverdlovsk. [...]Builders must be told about such failings – and there are many

of them – and be told to drastically improve the quality of their work. Comrade Yudin, the Minister for the Construction-Ma-terials Industry, and other workers in the construction-materi-als industry should not give themselves airs, but should learn from our friends in Czechoslovakia, who make fine construction materials and parts. (Applause.) They can also learn from the German Democratic Republic, where they produce fine facing tiles. It has to be said without beating about the bush that some com-rades learn too little from others and, what is more to the point, don’t even desire to learn. (Applause.) [...]Special attention should be paid to improving the quali-

ty of panels made of wood. In many houses window transoms and doors are badly made. And you know that when someone walks into a house, what he notices first of all is the door – how well it closes, whether there are any chinks in it, how it’s painted. He

– 1 0 –

also looks to see how the windows have been made and what the various fittings are like. We must work constantly and insistent-ly to improve the quality of decorating work. In residential buildings the stairwells must likewise be well decorated.There is much that must be done to improve the quality of

soundproofing in houses. We especially need to work on insulation between apartments; this should be beyond reproach. In this case we need to make sure that walls between apartments and between different floors conform with soundproofing requirements. [...]Production of linoleum must be expanded. Floors covered in li-

noleum are no worse than parquet floors; they’re more hygien-ic and smarter. It is easier to look after such floors than af-ter parquet ones. Everyone knows that parquet floors have to be waxed – which is a complicated business and requires extra ex-penditure. We should value women’s labour and try our best to lighten it. [...]For decorating the external walls of buildings the best mate-

rial is ceramic tiling. Ceramic facing is long-lasting, aesthet-ically pleasing, and does not change colour during use. [...][...] The main thing is, it’s vital that order should be kept:

no construction should begin without an architectural design, without an estimate, or without detailed plans. (Applause.) But what currently happens in practice? No sooner has a decision been taken to build something than a report comes back saying that construction has begun. And there isn’t even an architec-tural plan for the building. It’s well known that before start-ing construction the site must be well prepared, roads built, supply of water and electricity taken care of, and full archi-tectural plans drawn up [...]We lose a great deal as a result of our building sites not re-

ceiving metal and other materials in the right assortment. I’ll give two examples, but builders could produce such examples without end. Wire with a diameter of 5.5 mm is needed for rein-forced concrete. There isn’t any. The builders are told: take wire that is 1 mm wider in diameter. You might think it hard-ly makes a difference – just one millimeter, not worth getting into a fight about. And yet in 1953 in the case of building done by the Ministry of Construction this millimeter led to an ex-tra 4800 tons of metal being used. That’s the kind of figure that Gosplan goes into battle about – and quite rightly so. So that, comrades, is what this millimeter costs [...]!

Increasing the productivity of labour, creating a supply of qualified builders

[...] It’s well known that there is much room in the construc-tion sector for improving productivity of labour and conse-

– 1 1 –


quently for increasing salaries earned by workers. Such room is to be found in mechanization of building work; correct use of the powerful equipment we have on our building sites; a switch to industrial methods of construction; improvement of workers’ skills; better use of the advanced experience gained by innova-tors; and strengthening of production discipline. [...]In order to raise the real wages earned by workers it is nec-

essary to ensure a growth in labour productivity and a growth in the take-home pay earned by each worker.There are many examples that provide convincing proof of the

opportunities available for improving productivity of labour and increasing workers’ wages. Here is one such example. I shall compare two schools of the many built in Moscow in 1954 – one in Tomkmakov pereulok and built out of brick; the other, in Ku-tuzovskaya sloboda, built from large blocks. Observe the dif-ference in the amount of labour the two schools required. 7,360 man-days were spent on laying the brick walls and building cor-nices, ceilings and floors, staircases, and partition walls, while the same work in the building made from large blocks re-quired 1,780 man-days – or only 24% of the number of man-days spent on the school made of brick. The average worker’s pay for the above types of work at the school made from brick was 268 rubles per man-day, while in the case of the block-built school the respective figure was 1,432 rubles, i.e. 5.3 times more. If we consider all types of work done at the brick school, pay per man-day was 142 rubles, while for the second school it was 261 rubles, i.e. 1.8 times greater. As for use of cranes, during construction of the first school 314 machine-shifts were used; while for the second 164 – or 54% – were needed. This, comrades, is where there is room for growth in labour productivity and in-creases in pay! [...]Comrades, I shall bring my speech to a close by expressing my

confidence that builders, architects, engineers, workers in the construction-materials industry and in manufacture of machinery for construction and roads, and employees of design and research organizations will carry out with honor the tasks laid upon them by the Party and the Government; will improve still further the level, pace, and quality of construction in our country; will accelerate the bringing in of factories, mines, power stations, and manufactories; and will build residences, schools, and hos-pitals better and more beautifully. Goodbye until we meet again at the next conference of builders. I wish you continued suc-cess, comrades! (Wild, continuous applause. Everyone stands)

– 1 2 –



“We are not against beauty,

but we are against

superfluity.


Revive by Developing, Develop by RevivingAround the world, vital pieces of urban her-itage have been destroyed or are in urgent need of rescue. The forces of modernization have stripped cities of their historical iden-tities and original urban logic. An imaginary international cultural organization cham-pions a purposeful revival of lost archi-tectural and town planning values as a means of redressing the urban traumas of modernization.

Revived Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH

Illus

trat

ion

by M

aja

Wro

nöska


VISIT THE RUSSIAN COUNCIL FOR RETROACTIVE DEVELOPMENT AT BOOTH B3

T he Russian Council for Retroactive Development (RCRD) is an international cultural organization dedicated to a purposeful revival

of the lost historical, architectural, and town planning values of the city and redressing the urban traumas of modernization. For over twenty years, the RCRD has been at the forefront of the fight to reconstruct Russia’s architectural heritage. From its headquarters in Moscow, the Council oversees the Retroactive Development® of a city ravaged by reckless Soviet and postSoviet planning practices. The RCRD works to develop a new, holistic approach to urban planning based on the application of best practices from previous development periods. Its efforts have yielded a number of high profile reconstructions, including Kolomenskoye Palace, the Iberian Gate, and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, three invaluable pieces of Moscow’s architectural heritage that were tragically demolished.

The Origins of Retroactive Development®

“Now there is a moment in the development of Moscow, when the nihilistic actions concerning the city’s central core has gone too far. There is a threat of the whole losing artistic appearance, and it becomes clearer and clearer that in future we should revive the lost elements, developing new aesthetic values on the base of their genetic potential rather than strictly preserving monuments of architecture or creating so-called ‘preservations zones’.”

— Revived Moscow, diploma design by B. Sav-in, A. Ivanov, O. Makarova, M. Kyrchanov, O. Omelyanenko, V. Palkus, 1990 (Supervisor: Ass. prof. B. Yeremin)

The Russian Council for Retroactive Development (RCRD) has its origins in the ideas and studios of Boris Yeremin, an esteemed professor at Moscow Architectural Institute (MARKhI). During the 1980s and ‘90s Yeremin led a series of efforts to define the future development of Moscow, based on a sensitive engagement with its past. Under the umbrella of retro-razvitie (retroactive development), Yeremin’s students launched a wide range of proposals for reviving individual buildings, public spaces, and entire neighborhoods in the capital.

The projects were united by a shared desire to establish a new form of urban development based on undoing the mistakes of modernization. Although their proposals occasionally included acts of architectural preservation, Yeremin and his students generally took a critical view of the practice, arguing that it instills in the architect a passive attitude towards heritage. Retroactive Development® was developed as an active approach to imagining and improving the city, based on understanding its history and, when beneficial, resurrecting those parts that have been unwisely removed.

Although developed in an academic context, Yeremin’s ideas were put into practice throughout the 1990s and 2000s, as former students assumed positions in government, determining planning and construction policy for Moscow.

Revive by developing, develop by reviving “Over the past decade, we have seen a welcome new trend evolving, mainly in developing coun-tries. I am speaking about culture as an econom-ic driver: a creator of jobs and revenues; a means of making poverty eradication strategies relevant and more effective at the local level.”

— UNESCO DirectorGeneral Irina Bokova

While the cultural value of reviving urban heritage is obvious, Retroactive Development® also operates as a driver of economic growth. Besides employing the historians, craftspeople, architects, and contractors needed to build them, projects like the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and Iberian Gate have become unmissable tourist destinations crucial to Moscow’s city marketing.

It’s a model the Council hopes to see replicated, as cities everywhere attempt to develop through reviving their heritage. The benefits are obvious: worldwide tourism to global heritage sites is increasing 8 to 12 percent per year on average, according to United National World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), with many sites doubling or tripling in visitation and revenues every 10 years. According to estimates by the Global Heritage Foundation, over 50 global heritage sites today each have annual revenues of over $100 million, up from a fraction of that number 20 years ago.

Rather than focusing on simply protecting or repairing existing sites, Retroactive Development® provides a means to generate new destinations, drawn from the past, ready for the future.

Based on the Russian experience, our message is simple: the past is never gone; heritage can always be revived.

Illus

trat

ion

by M

aja

Wro

nöska


Abbey of Santa EngraciaZaragoza, Aragon, Spain

Leaning Tower of ZaragozaZaragoza, Spain

Buen Retiro PalaceMadrid, Spain

Cerro de los ÁngelesMadrid, Spain

Royal Alcazar of MadridMadrid, Spain

BastilleParis, France

Château de MeudonMeudon, France

Tuileries PalaceParis, France

CoudenbergCoudenberg, Belgium

Maison du PeupleBrussels, Belgium

Huizen transmitterHilversum, Netherlands

Armenian cemetery in JulfaJulfa, Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

26 Commissars MemorialBaku, Azerbaijan

Reza Shah's mausoleumRay south of Tehran

TacharaMarvdasht, Iran

Neutrality MonumentAshgabat, Turkmenistan

PersepolisFars Province, Iran

Buddhas of BamiyanHazarajat, Afghanistan

Gate of All NationsMarvdasht, Iran

Hanging Gardens of BabylonHillah, Babil province,Iraq

House of WisdomBaghdad, Iraq

Ganden Monastery Lhasa Prefecture, Tibet

Sükhbaatar's MausoleumUlaanbaatar, Mongolia

Ram JanmabhoomiAyodhya, India

Załuski LibraryBrühl PalaceKotowski PalaceRoyal CastleSaxon PalaceWarsaw radio mast

Stalin MonumentPrague, Czechoslovakia

Kiev City Duma buildingKiev, Unkraine

Palace of the Grand DukesVilnius, Lithuania

Gellért Hill CalvaryGellért Hill, Budapest

Oriental InstituteSarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Nelson's PillarDublin, Ireland

Raglan LibraryMonmouthshire, England

Copenhagen CastleCopenhagen, Denmark

Tre Kronor (castle)Stockholm, Sweden

House of the BlackheadsRiga, Latvia

Sanzhi UFO housesSanzhi District, New Taipei City, Taiwan

HaiyantangXiyang Lou, China

Porcelain Tower of NanjingNanjing, China

Beaconsfield HouseEdinburgh Place Ferry Pier Hong Kong Club BuildingHong Kong HotelKowloon Station (KCR)Kowloon Walled CityQueen's Pier

Hotel Grand ChancellorChristchurch, New Zealand

Beijing city fortificationsBeijing, China

Old Summer PalaceBeijing, China

YongdingmenBeijing, China

Red Gate Armorial GateDynamo StadiumHotel MoskvaRossiya HotelSukharev Tower

Ipatiev HouseYekaterinburg, Russia

Kalamaja cemeteryTallinn, Estonia

Kopli cemeteryTallinn, Estonia

Mõigu cemeteryTallinn, Estonia

Pella PalaceChicherin House

Colossus of RhodesRhodes, Greece

Great Palace of ConstantinopleOld Istanbul, TurkeyGreat Palace of ConstantinopleOld Istanbul, TurkeyImperial Library of ConstantinopleOld Istanbul, TurkeyImperial Library of ConstantinopleOld Istanbul, Turkey

Drazark monasteryAdana province, Turkey

Law school of BeirutBeirut, Lebanon

Mandelbaum GateJerusalem

Georgi Dimitrov MausoleumSofia, Bulgaria

Artificio de JuaneloToledo, Spain

Ratac AbbeyBar, modern-day Montenegro

El Dedo de DiosGran Canaria, Canary Islands (Spain)

Idora ParkOakland, California

Ripple RockSeymour Narrows, British Columbia, Canada

NohmulBelize

San Estevan (Maya site)San Estevan, Belize

Guaíra FallsBorder between Paraguay and Brazil

HwangnyongsaGyeongju, South Korea

Kaesong NamdaemunKaesong, North Korea

Temple of King DongmyeongKorean Peninsula, North Korea

Seoul City HallSeoul, South Korea

Imperial HotelTokyo, Japan

Yosami Transmitting StationKariya, Aichi, Japan

NHK Kawaguchi TransmittertKawaguchi, Saitama, Japan

Lafayette transmitterMarcheprime, Aquitaine, France

Ribeira PalaceLisbon, Portugal

Royal Palace of ÉvoraÉvora , Portugal

MategriffonMessina, Sicily

Nemi ships Lake Nemi, Rome

Stari MostMostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

Bodrum, Turkey

Pearl RoundaboutManama, Bahrain

Qishla of MeccaMecca, Saudi Arabia

Trajan's BridgeKladovo (Serbia)

Warsaw, Poland

Moscow, Russia

Hong Kong

Saint Petersburg, RussiaTallin, Estonia

Library of AlexandriaAlexandria, Egypt

DESTROYED HERITAGE100 global candidates for Retroactive Development







Château de MeudonMeudon, FranceTuileries Palace

Paris, France




A rmenian cemetery in JulfaJulfa, Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

















































NohmulBelize













Mategri�onMessina, Sicily




Bodrum, Turkey




Warsaw, Poland

Moscow, Russia

Hong Kong



EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH








Château de MeudonMeudon, France

Tuileries PalaceParis, France




Armenian cemetery in JulfaJulfa, Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

















































NohmulBelize













MategriffonMessina, Sicily




Bodrum, Turkey




Warsaw, Poland

Moscow, Russia

Hong Kong



DESTROYED HERITAGE100 global candidates for Retroactive Development







Château de MeudonMeudon, FranceTuileries Palace

Paris, France




A rmenian cemetery in JulfaJulfa, Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

















































NohmulBelize













Mategri�onMessina, Sicily




Bodrum, Turkey




Warsaw, Poland

Moscow, Russia

Hong Kong



Destroyed heritage:100 global candidates forRetroactive Development®


Resurrection: Cathedral of Christ the Savior, 2014.

Origin: Cathedral of Christ the Savior, late 1800s. Replacement: Moskva Pol (Moscow Pool), 1964.Destruction: Demolition of the Cathedral, 1931.

Retroactive Development® at work: The resurrection of Christ the SaviorThe Cathedral of Christ the Savior was originally built between 1837 and 1883 as a monument to victory in the War of 1812. In 1931, Stalin demolished the cathedral to clear space for the Palace of Soviets, a monumental building meant to house the Soviet Union’s central administrative center and congress hall. The Palace proved unbuildable and the site was abandoned

until, in the 1950s, the government converted it to the world’s largest open-air swimming pool. In 1995, the pool was closed; workers began reconstructing the cathedral later that year following a new design that included additional features such as a conference hall, shops, and a car wash. Partially funded by the donations of over a million Muskovites, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior today stands as one of Moscow’s most important architectural and spiritual attractions.

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH


From Russia to the world RCRD applies a 360degree Retroactive Development®

methodology based on the purposeful revival of lost historical and architectural treasures, the protection and restoration of surviving monuments, and the active development of urban ensembles on the basis of the generative potential of their architectural heritage.

In 2014 the Council expanded its scope of activities beyond Russia, surveying global sites, and applying the Retroactive Development® methodology in cities such as Paris, Berlin, and New York. Going forward, the organization plans to more intensively engage societies that are currently undergoing rapid urbanization or have had vital components of their architectural heritage erased, either by war, iconoclasm, or rampant development. Based on the Russian experience, our message is simple: the past is never gone; heritage can always be revived.

Rather than focusing on simply protecting or repairing existing sites, Retroactive Development® provides a means to generate new destinations, drawn from the past, ready for the future.

Origin: Berlin City Palace (Berliner Stadtschloss), postcard, 1800s.

Replacement: The Palace of the Republic, 1977.

Ressurection: Reconstructed Berliner Stadtschloss, 2019.

Destruction: Demolition of Berlin City Palace, 1950.


Collectivity For Any ContextFor reasons of economy, culture, and secu-rity, communal living is on the rise. NAR-KOMFIN™, a revolutionary communal hous-ing scheme from the 1920s offers promising new strategies for shared living, work, relaxation, and detention.

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH


VISIT NARKOMFINTM AT BOOTH D6

N ARKOMFIN™ is based on the Narkomfin Communal House, a highly influential experimental residence located at 25 Novin

sky Boulevard, in the Central district of Moscow.Designed by renowned Constructivist archi

tects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis, the project was imagined as a prototype for all subsequent Soviet state housing. Its program and household types were determined by the STROIKOM, an investigative research committee, which was funded by the Soviet government and headed by Ginzburg. The original NARKOMFINTM scheme was designed according to this program to accommodate approximately two hundred people in households of varying types.

As a product of postrevolutionary socialist energy, collectivity is written into the DNA of NARKOMFIN™. Apart from sleep, independent study, and personal hygiene, all of life’s essential activities can be conducted communally in NARKOMFIN™ architecture: eating in the common dining rooms, working in its studios and libraries, physical exercise in the gymnasia, and relaxation in the common rooms, reading rooms, and the surrounding landscape, with child care provided in communal children’s quarters, when applicable.

In describing his design, Narkomfin’s architect Moisei Ginzburg was insistent that the buildings not only support, but mandate collectivity. “The economic routines of the worker’s family (nutrition, cleaning, washing),” he wrote, “as well as the education of children, their care and control, and the fulflment of the cultural and sport needs of workers and children, can and must be collectivized — that is, produced on a collective basis.”

More than 80 years later, NARKOMFIN™ offers buildings for cooperatives, corporations, and communes that share its founder’s vision.

A product of post-revolutionary socialist energy, collectivity is written into the DNA of NARKOMFIN™

Moisei Ginzburg

Narkomfin Communal House, 1928

84 Fair Enough June 4-8 2014

There are currently four standard NARKOMFIN™ models. Each addresses a different set of communal needs and draws on different aspects of the original Narkomfin design.

Dom Kommuna

Where it all began: a fully integrated apartment block for communal living, based on Moisei Ginzburg’s original vision, customizable to any climate or community.

NARKOMFIN™ Youth

Absolute order with improvisational opportunities: NARKOMFIN™ logic is designed to structure life. With slight adjustments to emphasize security, architecture originally designed to dictate a worker’s daily schedule is transformed into a modern approach to juvenile detention, NARKOMFIN™ Youth.

NARKOMFIN™ Wellness

Therapeutic togetherness and revitalizing seclusion: structured around the original Narkomfin logic, but adjusted to accentuate health and embrace nature, NARKOMFIN™ Wellness is the ideal solution for spas, retreats, and rehabilitation centers in warmer climates.

NARKOMFIN™ Workspace

Focus, structure, serendipity: Work in the 21st century requires a near alchemical balance of stimulating social interaction and monk-like concentration. NARKOMFIN™ Workspace is designed to provide both, in a structured, cheerful environment, which encourages inhabitants to abandon outdated distinctions between work and play.

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH


Dom Kommuna: The ultimate in collective livingIn our age of skyrocketing rents and fraying social ties, many are reconsidering the advantages of collective living. Dom Kommuna offers an ideal solution. In Dom Kommuna, all activities — except for sleep, individual study, and personal hygiene — are conducted communally.

Fully realized, according to a master architect’s vision Although based on Moisei Ginzburg’s original Narkomfin Communal House, Dom Kommuna is, in fact, an upgrade. Political and financial complications compromised the original project, resulting in material changes and the elimination of vital facilities. NARKOMFIN™ has worked to correct this history by providing a masterpiece of communal housing as Ginzburg originally intended — including a full rooftop garden and day care center unrealized in the original version.

Based on a sliding scale of collectivity and privacy Assembling a housing collective can be complicated, especially when not all members are equally acclimatized to communal living. Dom Kommuna anticipates and embraces this diversity of experience and expectation by providing both fully collectivized apartments (which we call F units) as well as ones that retain aspects of private, individual, and family living (the K and 2F units). After entering Dom Kommuna as K unit residents, many eventually transition to the F unit, where the full scope of Moisei Ginzburg’s architectural and social vision can be experienced in its purest form.

NARKOMFIN™ Wellness: A platform within natureNARKOMFIN™ exists at one with nature. Moisei Ginzburg’s original Narkomfin Communal House was designed as a prototype for a new social dwelling where, in the architect’s words, “the peasant can listen to the songs of larks,” and where “the combines of habitation, dense and compact, permit their inhabitants to enjoy gardens, expanses of greenery, and the collective spaces of sport and relaxation.”

With NARKOMFIN™ Wellness we embrace that spirit and expand it, providing a wide open architecture in which the distinction between inside and out blurs. The windows open like an accordion to transform living quarters into an open terrace surrounded by greenery. The sense of ‘room’ is lost: the center becomes a platform integrated within nature.

Where the border between inside and outside blurs...The common rooms of the F units are provided with very large windows. By contrast, the sleeping niches have long horizontal strip windows extending the length of the eastern wall. The location of the windows in the F units ensure that morning light enters the sleeping niche and evening light filters through the trees into the large windows of the common room.

...And a communal spirit blows with the breezeThe layout of NARKOMFIN™ Wellness ensures that the common room and sleeping sphere open out to one another visually, as well as spatially. Based on original research conducted by Moisei Ginzburg and his colleagues, this open arrangement facili

NARKOMFIN™ contains two types of living units, one with a kitchen and one with-out, in order to offer de-grees of communal living.


tates the hygienic circulation of air through the two rooms and the windows on either end. A truly ‘open plan,’ the only enclosed spaces in the F units of NARKOMFIN™ Wellness are the shower and toilet.

NARKOMFIN™ Youth: An architecture of controlNARKOMFINTM is active architecture. Created according to Constructivist architectural principles, it provides the tools to define and monitor all aspects of its inhabitants’ lives. Almost a century ago, Narkomfin architect Moisei Ginzburg created a facility in which, according to him, “all difficulties related to daily life appear already resolved and brought to conform to a standard, [where] the forms of […] life are not understood in dialectic terms, but in some sort of uniform and unchanging order.”

Ideal for defining and monitoring daily life Records from the time attest to the success of his approach. In his book Home, Ginzburg quotes a certain comrade Kuzmin, who described the life of a communal member in the original Narkomfin: “A worker woken up by a call from a radio centre regulating communal life, got up, made his bed, went to his wardrobe, put on a dressing gown and slippers, and moved to an exercise room.” He recounts the morning schedule: “1) going to sleep at 22.00; 2) sleep for 8 hours, wake up at 6; 3) morning exercises for 5 minutes — 6.05; 4) washing for 10 minutes — 6.15; 5) shower for 5 minutes — 6.20; 6) dressing for 5 minutes — 6.25; 7) going to the canteen for 3 minutes — 6.28.”

NARKOMFIN™ Youth builds on this tradition of efficiency and control. The facility accommodates for a full range of collectivity and isolation: sleeping cells and living units are connected by a bridge to a communal block that contains a gymnasium with showers, toilets, dressing and storage rooms, as well as a kitchen and cafeteria, with a rest area and reading room.

The living and sleeping cells are spacious, with a height of 2.2 meters and, in the case of twostory spaces, 4.4 meters. A continuous side corridor connects the units and provides a easily controllable means of circulating the inhabitants.

Designed for cost effectiveness, yet accommodating comfort For administrators, NARKOMFIN™ Youth also includes well designed and equipped office and residential spaces. The largest consists of one large, twostory main room with an open gallery. The entry is on the ground floor, with a separate kitchen and a primary twostory room. The second floor contains two bedrooms, two closets, and a large open gallery that leads onto a balcony. The upper open gallery accommodates an office with builtin planter and a solitary pilotis overlooking the main living area.

NARKOMFIN™ Workspace: A design from the past, perfect for the presentFor decades, the name NARKOMFIN™has implied innovation. Considered by some too radical for its own time, Moisei Ginzburg’s visionary design as

NARKOMFIN™ private dwell-ing units are connected by internal streets that lead to collective facilities.

(Imag

e by

Jul

ia A

rdab

yevs

kaya

)

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH


pired to change the world by embracing a new lifestyle in which outdated distinctions between private/public and work/play dissolve. History has confirmed the architect’s assumptions and today NARKOMFIN™ could be considered an architectecture ideally suited to the needs of creative, fast changing companies.

A social condenser, built for innovation Work in the 21st century requires an almost alchemical balance of stimulating social interaction and monklike concentration. NARKOMFIN™ Workspace is designed to provide both: by accommodating the full spectrum of human activities — from solitary rigor to collective relaxation — in a single complex, NARKOMFIN™ compresses the program of office life in order to make it overlap and hybridize work and play. This emphasis on crosspollination makes the kind of serendipitous exchanges and unexpected connections essential to creativity almost inevitable. At the same time, through its signature colorcoded internal navigation system — developed in collaboration with Professor Hinnerk Scheper of the legendary Staatliches Bauhaus — NARKOMFIN™ Workspace provides employees an example of the structure and recognizable internal logic that all great new products must possess. NARKOMFIN™ Workspace is the ultimate workplay environment, an office that ensures innovation by architecturally encouraging employees to work in ways that are proven to produce new ideas.

In this age of skyrocketing rents and fraying social ties, many are re-considering the advantages of collective living

NARKOMFIN™ Workspace has a color-coded internal nav-igation system, developed in collaboration with Professor Hinnerk Scheper of the legendary Staatliches Bauhaus.

NARKOMFIN™ Workspace campus

(Imag

e by

Jul

ia A

rdab

yevs

kaya

)


Sketch of industrial shop made of ramabloks by Lazar Khidekel, 1942

Sketch of industrial shop by Lazar Khidekel, 1942

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH

All

imag

es c

ourt

esy

of t

he K

hide

kel f

amily

arc

hive


RamablokTM recon-struction by Mark Khidekel, 2014

VISIT KHIDEKEL ELEMENTS AT BOOTH D1

Khidekel ElementsAccording to the International Displace-ment Monitoring Centre, approximately 144 million people in 125 countries were forced from their homes between 2008 and 2012. 98% of those displaced live in de veloping countries. Improvements in ear ly warning systems and other life-sav-ing measures have decreased disaster mortality rates, but increased the num-ber of survivors in desperate need of hous-ing. A technolo gy created by a former suprematist artist could provide a vital new tool.

Khidekel Elements is a hypothetical non-profi t organization dedicated to providing low-cost, easy-to-erect housing for com-munities displaced by war and natural di-sasters. Its work is based on the applica-tion of Ramablok™ technology, an open system of elements for the rapid assem-bly of industrial strength structures from found materials.

All

imag

es c

ourt

esy

of t

he K

hide

kel f

amily

arc

hive


T he RamablokTM was originally developed by Lazar Khidekel, a renowned Soviet artist and architect who, in 1942, invented a unique approach to the rapid construction of industrial facilities. Working

at the height of World War II, in conditions of extreme urgency and resource scarcity, Khidekel proposed a new unit of construction that could reduce the use of concrete and wood, without sacrificing strength. He called this unit the ramablok.

Based on Suprematist principles Prior to becoming involved in architecture, Lazar Khidekel was an artist aligned with the Suprematist movement. Suprematist art focused on ba sic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, paint ed in a limited colour palette. When faced with the urgent need to construct industrial buildings with limited time and resources, Khidekel combined the Suprematist principle of minimalism with an intuitive con structivist understanding of the skeletal object to create a standardized yet flexible system of construction that was able to selfadjust, depending on the available building materials.

Created from found materials Out of necessity, the original Ramablok™ was a marvel of sustainability. It was composed of two primary elements: wood for the frame and concrete or ash for filling. The wood was often found or recycled, as wartime limits made cutting down trees impossible, and ash came from the furnaces of locomotives, industrial plants, or other facilities.

In official documents of the time, Khidekel described the benefits of his invention in this way:

Ramabloks are elements for the rapid assembly of the walls of industrial buildings in wartime. The speed of erec-tion is achieved by the scalable size of the element (from 0.8 sq.m – 160 sq.m), its variable weight (from 45 kg up to 2200 kg), ease and cleanliness of installa tion, and its

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH


General PartFencing occupies a large share of industri al construction, both in terms of labour and the amount of building materials and construc-tion time required. In wartime, these parts of the buildings require more rational deci sions regarding the use of building materi als and construction techniques allowing for optimal wall thickness, as well as the complete or partial replacement of deficient materials (brick, cement, and other fluids, timber mate rials, nails, etc.).

The proposed design of constructing walls out of ramabloks is designed to ob-tain optimum wall thickness and weight, mak ing them exclusively for fencing functions. The application of ramabloks is suitable for outdoor fences and internal walls — parti tions of industrial buildings or partitions of low cost and simplified housing, and other similar premises.

Description of ramablokRamabloks are elements for the rapid assembly of the walls of industrial buildings in wartime. The speed of erection is achieved by the scal able size of the element (from 0.8 sq.m — 160 sq.m), its variable weight (from 45 kg up to 2200 kg), ease and cleanliness of installation, and its lack of wet processes and waste. A dry and clean assembly process allows for the erection of walls simultaneously with the installation of equipment.

Ramabloks reduce the consumption of plastic materials — slag concrete, gypsum concrete, terrolit, etc. Ramabloks reduce the con-sumption of timber compared with wood en post-and-plank structures by a factor of 30-50%. Ramabloks can replace a brick wall of 0.5, 1, or 1.5 bricks thick, as well as walls of light concrete blocks.

The filler material of each ramablok can be chosen depending on local or available ma terial of a rather wide range and may be of an optimal thickness (6 cm and over), because the filler in the frame is protected against damage to the perimeter.

Thermotechnical and technical and economic indicatorsThermotechnical properties: when the fill er plate has a thickness of 6-12 cm (dependent on material), ramablok fencing may be equiva-lent to a brick wall at 0.5, 1, or 1.5 bricks thick. Ramablok fencing filled with gypsum concrete (bulk density of 800 kg/m3 and a thickness of 10 cm and thermal conductivity coefficient of 0.25) is equivalent to a brick wall 1.5 bricks in thickness, while lightweight concrete (bulk density 1200 kg/m3 thickness of 12 cm and a coefficient of thermal conductivity of 0.45) is equivalent to a 0.75 thick brick wall.

From the archives: Lazar Khidekel’s 1942 proposal for

Ramablok™ technology

From official papers / State Institute for the Design of Metallurgical Plants “GIPROMEZ” / The construction

sector / The project of construction of walls of industrial buildings from ramabloks


lack of wet processes and waste. Ramabloks reduce the consumption of plastic ma terials — slag concrete, gypsum concrete, terrolit, etc. Ramabloks reduce the consumption of timber compared with wooden post-and-plank structures by a factor of 30-50%. The fill-er material of each ramablok can be chosen depending on local or available material in a rather wide range.

#suprematismforhumanityThe vast majority of human displacement is triggered by climate related hazards. With many of the most precarious communities located in our most populous countries, the need for rapidly constructed, environmen tally responsible housing only grows more acute. By providing a technol ogy developed and tested during times of war and under harsh climatic con ditions, Khidekel Elements may offer unrecognized global value.

During the war, Lazar Khidekel served as chief architect of the State Institute for the Design of Metallurgical Plants, where he applied Ramablok™ technology to a number of projects, including:

Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical PlantRenovation and expansion of the plant for the development of the defense industry during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Designed and constructed between 1941 and 1943.

Novo-Kuznetsk Metallurgical PlantRenovation and expansion of the plant for the development of the construction industry. Designed and constructed between 1941 and 1943.

Chelyabinsk Metallurgical PlantRenovation and expansion of the plant for the development of the defense industry during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Designed and constructed between 1941 and 1943.

Uzbek Semi-integrated Steelworks PlantDesign and construction of a new steel plant. Designed and constructed between 1943 and 1944.

Sumgait Metallurgical PlantDesign and construction of shops and other facilities connected to the plant. Designed and constructed between 1943 and 1945.

“Intersecting lines” by Lazar Khidekel, 1920

EXHIBITOR IN DEPTH




EXPERT ASSESSMENT

Understanding an exhibitor’s creative strategies

Fair Enough takes immense pride in on our exhibitors’ elaborate, informationrich booths. In our Expert Assessment feature, we invite a specialist to dissect one of the best examples in order to reveal its hidden layers of messaging and showcase its authors’ creative strategies. In this edition, art historian Markus Lahteenmaki takes on Lissitzky.


E l Lissitzky acted as the leader of a group of 38 designers for the 1928 Pressa Exhibition in Cologne.

The display exhibited the prog ress of the press industry, and more generally the socialist state, to the West in twenty different rooms. The different spac es covered themes such as the living conditions of the proletari at, agriculture, electrification of the country, and life under the new political system.

The display brought together multiple media varying from posters to texts, from sculpture, painting, objects, models and photomontage to kinetic stands, objects and sculpture. Many of the stands and exhibits combined several different media and technology. Moreover, exactly this merging of the media, technique and method of display to that of the messages conveyed was an essential aspect of many of them. These multiple messages, techniques and media are then brought together with Lissitzky’s overall design of the display, and even more so on yet another level, in the catalogue Lissitzky designed for the exhibition.

YvesAlain Bois wrote on Lissitzky’s art and his use of axonometry and perspec tive that “he wanted to destroy the spectator’s certainty and the usual viewing po sition,” continuing, “in his Prouns, Lissitzky wanted to invent a space in which orientation is deliberately abolished: the viewer should no longer have a base of operations, but must be made continually to choose the coordinates of his or her visual field, which thereby become variable.” At Pressa, the multiple media used together, the design, the simultaneity of spaces, displays and informa tion, create an experience where a

similarly uncertain position is attained. Lissitzky’s designs for the Pressa act

on the whole like a painting with no set point of perspective, or like a photomontage, juxtaposing the different media, images, and messages in a manner that follows no specific rules or conventions, instead leaving the orientation and the experience variable. The role of the beholder becomes central in piecing together the array of information, but the beholder has no set viewpoint, only a multiplicity of possibilities, and perhaps, sudden hints to guide interpretation. In the context of the exhibition, this can be seen on the level of individual exhibits, which call for an active interpreter — and some of the kinetic ones even require an active participant — and on the level of the exhibition itself, in which the movement of the beholder through the spaces and from one piece of information to another becomes central. Lissitzky breaks the idea of a single path and a single perspective, replacing it with a multiplicity and simultaneity of information and ways of perception in the midst of which the beholder becomes an active participant on the level of physical movement as well as through active meaning making, operating without a conventional base of operations.the middle of which the beholder becomes an active participant on the level of physical movement, as well as through active meaning making, thus operating without a conventional base of operations.

Alongside the exhibition, Lissitzky put together an extensive catalogue in the form of a book opening like an accordion, extending to several meters. The catalogue consists of a single con tinuous

photomontage, which features smaller compositions. It combines and juxtaposes photographic material of the exhibition spaces and exhibits with other photographic material from newspapers and elsewhere. It employs ideas and strategies similar to the exhibition itself and recreates a similarly open base for interpration.

The concepts of variable and simultaneous points and paths of reference, and the active, but open role of perception, together with the merging of different media through intense design, ideas which are central to the exhibition, are in the catalogue taken one step further. It does not rely only on the power of the images of the exhibits, but combines them with other imagery and texts to create new layers of meaning, which not only support, but also add to, and alter the original meanings of the exhibits. The catalogue gives another chance to juxtapose the different exhibits and create new paths of interpretation. Text and cut out images have been added to mark and signify, to set the tone, and suggest interpretations, but as well they can be interpreted as mere slogans, with free association. Moreover, even though the text that follows analyzes a section of the catalogue as an exhibition catalogue normally would be, looking for descriptions and suggestions for interpretations of the exhibits, that is by no means meant to indicate that it would be the only, or even the optimal way to approach this particular catalogue. Lissitzky’s catalogue for the Pressa seems even to resist this type of reading: it can well be read with more free association, simply looking at the images, jumping from one to other, and piecing the information together from variable perspectives, with no set base of operations or conventional ways of interpretations. In this, it acts in a similar way to the exhibition design itself, as well as Lissitzky’s designs more generally, extending from painting to spatial design, from photomontage to installations, and from exhibitions to catalogues — intermixing them all from variable bases of operation.


Variable Bases of OperationEl Lissitzky’s designs for the 1928 Pressa exhibition

EXPERT ASSESMENT



A section of the catalogue for the Soviet Pavilion at Pressa Cologne, 1928 by El Lissitzky. Reproductions of the catalogue and the orig-inal photomontage.

1

2

8

4

VISIT LISSITZKY AT BOOTH A2


1 On the left there is a photograph of one of the exhibits, a large conveyer belt, providing pieces of information

and news in the form of slogans, texts, statistics, charts, diagrams and posters, in constant movement. Referring to the ma-chinery of the printing press in its shape and structure, the colossal display-ma-chine acts here as a monumental and in-dustrial conveyer, bearer and transmitter of information of another sort. It propa-gates and communicates through the in-formation attached to it, but also through its whole structure and design.

2 In between the sheets displayed, the belts feature large letters composed of newspaper sheets,

forming the word UDSSR. Thus, in addi-tion to the variety of different media and messages they carry in order to commu-nicate facts, figures and images on the theme of the exhibition, the belts act as a sign and a marker for the whole sec-tion. They also visually set the rhythm for the wider display. The size, movement and action of this display-machine sets a dy-namic pace and a sharp key for the whole space, as it does for the whole section in the catalogue.

3 The close-up of the informa-tion-conveyer adjoins a general view of the main exhibition space

in the catalogue. The close-up is placed as if to activate the page and set a move-ment and rhythm to the interpretation of it with its dynamic perspective and strong paralleling contours, some of which con-tinue in the same pitch in the next im-age. All this visual play happens in accor-dance, supporting and contributing to the themes and ideas dealt with in the exhi-bition: the relationship between the mes-sage and its carrier, the exhibit and the exhibited is variable and complex.

4 The text ‘Transmissionen’ (Trans-missions) is added in red on top of one of the dynamic lines of

the conveyer-machine. It marks and an-notates the exhibit together with the

number below it connecting the cata-logue to the real-life exhibition, but it also marks the image on the catalogue guid-ing its reading. The word, which merges with the image following the contours of the photograph, is complemented by the text on the conveyer belt, ‘der UDSSR’, which can mean ‘the USSR’, but also ‘of the USSR’. Thus the conveyer belt of the first image together with the added label becomes the title for the whole ensem-ble: ‘Transmissions of the USSR’. On the other hand, the label becoming part of the image marks the machine, which then becomes a signifier and a monumen-tal physical manifestation of the printing press in the USSR. The level of what is in the image adjoins through the montage with what is on it, and the interpretations become variable.

5 The larger photograph adjoining the first image of the conveyer belt features the main exhibition

space of the Soviet department. Some other central exhibits of the Soviet Pavil-ion are visible in it: a freestanding star, a large map, and parts of Lissitzky’s grand photomontage wall entitled ‘The Task of the Press is the Education of the Mass-es.’ The map and the photomontage wall are barely visible and merge to the back-ground on the catalogue, but the star is clearly visible and stands out. The sev-en pointed, three-footed star is com-posed of beams in between which planes are formed with canvas. In the heart of it, the beams and planes enclose a ham-mer and a sickle. The whole composition is encircled and covered with circulating bands and spheres, all topped with a disk where the slogan ‘Proletarier aller Land-er vereinigt Euch!’ (Workers of the world, unite!) is written. The ribbons circulating the star also feature writing, and illumi-nated slogans of the revolution spelled in several languages surround the star.

6 The star-exhibit, called in the cat-alogue ‘Struktur der Sowjet’ (the Structure of the Soviets), could

be read as an image of not only of the

soviets, but more widely as a Socialist Universe. In this universe the centerpiece is the Red Star of the Revolution sur-rounded by belts of stars and constella-tions composed of revolutionary slogans. It is covered with the orbiting planetary spheres all dominated by the call for the global triumph of the proletariat. In the hearth of it all there are the hammer and the sickle, the symbols of the Communist Party, the source of its energy.

7 In the context of the catalogue, the star-exhibit compositional-ly follows the monumental Trans-

missions machine. This reading is sup-ported by the adjoining photograph of a crowd of people reading newspapers, discussing them, learning and propagat-ing Socialism, thus extending on and con-necting the two images above it. This is the consequence, the tool and the con-clusion: the ideology being transmitted. On the top, enclosed by the two photos, facts and figures on the achievements of the soviets are given to demonstrate the vast, fast and inevitable progress of these activities: 212 newspapers in 48 languag-es and over 8,250,000 copies. Read to-gether, these images suggest a reading of the press as a major contributor to and builder of the Soviet Universe, the theme of the whole Soviet exhibit at Pressa. The Red Star symbolizing the world domina-tion of socialism is a direct consequence of the efficient Transmissions.

8 Below the images discussed previ-ously, the section of the catalogue here reproduced on two differ-

ent pages, features two more exhibits. On the bottom left, under the large transmitter, is a model of a pre-revolutionary under-ground printing press labelled as ‘Illegale Druckerei’, an ‘Illegal Press’. It literally forms the foundations to the already established printing, and figuratively the starting point to the triumph of the Soviet press.

9 On the bottom right of the sec-tion there are three images of the windows of the Soviet pavilion

EXPERT ASSESMENT


5

6

7

3

9


featuring slogans, facts and figures paint-ed on the glass. The paintings act as a demonstration of typography as well as a candid and innovative attitude towards the media of display. On the level of the ensemble in the catalogue, it closes the circle displaying the final slogans and cries of victory, painted on the glass, pic-tured against the light. This must be the bright and inevitable future of it all.

10 The other section of the cat-alogue feature here starts with a red label stating ‘Die

Sowjetpresse organisiert Die Bauern-schaft fur Den Ubergang zu neuen Ge-sellschaftlichen Formen Der Land-wirtschaft’ translating freely as ‘the Sovi-et press organizes the peasantry for the transition to new social forms of agricul-ture’. This section has two more titles on the top, this time cut out from newspa-pers or other sources as opposed to the red typography used for the labels. These texts merely repeat and sharpen the red label, stating ‘on the socialist structure of

a village’, ‘implementation’, and ‘the col-lective principle in agriculture’. These cut outs illustrate the theme set forward by the red labelling alongside the oth-er cut out images. They create subcate-gories for the topic and exemplify what it means, but they also have a composition-al function. They act alongside the oth-er images, not on top of them as the red labels do. The cut out photographs un-derneath them work in a similar way, il-lustrating a smiling and working peasant together with another peasant reading a newspaper.

1 1 On the top right, there is a ki-netic demonstrative model la-belled as ‘the Anniversary Show

of a Village’, whose functions and mean-ing stay open to interpretations, but seem to be suggest a builder of a mod-ern countryside, holding a modern house and spreading joy. Below the illustrations, there is a model of an ‘Izba-Chitalnye’, a reading cabin, which were small cabins built all over the countryside to facilitate

sessions to educate and propagate the peasants. It is perhaps this kind of an izba the kinetic man is holding and spreading. The izba is a simple architectural mani-festation and crystallisation of the idea of the whole composition; they were the actual places where the spreading of So-cialism took place in the countryside. They were the places where peasants were taught to read, and then given the newspapers to read from. At the bottom of this composition, below the cabin, lays a solid pair of newspaper stands, as if re-minders of the main theme of the exhibi-tion, and as the compositional foundation for this work, merging the message and the design.

Sources: Bois, Yves-Alain: ‘El Lis-sitzky: Radical Reversibility’, in Art in America (April, 1988), pp. 162–180.

Images: Zeichnung, Zeichenkunst & vorbereitende ZeichnungPhotoausschnitte (52 x 69 cm)

Koln, Museum Ludwig, Grafische Sammlung, ML/Z 1985/053, erworben: 1976

A new design for a new ideologyLissitzky is a hypothetical, multidisciplinary studio that specializes in the artistic production of utopian exhibitions. Based on the work of the visionary designer El Lissitzky, a Lissitzky-designed environment does not depict reality as it is; it visualizes an aspirational future and enlists the audience in a collective effort to achieve the dream.

In the Lisstizky booth, historical images of the Pressa exhibition from 1928 are juxtaposed with a newly generated visualization of a Lissitzky-designed exhibition for Google. The Pressa exhibition was intended to celebrate the role of printing in spreading literacy in the early Soviet Union. The radical transformative aspirations of the USSR are today found in private companies like Google, which seek to fundamentally alter the ways that we consume and generate information in order to bring a new, data-driven society into being.

EXPERT ASSESMENT

Imag

e by

Alin

a Kv

irkv

eliy

a



10

11

Imag

e by

Alin

a Kv

irkv

eliy

a


Background Check

VKhUTEMAS TrainingIn a competitive commercial environment, it can be difficult to discern style from sub-stance. Background Check is a feature cre-ated by Fair Enough to provide clear, rigor-ous explanations of who our exhibitors are and where they come from. In this install-ment, the architecture historian Anna Bokov examines VKhUTEMAS, the revo-lutionary design institute that invented VKhUTEMAS Training.

Verifying an exhibitor’s origins


VISIT VKHUTEMAS TRAINING AT BOOTH A5

The school’s significance lies not only in pioneering modernist design pedagogy, but also in generating a new spatial and visual language, instrumental for the emergence of modern architecture and design in Soviet Russia and beyond.

A brief history VKhUTEMAS was a product of Russia’s postrevolutionary society. It emerged as a result of a radical twostep educational reform, implemented by the Soviet Ministry of Education after the October Revolution in order to train the emergent proletarian class and to develop a new artistic culture capable of addressing the growing needs of industrial production. The first phase of this reform was initiated in 1918, just after the revolution, and resulted in the dissolution of two czarist institutions — a fine art academy and an applied art school — and the establishment of Free State Art Studios (SGKhM) in their place. Eventually, in a second phase of reform, these independent, freespirited workshops were consolidated into a unified school — VKhUTEMAS, an acronym for Vysshie Khudozhestven-no Tekhnicheskie Masterskie, translated as Higher Artistic and Technical Studios.

VKhUTEMAS was conceived as “a specialized educational institution for advanced artistic and technical training, created to train highly qualified artistpractitioners for modern industry, as well as instructors and directors of professional and technical education”. The decree, signed by Vladimir Lenin in 1920, emphasized the technical and industrial direction of the new design school and formulated its interdisciplinary structure: from the start, VKhUTEMAS was conceived as a synthetic interdisciplinary

school consisting of both art and industrial faculties. The school would comprise eight art and production departments — Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Graphics, Textiles, Ceramics, Wood, and Metalworking — organized in order to educate the emergent proletarian class and address the growing needs of industrial production.

VKhUTEMAS was a diverse institution and its mosaic of progressive and conservative faculty created a uniquely pluralist environment. Among its faculty were such pioneers of the Russian avantgarde as Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Vesnin and Lyubov Popova, Boris Korolev and Anton Lavinsky, Nikolay Ladovsky and Vladimir Krinsky, El Lissitzky and Vladimir Tatlin, Gustav Klutzis and Moisei Ginzburg. Their pedagogical contributions made the school a major experimental design laboratory and a thinktank of the modern movement. However, the school’s significance lies not only in pioneering modernist design pedagogy, but also in generating a new spatial and visual language, instrumental for the emergence of modern architecture and design in Soviet Russia and beyond.

In 1926, VKhUTEMAS was renamed to VKhUTEIN, replacing the word “studios” with “institute” and marking a turn towards topdown institutionalization in both education and professional practice. Throughout its existence the institute’s fate was closely linked

Graphics Course: Construction, 1921


to the political and ideological fluctuations of the Soviet state. Started as a progressive institution open to a wide range of students, the school fell victim to the political and ideological changes of the Stalinist regime and was eventually closed in 1930. Moscow Architectural Institute (MARKhI), founded in 1933, eventually merged the VKhUTEIN architecture department with the technical curriculum of Civil Engineering institutes. To this day, MARKhI remains Russia’s preeminent architectural school. While it shares some strands of the VKhUTEMAS genetic code, its design pedagogy has mostly reverted to the BeauxArts academic tradition.

New approaches for a new society VKhUTEMAS was not simply an educational institution, but an agent of social change, a crucible of modern culture. In order to understand its role at the time, it is helpful to examine it relative to its contemporary and rival school – the interdisciplinary art school Staatliches Bauhaus.

The history of the Bauhaus was closely linked with that of VKhUTEMAS: the two schools shared foundational values, disseminated by leftist organizations and by the key avantgarde protagonists — Vasily Kandinsky and El Lissitzky especially, who conducted student visits and exhibitions, and exchanged ideas through publications and correspondence. Like

the Bauhaus, VKhUTEMAS was a synthetic interdisciplinary school that consisted of both art and industrial departments. It had a welldeveloped preliminary course, consisting of four disciplines: Space, Volume, Color and Graphics. Both features – the interdisciplinarity and the core curriculum made VKhUTEMAS similar to the Bauhaus. Unlike Bauhaus, however, which did not have an architecture department until 1927, VKhUTEMAS trained architects from the very beginning. In fact the architecture curriculum, both preliminary and advanced, was one of the strongest and most innovative at the Moscow school.

The schools also differed greatly in size. The number of students and faculty at VKhUTEMAS compared to Bauhaus differed roughly tenfold. For example, in the 19241925 academic year VKhUTEMAS counted 1445 students while Bauhaus enrolled 127. While both schools aimed for a new unity of art and technology, VKhUTEMAS aspired to create the proletarian version of that unity, eventually resulting in an ideological gap between them.

VKhUTEMAS aimed to bring education to the masses and masses to the growing industrial production. This could only be achieved through radical education experimentation: the existing pedagogy no longer worked, as the influx of thousands of students from the countryside could not be trained using bespoke apprenticeship or elitist academic

Exhibition of student work, VKhUTEMAS, 1924

VKhUTEMAS aimed to bring education to the masses and masses to the growing industrial production. This could only be achieved through radical education experimentation.

BACKGROUND CHECK


Space Course: Organization of space witin a cube


Alexander Vesnin

The VKhUTEMAS core curriculum was developed by the leaders of Soviet avant-garde — progressive artists and architects who saw design education not only as a process of knowledge transfer, but as a vehicle for innovation and a laboratory for the development of modernist language.

Gustav Klutsis

Vladimir Tatlin Alexander Rodchenko

Nikolai Ladovsky

BACKGROUND CHECK


Vladimir Krinsky

Alexander Rodchenko

Nikolai Ladovsky

Boris Korolev

Anton Lavinsky

Lyubov Popova

Varvara Stepanova


methods. The situation raised fundamental questions about design education that continue to resonate today: Is there an alternative to the academic method? How can one teach something that has not yet been done, something that has no precedent? How do you teach that to hundreds of students with diverse backgrounds, some with no previous training and to others steeped in the BeauxArts tradition? Is it even possible?

In response, the teachers and students of VKhUTEMAS developed an approach without precedent, in which the process of teaching and learning served as a vehicle for venturing into the unknown. Studio teaching became a laboratory method, a way of testing different iterations over and over again. The masstraining methodology that they invented relied on a set of prescribed operations, a very basic algorithm of stepbystep written instructions, given out to students in the form of assignments, as well as a core curriculum of introductory courses required to all new students.

The Core Curriculum: Graphics, Color, Volume, Space The exchange between art and industrial departments at VKhUTEMAS was facilitated by a preliminary curriculum that consisted of four primary courses — Graphics, Color, Volume, and Space. While the Core Department was formally established by 1923, the courses

continued to evolve throughout the decade, from the establishment of the school until its closing. The core curriculum cemented the foundation of VKhUTEMAS’s interdisciplinary approach and became the unifying element of the school.

The four preliminary courses — Graphics, Color, Volume and Space — emerged from the core sections of three VKhUTEMAS departments — Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. All four courses were mandatory for the entire student body, irrespective of their subsequent specialization. The courses were lead by those faculty members who had joined a Group of Objective Analysis at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), an organization established concurrently with VKhUTEMAS in 1920, and led by Vasily Kandinsky. The principal goal of INKhUK was to systematize the emerging modern movement into a scientifically based program, known as the “objective method,” that could be used for educational and research purposes.

In other words, the core curriculum was developed by the leaders of Soviet avantgarde — progressive artists and architects who saw design education not only as a process of knowledge transfer, but as a vehicle for innovation and a laboratory for the development of modernist language. The INKhUK –VKhUTEMAS conglomerate formed special research “laboratories” within the school’s departments for exploring the objective method and developing the “elements”

Nikolai Ladovsky with VKhUTEMAS students and members of the Society of Builders of the Inter-national Red Stadium, 1925.

The ultimate goal of the VKhUTEMAS objective method is to integrate artistic culture with material production – to bring “art into life.”

BACKGROUND CHECK


of their respective disciplines – Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

The socalled “objective method” was conceived as an alternative to the subjective approach of a bespoke apprenticeship model and to the elitist academic BeauxArts training that no longer met the goals of the new era. It was also a response to the problem of scale: in 1924, the Core Department counted over 450 students. The objective method aimed to provide for all, creating a unified pedagogical approach across different fields from painting to architecture. It was based on primary elements (elementi) and their properties (kachestva), creating a solid formal foundation and allowing for synthetic thinking across disciplines. The method relied on the newest scientific discoveries, for example in industrial and perceptual psychology, on technological achievements, such as the use of metal and glass, and on the most progressive artistic experiments, from Cubism to Suprematism and Constructivism. But the ultimate goal of the objective method was to integrate artistic culture with mass industrial production – to bring “art into life.”

GraphicsIn 1920 the Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko began teaching a course “Graphic Construction on a Plane,” also known as “Initiative,” and later “Graphics,” where he experimented with articulating the distinct perceptual qualities of elemental forms. Rodchenko’s exercises were designed around a set of compositional constraints and simple sequential operations, using basic geometric figures. This clear algorithm made the course universally accessible across the diverse, multidisciplinary student body at VKhUTEMAS.

Rodchenko defined several limitations for his students in this recombination game — from the proportion of a working field to the elements themselves and the relationships between them. The elements were primary geometric forms — circles, triangles, squares, and parallelograms that were related in size, or isometric. The composition had to be constructed along certain trajectories — vertical, horizontal, diagonal, cross, and freeform. Each exercise consisted of a simple set of instructions, usually accompanied by a diagram, outlining a clear algorithm of operations to be followed by students, as well as posing a problem to be solved creatively.

Starting in 1923 Rodchenko headed the Metal and Wood Department (DerMetFak), where he, along with El Lissitkzky, Vladimir Tatlin, and Varvara Stepanova, would further develop the principles of

Student assignments for the VKhUTEMAS Graphics course


Composition and Construction in the design of furniture and various objects for the new mode of everyday life (noviy byt). Rodchenko’s wife Varvara Stepanova implemented her husband’s principles (or maybe it was the other way around!) of graphic exercises in her textile designs. She taught a course on Composition in the Textile Department but most of her work centered on close collaboration with the major textile factories in Moscow, more directly bringing “art into life.”

Color Compared to the other three core disciplines, the emergence of the preliminary course “Color” was the most contentious. The process of teasing out the “one element” of painting was approached from different angles by the faculty of the Painting, VKhUTEMAS’s largest department. Initially, starting in 1920, the problem of color, as the key element of painting, was developed in several studios simultaneously — “The Articulation of Form with Color” by A. Osmerkin, “Color on a Plane” by I. Klyun, “Color in Space” by A. Exter, “Simultaneity of Form and Color” by A. Drevin, and finally “The Maximal Influence of Color” by L. Popova and A. Vesnin.

The underlying structure of the Color course was based on both scientific knowledge and artistic experiment. Starting with breaking down the rays of a rainbow, color theory has been a subject of scientific

quest for centuries — from Aristotle to Albers. At VKhUTEMAS, faculty member Gustav Klutsis devised his own method for exploring the primary and secondary color ranges, based on a circular pattern.These methodological aids provided timeless artistic insights, as well as practical tools for exploring the possibilities of color. Klutsis has hardly alone in his experimentation: from its foundation, VKhUTEMAS hosted experiments on the full range of chromatic possibility: from complimentary to contrasting color schemes, to Vasily Kandinsky’s famous synesthetic explorations of the entire pallet.

Popova and Vesnin distinguished between the impression of the object and the essence of its color. They encouraged their students to analyze the real elements of the objective world, to extract their essence, to understand the nature of form relative to color. The resulting compositions aimed to arrive at certain “objective laws” of color as a primary element, and even as a form of energy, that does not simply cover up an object but constructs it.

The Color course included four units: 1) color volume on a plane, 2) color space on a plane, 3) comparison of colored materials on a plain, and 4) comparison of colored materials in space. The first unit studied various surfaces — faceted, cylindrical, spherical, conical — and organized them according to basic compositional methods, similar to Rodchenko’s Graphics, along a vertical, horizontal, diagonal, cross,

Color Course: Color and archi-tectural volume

BACKGROUND CHECK


or circle. The second unit studied surface texture or faktura. Students were asked to reveal such properties of color as tension, weight, and movement. Fak-tura was explored through creating different textures and patterns using the same color. The third unit studied the interaction of several different materials and textures on a surface, using the compositional methods mentioned earlier. The fourth unit juxtaposed materials in space, with the complexity varying according to the number of materials, which could range from three to seven.

Volume The Volume course was formed within the Sculpture department by three artists, all of whom were members of INKhUK – A. Lavinsky, B. Korolev and A. Babichev. The course was initially formed under the influence of Cubism, as both Lavinsky and Korolev were strong advocates. The first Volume exercises involved cubist analysis of both still life and live models where basic geometric forms and the female body were interpreted using cubist compositional method.

As Volume evolved as an interdisciplinary preliminary course, its assignments became more abstract. Students were asked to produce volumetric compositions and to develop the following properties: to articulate volume in space, to articulate a relationship between the weights of volumes, to articulate the

dynamics of a volume, and to show the intersection of objects, using a kit of forms – cube, sphere, cylinder, cone, and pyramid. Another exercise challenged students to compose various elements and materials, such as plane/paper, wood block, and metal wire. Another set of exercises dealt with the transition from simple to complex geometries — from the basic geometric figures to elaborate decorative ornaments.

Space The Space course was the first to teach modern architecture to a large mass of students. Like the other three core courses, its development can be divided into two distinct phases: the first phase occurred within the Architecture Department as part of OBMAS (United Studios) and the second phase within the Core Department. The course would ultimately become highly influential not only for its innovative pedagogy but also as an experimental laboratory for developing new architectural languages.

Developed by N. Ladovsky, V. Krinsky and N. Dokuchaev in 1920 as a foundational architecture course, Space evolved into a preliminary discipline designed for students from all the VKhUTEMAS departments. For greater applicability, a series of new abstract exercises were added, particularly exercises on surface, designed to accommodate the students of Painting and Textile departments. Ladovsky

Clay’s shapelessness and materiality taps into what psychologists call “embodied cognition,” allowing one to depart from the familiar and make a cognitive jump, ultimately arriving at new forms.

Volume Course: The arrangement of geometric forms


recommended seven of his students from OBMAS as instructors: Balikhin, Glagolev, Korzhev, Lamtzov, Petrov, Spassky, and Turkus. In 1923 they began to implement the psychoanalytical method within the entire VKhUTEMAS. First introduced by Ladovsky and his colleagues at INKhUK, the method was based on its founders’ belief that a study of perception could generate a new syntax of plastic form. For Ladovsky, the objective, psychoanalytic method was perceptually and experientially determined: it was based on, in his words, the “economy of psychic energy” and “the fundamental human need to orient in space.”

Ladovsky articulated his position in a short essay, titled “Fundamentals of Architectural Theory” (AS-NOVA News, 1926). For him, Architectural Rationalism, as he called his doctrine, was analogous to the technical rationalism, but operated in terms of perception, rather than labor and material. Rationalists aimed to create a selfreferential system, a new grammar of architecture based on abstract elements.

In his essay, Ladovsky listed the formal qualities that would serve as the protoelements for the new architectural order.

“In the perception of the material form as such, we can recognize the expression of its qualities: 1) Geometric – relationship of surfaces, corners, etc.; 2) Physical – weight, mass, etc.;3) Mechanical – stability, mobility; 4) Logical – articulation of surface as such and of surface bounding volume.Depending on the articulation of size and quantity we can talk about: a) Strength and Weakness; b) Growth and Invariability; c) Finiteness and Infinity.” These qualities formed the pedagogical basis for

the Space course, and eventually developed into assignments on the articulation of Form, Space,

Space Course: The articulation of mass and weight, 1922

BACKGROUND CHECK


Volume, Rhythm, Structure, Balance and Mass, and Weight.

One of the most innovative pedagogical methods at VKhUTEMAS was having students design directly in model. While model making as such was not new, traditionally it was based on something that already existed and was then modeled. The method used in the preliminary Space course was fundamentally different. When starting a model, students did not know its final outcome; the result was formed as a part of the process of making. They were given assignments (written instructions) and were asked to translate these into form. The models were by definition abstract, thus already suggestive of modernist forms. They did not have a scale or function — not unlike the early laboratory art constructions by Tatlin or Rodchenko. From there, the students developed the models into “applied” exercises — with program and to scale, slowly working up to what would become modern architecture in just a few years.

Humans are conditioned to learn faster through social interaction. The notion of “performative sociality” used by archeologists for describing the evolutionary advances in material culture, perhaps applies to VKhUTEMAS as well. Working collectively in a laboratorylike setting, the large body of VKhUTEMAS students produced a rich repository of protomodernist forms.

In 1921 Ladovsky proclaimed: “Space, not stone, is the material of architecture.” Today, we can only

speculate what he meant. Analyzing the use of clay in Space exercises can offer one such interpretation. Clay, a malleable material used throughout history for anything from ceramic pots to brick walls, automatically prompted a connection between mind, body and matter. Clay’s shapelessness and materiality tapped into what psychologists call, “embodied cognition,” allowing a whole range of students, from those who recently learned to read to those who were already schooled in the BeauxArts, to distance from the familiar and make a cognitive jump — ultimately arriving at new forms.

When starting a model, students did not know its final outcome; the result was formed as part of the process of making. The models were by definition abstract, thus already suggestive of modernist forms.

Space Course: The articulation of volume and space, 1922


Case Study

The full value of a product, service, or company is impossible to convey in a simple sales pitch or PowerPoint deck. Particularly when the subject has decades of experience and an expansive portfolio, it is often better to skip the overview and focus instead on a representative work that embodies the values and capabilities that define the firm. In Case Studies, we take an indepth look at our exhibitors’ most significant projects to help potential clients better understand the full scope of what they offer.


VISIT MOSCOW METRO WORLDWIDE AT BOOTH C2

Motivation in Motion Moscow Metro Worldwide

Metro Moscow Worldwide is an imaginary design studio dedicated to the creation of inspirational underground stations and art-works. Based on the socialist artistry of the Moscow metro system, MMW offers cities around the world decorative solutions that stimulate civic pride by celebrating cultural, social, and corporate values, sports, industrial and military achievements, science, and the fine arts.

The office was founded in 1931 by the Cen-tral Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and has since completed 194 projects that are visited over 2 billion times each year. It has expertise in all aspects of metro plan-ning, design, and media. The firm offers com-prehensive motivational messaging solutions, from a metro system's concept phase to its renovation and expansion. In this case study, we examine three of MMW's signature proj-ects, the Mayakovskaya, Novoslobodskaya, and Kievskaya metro stations in Moscow.


Mayakovskaya Station

“Go down into the metro, citizen, lift up your head and you will see a brightly lit, mosaic sky.”

— Alexander Deineka

Opening date: 11 September 1938Station architect: A. N. DushkinVestibule architects: A. N. Dushkin,

Ya. G. Likhtenberg, Yu. P. Afanasev; G. S. Mun

Artists: A. A. Deineka, I. L. LubennikovSculptor: A. P. KibalnikovStation construction: deep-level,

three-vaulted, column-type built to a special design

T he most beautiful station in the Moscow metro was also the most unu sual at the construction stage.

The first design was by Sergei Mikhailovich Kravets, then chief architect of Metroproekt. The ground under Mayakovsky Square seemed firm enough at first to use a new metal frame construction that made it possible, in spite of the depth, to have elegant metal supports instead of the usual massive pylons. The interior literally opened up into a large hall of columns and not just a combination of squat aisles.

This bold idea called for the invention of a new method of tunnel building. The sections of the main vault were erected with the help of a huge semicircular

shield resting on the tubing of the side tunnels, which had been excavated by then. When the main hall was completed, however, the vault showed numerous cracks, and it be came obvious that the planners had overestimated the firmness of the ground. An emergency commission was convened to review the situation: the station must be saved, but they did not want to abandon the column system. They consulted architect Alexei Nikolayevich Dushkin, who had designed another important station, Kropotkinskaya. Dushkin agreed with the engineers’ proposal to reduce the height of the main vault by several meters and suggested using a construction made of special types of steel, which

would enable them to retain the full width of the hall. To convince the commission that metal could be used for such loads, Dushkin invited the wellknown aircraft designer A. Putilin, who suggested casting the supports and decorative steel profiles at the airship plant in the settlement of Dirizhablestroy (now called Dolgoprudny).

Thus the station acquired its present appearance: two rows of columns serve as supports for the three arched vaults, and each section formed by the arches opens into a small ovalshaped dome. It was decided that each dome (of which there were 35) would contain a mosaic. The drawings were en trusted to the artist Alexander Deineka, and the mosaics themselves to V. Frolov. The theme of this famous Mayakovskaya mosaic cycle is 24 Hours in the Land of the Soviets: mor ning, afternoon, night and morning again. The idea was that passengers arriving and departing would be greeted by morning subjects. All the panels illustrate the life of citizens in the young Soviet country.

For a long time the last two domes were inside the service section, meaning that passengers could not see them, but when the second exit to the town was built in 2004–2005, one of these domes became open to the public and the other (the Pilotage Group) was dismantled.

The mosaic panels are at the same height as the original vault. The whole station was originally intended to be much higher. Circles of light bulbs illuminate the mosaics, but the main hall is lit by reflected light, which is softer. Dushkin became well known for these effects.

All

text

and

imag

es c

ourt

esy

of A

gey

Tom

esh/

WA

M P

ublis

hing

Gro

up

Pho

to b

y H

. Sitn

ikov

CASE STUDY

Platform Hall, 20 September 1955


Alexander Deineka. Mo-saic. Signalman. Smalt

In his treatment of the station Dushkin rejected the classical system of co lu mns supporting a vault. He thought it would be out of place in this underground context, where each meter had been won by the builders’ superhuman efforts to overcome incredible difficulties. Discarding the formal features of the order system, he followed the logic of Gothic architecture instead, where the supporting and supported parts are not separate, but flow into

each other, so to say: the supports and vaults are outlined by multiprofile steel molding and the columns, up to a man’s height, are decorated with semiprecious rhodonite from the Urals, much of which has been lost and replaced by marble or plaster of the same color. The steel strips are very popular with children. Flick a coin hard along the groove of an arch and it will whiz over to the other side. Fivekopeck coins were used in the old days, but

now a fiveruble piece is best.Mayakovskaya became a masterpiece

of Art Deco and was greatly admired at the time. Its design won a grand prix at the New York World Trade Fair in 1938, and it is still considered one of the most beautiful metro stations in the world.

Of course, there was bound to be criticism. Dushkin was accused of ignoring the intention to make the station an underground tribute to Mayakovsky.

All

text

and

imag

es c

ourt

esy

of A

gey

Tom

esh/

WA

M P

ublis

hing

Gro

up

Pho

to b

y H

. Sitn

ikov


This oversight was put right later by placing a bust of the poet by sculptor A.Kibalnikov at the far end of the main hall.

During the Great Patriotic War Mayakovsky became a symbol of the Soviet people’s resistance. On 6 No vem ber 1941 an official meeting was held there to celebrate the 24th anniversary of the October revolution, and the words “Our cause is just” rang out once more. The station was also used as an airraid shelter.

The original underground vestibule (architects Ya. Likhtenberg, Yu. Afa nasev) is inside the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall building.

In 1993 the question of reconstruction arose, as the H30 series escalators, the oldest in the world, could no longer cope with the increasing stream of passengers. To avoid closing down the station completely, it was decided to build another exit at the opposite end of the main hall. This was opened on 2 September 2005, together with a new groundlevel vestibule decorated with mosaics by I. Lubennikov. The author of the project Galina Mun took care to ensure that it blended in with Dushkin’s masterpiece. In the ceiling mosaics Deineka motifs alternate with quotations from Mayakovsky’s poetry; his bust now stands at the top of the escalator.

The new vestibule is a temporary construction. It will eventually form part of a new building planned for the site.

A. Deineka. Mosaic. Girl with an Oar. Smalt.

CASE STUDY


A. Deineka. Mosaic. High Jump. Smalt.

Following pages: Parachute jump; Vol-leyball. Smalt


CASE STUDY


Novoslobodskaya Station

The glass for these famous panels was kept in Riga Cathedral and intended for Latvian churches

Opening date: 30 January 1952Station and vestibule architects:

A. N. Dushkin, A. F. StrelkovArtist: P. D. Korin assisted by

E. Ya. Veilandan, D. Ya. Bodniek, Kh. M. Rysin and E. Krests

Station construction: deep-level, three-vaulted, pylon-type

T he station gets its name from Novoslobodskaya Street, which arose in the 16th century along the road

to the town of Dmitrov, on the territory of Dmitrov’s Novaya sloboda (New Settlement). It was the last underground project to be designed by the Moscow Metro’s most brilliant architect, Alexander Dushkin.

Originally, the architects used the same scheme that Zelenin suggested for the construction of Dobryninskaya station, namely, alternating large and small archways, some of which framed openings to the platforms, while others formed niches in the pylons. But this seemed too laconic and insufficiently impressive to their contemporaries, so the architects decided to cover the pylon niches with stainedglass windows and put bulbs behind them to imitate daylight. Thus they succeeded in totally “dematerializing” the pylons. From a heavy supporting construction the pylons turned into frames for beautifully light, stainedglass windows.

The pylons are faced with marble: ProkhoroBalandinsky on the upper section and blackandwhite mottled marble lower down. The track walls have Koyelga marble (with Korkodino at the base). The station floor is paved with a chequered pattern of grey granite and black gabbro tiles.

The thirtytwo stainedglass windows are framed with an ornamental band of chased brassgilt. Similar brass strips decorate the archways to the platforms. The windows were designed by Pavel Dmitrievich Korin, author of the sketches for the mosaics at KomsomolskayaRing. The upper section of each window contains a medallion, six of which depict members of the socalled “intellectual professions”: an architect, geographer, agronomist, power engineer, artist and musician. The others have geometrical designs and fivepointed stars.

There was no stainedglass window tradition in Russia, so the Novoslobodskaya windows were made by Latvian artists.

What is more, they used glass stored in Riga Cathedral and originally intended for church windows (the churches were closed when Soviet power was set up in Latvia).

The idea of including these windows seemed rather controversial at first, because they were associated with what were then called “cult buildings”, i.e., churches. But when the station opened it transpired that Muscovites, unfamiliar with Western religious architecture, regarded the windows as pictures of some magic underground realm.

The mosaic panel Peace in the Whole World at the far end of the central hall showing a woman with a child in her arms is also by Pavel Korin. People detected a resemblance in the woman to Tamara Dushkina, the architect’s wife and author of memoirs about his life. There was originally a portrait of Stalin above the woman’s head. After the denunciation of the cult of personality, the artist had to rework the mosaic in 1961–1966, and a pair of white doves appeared in place of the former Soviet leader. In her memoirs Tamara Dushkina describes how the mosaic was made: the first piece of smalt was applied by Korin himself, the second by Dushkin, and then each of them placed a coin in the priming for “good luck”.

The light fittings, stainedglass windows and mosaic panels were restored in 2003. As a result the lighting became brighter, changing the original idea considerably, for the authors had tried to create a kind of grotto with soft, subdued lighting.

CASE STUDY

Central Hall, 16 Septem-ber 1955

Pho

to b

y N

. Sitn

ikov


P. Korin (sketches) E. Veiland, D. Bodniek, Kh. Rysin, E. Krests, Stained-glass windows

Detail - glass, chasing, cast aluminium, anod-ized bronze gilt

Pho

to b

y N

. Sitn

ikov


CASE STUDY


Kievskaya

Khrushchev didn’t like Kievskaya metro station. He thought it did

not “express the Ukraine”.

Opening date: 5 April 1953Station architects: L. V. Lilye, V. A.

Litvinov, M. F. Markovsky, V. M. Dobrakovsky

Artists: V. A. Konovalov, V. N. Arakelov, P. M. Mikhailov, L. A. Karnaukhov, A. K. Shiryaeva, I. V. Radoman, K. P. Aksyonov

Sculptor: G. I. OpryshkoStation construction: deep-level,

three-vaulted, pylon-type

T he station’s groundlevel vesti bule is located in Kiev Railway Station, after which the station was

named. Its decor is intended to illustrate the friendship between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.

The competition for the best design attracted no less than fortytwo entries. The one with the simplest yet most elegant architecture won the day: cool pylons of white Koyelga marble and a ceramic frieze of chunky Ukrainian ornament. Kievskaya’s main decorations are the 24 large molded medallions with frescoes on a gold imitationmosaic ground, which adorn the vaulting over the pylons in the central hall and show idyllic scenes of the Ukrainian people’s labor and leisure pursuits. The medallions are executed in the manner of a popular woodcut, which permits artistic exaggeration: for example,

in the Vegetable Picking scene there is the most enormous beetroot and pumpkin. Some female collective farm workers are shown wearing stylized folk costume.

On the platform side the pylons bear the same medallions with Ukrainian wild flowers: poppies, cornflowers, lungwort, rue, forgetmenots, comfrey, and primulae. The end wall of the central hall has a fresco celebrating the tercentenary of the union between the Ukraine and Russia.

In the 1950s all designs for new metro stations were presented for approval to the Moscow Party Committee. Khrushchev (who was then first secretary of the Communist Party, but had a particular interest in the Ukraine) did not like the design, which he thought did not “express the Ukraine”, but it was approved nevertheless.

The station is lit by chandeliers with incandescent bulbs specially made for

it (and subsequently used in many other Moscow metro stations). The floor is paved with grey Yantsevo granite and Salieti marble.

The station hall is linked by corridors with the escalator hall leading to the Fili line and the exit. The escalator hall has Ionic columns of white marble and a mosaic frieze entitled Offerings to the em-blem of Soviet Ukraine. The emblem itself is over the exit and on either side of it are blacksmiths, reapers, mechanical engineers, miners, horticulturalists, cattle breeders and engineers (there was originally a portrait of Stalin here). Another escalator goes down to KievskayaRing.

The staircase passageways at the west end of the central hall are not used. They were built for a possible second exit from Kievskaya into Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya street. According to one project the Kalinin line was to be continued up to Arbatskaya on the ArbatskoPokrovskaya line, and from Ploshchad Revolyutsii the service would run along the old, shallowlevel stretch of track then the Fili line. Today these passageways are used for technical purposes, such as night parking of trains, and also for traffic organization in the rush hour.

The stations Kievskaya and KievskayaRing share a vestibule (built in 1940–1945 by Dmitri Chechulin) located in the new ticket office of Kiev Railway Station.

Central Hall, 20 May 1955. Photo by V. Koshevoy

CASE STUDY

126 Fair Enough June 4-8 2014

Vozdvizhenka Сenter, 2014

CASE STUDY

Pho

to b

y Yu

ri P

alm

in


The Same, but BetterFinancial Solutions

VISIT FINANCIAL SOLUTIONS AT BOOTH B2

Pho

to b

y Yu

ri P

alm

in


Our built heritage represents the very best of our past. It also provides a huge resource that can play an important role in the future of our cities by stimulating regeneration while protecting archi-tectural identity. Recent experience has demon-strated that integrating historic buildings within urban regeneration schemes can create popu-lar, successful urban quarters where people enjoy working, living and visiting. Such regeneration rep-resents an opportunity for the past and present to work together to provide for the needs of the 21st century while maintaining the architectural char-acter of an earlier age.

Our collective history can ably support the future of our cities and contribute towards the aims of other bodies to drive economic growth and pros-perity. Financial Solutions an imaginary real estate consultancy focused on this sector. It specializes in strategically demolishing landmark buildings in order to rebuild them with modern materials and additional facilities. In this case study, we look at one of Financial Solutions’ most discussed proj-ects, the Vozdvizhenka Center in Moscow, to bet-ter understand the principles behind their practice.

CASE STUDY


T he Vozdvizhenka Сenter, formerly known as Voyentorg, is a Grade A premium office center located in the

exclusive Kremlin Zone. It offers a total gross area of 66,700 square meters, distributed in eight aboveground floors (40,600 m2) and five belowground floors (31,100 m2), as well as four levels of underground parking capable of accommodating 540 vehicles. The Center’s first and second basement levels house an arcade of exclusive boutiques and there is a variety of restaurants and cafes available within walking distance. The building is striking — based on an awardwinning design from the early 1900s, Vozdvizhenka Сenter offers twentyfirst century facilities in an Art Nouveau atmosphere.

Chapter 1: Birth The Center’s lineage can be traced to Voyentorg, a military department store described by the Moscow Times as “one of the capital’s bestknown buildings.” Designed by the architect Sergei Zalessky just before the start of World War I, near the end of the Art Deco era, Voyentorg was considered one of Moscow’s most beautiful buildings at the time of its completion in 1913. In fact, even before construction began, Zalessky’s design had been recognized as extraordinary, receiving the 1910 Moscow City Duma architectural prize.

Voyentorg was the chief shop for the Russian military and, for those in the know, one of the best places to buy deficit goods during the years of shortages. Although dedicated primarily to retail, the building was multifunctional: the first three floors housed shops and the fourth was office space. The fifth floor provided facilities for tailors, seamstresses, and cobblers, while the building’s basement and attic functioned as warehouses. Voyentorg even offered a small amount of residential space: for about fifteen years, the Hungarian revolutionary communist Bela Kun resided in Apartment 4.

Voyentorg’s internal layout borrowed from Josef Olbrich’s Warenhaus Tietz department store in Dusseldorf, as did its generous use of space and emphasis on elegant finishes. The building’s signature features were its atrium and central staircase, both of which were illuminated by an elaborate skylight.

The walls of the atrium were lined with Italian marble and its columns were decorated with paintings. On the third floor was a floortoceiling wall buffet of polished American walnut complimented with restored antique furniture in the manner of Louis XV. The ceiling was decorated with moldings and frescos, while the facade was adorned with sculptures and basreliefs of folk heroes inspired by the Battle of Borodino.

In the 1930s, the building was restored and redeveloped. In 1935, the atrium skylight was replaced with a vaulted ceiling and bridges were added to the second and third floors. The Voyentorg’s central staircase was dismantled to allow the building to expand into its courtyard. Its new staircase took on additional architectural significance when, in 1959, the great Constructivist architect Ivan Il’ich Leonidov suffered a fatal heart attack while climbing it. The building fell into a state of disrepair in the decades that followed. In 1992, one employee was killed and another badly injured when they were crushed by a falling marble slab. Voyentorg closed down two years later. From its initial construction until it closed, the building remained exclusively in the hands of the military – first Tsarist, then Soviet – while keeping the same name throughout: Voenny Univermag or ‘Military Department Store.’

Chapter 2: DeathAfter the department store went out of business, the building experienced an extended period of decay. The city took over the building and in 1997 included it in a protected downtown zone. But no restoration took place. Torgovy Dom “TsVUM,” a closed jointstock company set up to privatize the property concluded that the building’s poor condition prevented trading or commercial activity from taking place within. In Autumn 2003, the Voyentorg building was demolished, triggering a firestorm of protest from architectural historians in Russian and abroad.

“It’s a crime,” Alexei Klimenko, head of the Professional Union of Artists Historical Preservation Society, told the Moscow Times at the time. “It is the pure apotheosis of Moscow power being unpunishable. They consciously think that they can break the law.”

Then and now: the original Voyent-org military department store and its expanded reproduction, the Vozd-vizhenka Center


“It’s like the death of a close relative,” ar

chitect Yevgeny Ass, deputy of the Russian

Architects Union, told NTV television. The activist preservation group Moscow

Architectural Preservation Society, or MAPS,

staged a flash mob protest at the demolition

site, laying flowers and candles, in memo

ry of the more than 400 historical buildings

that had been razed in Moscow’s city center

during the city’s building boom. Representatives of the government and

the building’s owners rejected the preser

vationists’ criticisms as nostalgic and im

practical. “It’s outdated architecture,” said

Alexei Vvedensky, spokesman for the city

run Complex of Architecture, Development

and Reconstruction. “It isn’t a rational use

[of space].” Moscow’s head of construction B. I. Resin

suggested that the preservationist’ demands

were arbitrary and that, by standing in the

way of new construction, they have a nega

tive, potentially lethal, influence on a city’s

development. “What about Voyentorg?” he

asked a reporter from Ogoniok magazine,

“Who decided that it is an interesting build

ing? There should be clear classifiers of ob

jects that are truly monuments. Such as the

UNESCO list. Why should the city die like

Venice? Why should we not build beautiful

new houses?”

Chapter 3: Rebirth For those responsible, the razing of Voyent

org was not a demolition, but a very intensive

renovation. The building that eventually re

placed the military department store was de

signed to replicate many of its distinguishing

features, while expanding and updating its fa

cilities. This approach was written into the re

construction from the start. The city govern

ment’s decree concerning the redevelopment

of Voyentorg, makes it explicit: Given the great importance for the

cityscape in the historic center of Moscow

of preserving [Voyentorg], the proposal by

the Department of CityPlanning, Develop

ment and Reconstruction of the City of Mos

cow and by the Central Military Department

Store Emporium Joint Stock Company con

cerning the reconstruction of the building

is to be accepted [...] viz. the demolition of

all buildings on the site […] with the con

servation of the most valuable architectural

elements of the facade when designing and

constructing a retail and office complex with

an underground parking lot in their stead.”The property development company AST

Group commissioned Mikhail Posokhin to

design the new, expanded Voyentorg. His

scheme replicated several of the original’s

features, including its entrance, facade pan

els and sculptures, clerestory central atri

um space, the building envelope, and cen

tral staircase. But the new building differed

drastically in its material finishes and scale.

With almost 70,000 square meters of floor

space, Posokhin’s new Voyentorg is almost

five times the size of the original, not includ

ing its a fivestory underground car park.In the spring of 2008, the real estate com

pany Jones Lang LaSalle presented the new

Voyentorg retail and office complex to the

business community. The building opened

later the same year. According to AST, over

all investment in the project was around

$140 million. At the time of the opening, the

period for return on the developer’s invest

ment was set for five years. In 2009, Moscow Times reported that AST had sold the build

ing to Suleiman Kerimov’s Nafta Ko holding

company. Details of the deal were not made

public, but Mikhail Gets, managing partner

of the real estate agency Novoye Kachestvo,

estimated that the property was worth about

$650 million, prior to the financial crisis, but

was probably worth about $300 million to

$350 million at the time of sale.

THE RUNDOWNThe Vozdvizhenka Сenter

Location: Central Moscow Year constructed:: 2008Building type: Mixed use Combined floor area: 66,700 m²Elevator count: 24Parking: 540 space, underground

Features:• 8 above-ground stories of

total area 39,100 m² • 5 below-ground stories of

total area 27,600 m²• Class A “premium” office

space (on the 3rd-8th floors) of area 28,500 m²

• An arcade of exclusive boutiques (1st and 2nd basement levels); 6,600 m²

• Functional and flexible open floor plates;

• Efficient column grid — 8.4 m x 8.4 m;

• Unbeatable underground parking ratio of 1:66;

• Stunning atria maximizing the use of natural light throughout the building;

• Fiber optics connection;• Central HAVC: ventilation

system with noise reduction capabilities;

• High speed state-of-the-art SCHINDLER elevators with traffic management systems;

• Sprinkler system;• Fire detection/alarm

systems and building auto-immunization systems by HONEYWELL;

• Superior computerized Building Management System;

• Café (1st floor), restaurant (2nd floor) and open terrace VIP lounge-restaurant (7th and 8th floor) for office tenants and guests;

• Canteen for office tenants – over 300 seats;

• Wonderful views of the Kremlin and New Arbat

Idea in Brief The Problem Historic buildings have become an essential part of urban regeneration strategies around the world. But historical buidlings often lack and scale and facilities to serve a large, modern city. The Solution Historic buildings that are popular but not yet protected can be demolished and replaced with replicas that offer additional space, new functions, and upgraded facilities. Case in Point The Vozdvizhenka Center in Moscow is new building based on an historic landmark. Developers demolished the building and replaced it with a similar design that offers 500 percent more space than the original.

CASE STUDY


Getting around preservationist protection: an insider’s view

At the time of demolition, Voyentorg was classed as “a newly identified architectural monument”. Despite this, its developers were successful in razing a landmark and building an entirely new structure in its place. Financial Solutions specializes in providing its clients the strategy and legal expertise required to pull off a project like this. To provide additional insights into their process, we are reprinting part of an interview conducted in Project Russia magazine (issue 29) with Alexei Komech (1936–2007), a member of the Presidium of the Expert Consultative Board to the Mayor of Moscow, the body responsible for the conservation of the historic fabric of the city, who witnessed the process firsthand.

The central military department store was built 1912-14 on the corner of Vozdvizhenka and Bolshoi Kislovsky Pereulok to the designs of Sergei Zalessky. The shop, which functioned up to 1994, subsequently became the property of the Moscow city government, after which it was closed and all but abandoned. The Central Administration for the Protection of Moscow’s Monument Buildings (GUOP) performed a survey and discovered that remains of 18th century vaulted chambers and a residential wing of 1828, acknowledged to be a valuable element in the historic streetscape of the site, had been incorporated into the complex. By a decree of the Moscow City Government dated June 17th 1997, Voyentorg became part of the Kremlin conservation area. Experts declared the building ‘a fine example of a public building in the Art Nouveau style,’ and it was placed on the list of buildings to be considered for historic status. GUOP appealed to the municipal authorities to restore the building carefully. Nothing, it seemed, could undermine the stately senescence of this noble masterpiece; but suddenly a fence was erected around the building and the demolition men got to work.

PR: What is the legal side of the situation with Voyentorg?

AK: It is GUOP’s job and obligation to conduct a survey of the building

in question in order to determine its importance and to make a case for it to be added to the state register of historic buildings. Experts review this register every now and then. Those to which they consider it necessary to award protected status are discussed at a sitting of the regional – in this case Moscow – commission of the historic building conservation body. This commission has the right to award them the status “newly identified object of cultural heritage” while the final decision is pending. Naturally, it is impossible to be “newly identified” forever. By law this status can only last for one year. At the end of the year the building has to be awarded proper protected status. But in actual fact this procedure lasts for decades.

Let’s say the historic buildings conservation body of a subject of the federation submits a list of 200 buildings for consideration. And when the local government is in the process of passing the legislation, the bodies reviewing and authorising the list remove some of the buildings. This was why the hotel Moskva never reached the commission, and this was evidently done on purpose. And then the hotel, like Voyentorg, was removed from the list of protected buildings. This can’t be done with buildings which already have full listed status, as that can only be removed by decision of the Federal Government, but as for newly identified buildings, a decision by local government, unfortunately, suffices.

PR: Is it in principle realistic to create a properly effective mechanism for protecting historic buildings, including newly declared ones?

AK: The mechanism exists, it has been created. Laws have been passed that offer 100 percent protection. Only they are not used, and everybody steps aside from implementing them. I cannot blame investors for what is happening: the investor has the right to take up any commission – the bigger the better. I can only blame the authorities, because the protection of historic buildings is their responsibility.

PR: [Former Moscow mayor] Yury Luzhkov says that he perceives the city entirely in terms of facades. So

why indeed not destroy a building, replace all its innards and then recreate the facades?

AK: Only someone born and brought up in the Soviet Union perceives the city in terms of facades. When our historic cities fell into the hands of workers and peasants after the Revolution, they threw out all the rich people who lived in sumptuous interiors and then destroyed these interiors. The world over interiors form an entire stratum.

We are a nation that has been deprived of this notion. Secondly, anything that has been produced in recent years bears all the signs of modern technologies, whether high or low, and they are completely different from the crafts practised by previous centuries. A sham replica is a lifeless copy and no more. But the attitude here in Russia is – there wasn’t any heritage, but there will be!

There’s no need to take any care of the original, because we can always make a new one that’ll be more robust, like in the case of the building on the corner of Stoleshnikov Pereulok. Luzhkov asked whether it was an historic building. He was told that it was. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘we need to raze it to the ground and build another one just like it.’ When someone from the historic buildings preservation department told him that it was forbidden, that it is illegal to destroy an historic building, he replied, “We’re not destroying it, we’re restoring it.” There you are. And this can be done at any time: there was no Cathedral of Christ the Savior – here you go, there is now! We’ll rebuild anything that’s been demolished. If Moscow is anythingto go by, it looks as if we shall soon have the newest ancient heritage in the world.

Ilya Voznesensky Alexei Muratov


Russian Federal SSR’s Industry pavilion, 1950s.

CASE STUDY


VISIT U-VDNKH AT BOOTH D4

75 Years of Success U-VDNKh

The All Russian Exhibition Center (formally known as VDNKh) is Russia’s most pres-tigious and successful exhibition venue. Located in the northeast of Moscow, it is one of the city’s most significant cultural, tech-nological, and architectural sites. For its start in the late 1930s as a temporary agri-cultural exhibition, U-VDNKh has grown together with Russia, reflecting and project-ing shifting cultural priorities. In the post-So-viet age, U-VDNKh was maintained a high profile by adjusting to changing times and tastes and continuing to provide its city and its citizens with a place of education and exchange. The layers of its rich history remain in tact, a unique resource for exhibitors to embrace or ignore.

For our final case study, the science and tech-nology scholar Sonja D. Schmid examines the development of VDNKh’s exhibition on atomic energy as an exemplar of the center’s past and present.


Celebrating Tomorrow Today: The Peaceful Atom on Display in the Soviet Union1 by Sonja D. Schmid

One of the bestknown Soviet sculptures, the ‘Worker and Collective Farm Woman’, was first pre

sented to an international audience at the World Fair in Paris in 1937, where it faced the swastika on top of the German pavilion. The monumental steel structure, created by the celebrated Soviet artist Vera Mukhina, until recently guarded the original entrance to the ‘Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy of the USSR’ (VDNKh SSSR). In the summer of 2003, the monument was dismantled for restoration, and is scheduled to be mounted on top of a shopping mall currently under construction at that same location, which would elevate the sculpture to a height close to its original level.2

The ‘Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy of the USSR’ is a remarkable ensemble of pavilions, demonstration facilities, parks, and fountains in northeast Moscow, and extends over more than 2 km2 (200 hectares). It has been characterized as ‘a crazed Soviet visionary’s wonderland’ or as ‘Soviet

Disneyland’. Its name suggests that it was a show of Soviet achievements, but it was at least as much a materialized vision of the glorious communist future, a beautiful demonstration of future happiness.

I first visited this place in 1994, and was immediately captivated by the traces of bygone glory, blending uncomfortably with the ubiquitous evidence of unleashed petty capitalism. Along the majestic alleys flanked by carefully arranged ensembles of palacelike buildings (pavilions), there are hundreds of small stands, lavki, lined up like a permanent camp. Even inside the gigantic pavilions, the halls are now subdivided into tiny cubicles crammed with imported consumer goods. This ‘Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy’, as it was known for most of its history, had been designed to represent the splendor of the entire Soviet Union in miniature.3 In today’s Moscow it seems to live up to this claim; perhaps more than ever, it epitomizes the uneasy coexistence of distinct, contradictory, and potentially incompatible cultural, ideological,

economical, and even architectural styles pervasive in postsocialist Russia.

I have two goals in this paper. First, I aim to uncover the history of a unique museum of nuclear energy, the Pavilion for Atomic Energy at the VDNKh, and to explain its function within the Soviet system of science popularization. In particular, I explore how the pavilion’s activities reflected Soviet concepts of learning, teaching, and entertainment, and how they were accommodated to the rhetoric of “educating and empowering the masses”. Against this background, I focus on the envisioned roles of “ideal visitors” — that is, on the social, cultural, and political relations embedded in this vision. I attempt to unpack the kind of social order that was implied by the organization and activities of this peculiar space — explicitly, in line with the dominant doctrine of ‘molding new Soviet citizens’, and more implicitly, in the way visitors to the pavilion were envisioned and how their experiences were shaped. A key event in this context was the severe accident at the Chernobyl

CASE STUDY

Imag

e co

urte

sy o

f the

GA

O V

VTs


nuclear power plant in April 1986, an unprecedented crisis also for the display of nuclear power. This failure revealed the pavilion’s ‘normal’ function, namely the unconditionally optimistic representation of nuclear energy. By exposing the inadequacy of this approach, it posed a severe challenge to the symbolic authority of the pavilion’s exhibitions.

The Pavilion for Atomic Energy was a highly visible museum, and as such afforded its exhibitions importance and prestige. While its representative location is comparable with the Smithsonian Institution, cultural traditions, and administrative and institutional practices, differ markedly. Museums ‘form part of the social fabric’ to different extents, and depend ‘on combinations of institutional structures and political factors’ unique to each country. By investigating the specific ways nuclear energy exhibitions were deployed to enroll visitors in the common project of constructing communism, I hope to convey the particularities that ensued from the special status of science and technology in the Soviet context. Ultimately, my project can be read as a test of supposedly universal analytical tools developed in the West. It explores how this historical case study speaks to contemporary museum theory, and how it qualifies our understanding of the popularization of science and technology, especially in comparison with ‘propaganda’ (I will return to this ambiguous term — suffice it here to plead for suspending our common understanding of propaganda as “deliberately erroneous information”).

Imagined Visitors Recent work in museum studies has demonstrated that an idea of pro Recent work in museum studies has demonstrated that an idea of prospective visitors guides the design of exhibitions from very early stages.4 Exhibitions frame their visitors in ways similar to the construction of the public in expertlay interactions. Brian Wynne refers to such framings as ‘implicit models of agency’, imposed on a group of actors; for example, ‘the public’.

Whoever visited the VDNKh was supposed to experience ‘a peculiar kind of joy’ that the Exhibition organizers skillfully turned into sentiments of awe and pride.5 The Exhibition’s architectural layout with its spectacular buildings, fountains, ponds, and recreational facilities was consciously designed to provide visitors with a beautiful environment, decisively different from their everyday lives.6

The VDNKh’s architecture — like that of world fairs — became an important visual element of Soviet cultural iconography: in the context of reconstructing the capital city, it served as a showpiece of Stalinist aesthetics. Its visual culture featured prominently in a series of popular movies during the 1940s.7 Explicit theatricality was a central feature of this place.

The AllUnion Agricultural Exhibition ... showed the characteristic features of the ‘ideal city’ of that time: orderliness, exaggerated spaciousness, pompous monumentality, and gloriously shaped buildings ... It was the model of a city of permanent celebration, of a happy and distinct tomorrow that had been transferred from the distant bright future into the present ... Grand portals gave the buildings a touch of sacredness. The demonstrative luxury

of this fairytale Exhibition city was far removed from the everyday reality at the beginning of the 1950s. But it was not understood as reality, but as promising and reassuring myth.

As this quote nicely illustrates, visitors to the VDNKh recognized its theatrical character. Nevertheless, the combination of these beautiful surroundings with the celebratory display of the Soviet economy’s achievements was conducive to the emergence of unreserved enthusiasm. In the 1950s, this atmosphere of Utopian optimism, specifically with regard to nuclear energy, was by no means restricted to the Soviet Union. Rather, it was a constitutive feature of any modernist state. An intriguing representation of nuclear enthusiasm in popular culture is the Russian version of Woody Guthrie’s anthem to the peaceful atom, Chto ne mozhet sdelat’ atom [One Thing the Atom Can’t Do], released in 1980 by the famous Russian singer songwriter Alia Pugacheva.8 The message implicit in this display of Soviet happiness was, of course, the palpable vision of “the bright communist future”, the future social order in neat miniature.9 As James Scott has

Symbol of the VDNKh, 1976

Imag

e co

urte

sy o

f the

GA

O V

VTs


This ‘Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy’, as it was known for most of its history, had been designed to represent the splendor of the entire Soviet Union in miniature. In today’s Moscow it seems to live up to this claim; perhaps more than ever, it epitomizes the uneasy coexistence of distinct, contradictory, and potentially incompatible cultural, ideological, economical, and even architectural styles pervasive in post-socialist Russia.

observed, such miniatures — ‘small, easily managed zone[s] of order and conformity’ — often rose to great prominence. Foreign guests were presented with perfect miniature versions instead of actual farms or factories. Scott argues that such miniatures ran smoothly, because enough contingent factors could be eliminated.

The symbol (or emblem) of the VDNKh was meant to condense the idea that science and technology were the driving forces of economic and technological progress, which, in turn, would lead to social transformation. Nuclear energy took center stage in this vision:

United they stand — the worker, the collective farm woman, and the scientist ... Next to them, there is a miner’s pick, a sheaf of golden corn. In one impulse, they fling up their workingclass hands toward the ... symbol of the atom ... the symbol of the Soviet man’s tireless creative search, of his effort to get to the foundation of the world’s secrets, to make them instruments of social progress ... That is the emblem of the All Union Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy of the USSR.10

Driven by this spirit of optimism, the VDNKh’s second objective was education. Visitors could browse pavilions that explained the inner processes of meat production, apiculture, horse breeding, or nuclear reactors. But they were not just invited to be dazzled, they were encouraged to actively join the project of constructing communism. As a French journalist put it in the early 1960s, everyone who visited the Exhibition started to think like a statesman, to feel responsible for the entire country, and, more importantly, was expected to do so. The pavilions’ exhibitions and the surrounding educational activities served the goal of familiarizing visitors with scientific disciplines, and of rendering sophisticated technologies accessible. But the celebratory display of Soviet achievements was designed to induce more than just passive acceptance: it aimed to transform visitors’ attitudes, and “[n]othing short of full hearted commitment would do”.

The Pavilion for Atomic Energy dealt

with problems strikingly similar to those at Western science museums, and it anticipated crucial features of contemporary exhibition practices. Sharon Macdonald’s description of the exhibition Food for Thought that opened at the Science Museum in London in 1989 resonates with the aims and activities of the pavilion’s staff:

The kind of visitor envisaged here is

rather different from that of traditional glass case and diorama display techniques. Where these allowed visitors, rather as in the early department stores, to gaze reverentially and deferentially at sanctified objects, Food for Thought invites visitors to get close to the objects, to handle — and even to smell — at least some of the goods, to enjoy themselves, to make a noise, to have fun, and ... to be ‘busy’.

In this context, Macdonald raises the question whether ‘the casting of visitors as “customers” and the emphasis on “consumer choice’” helps to democratize science and to empower the public. She concludes that ‘supermarket exhibitions’ can have quite opposite effects: they promise to democratize museums by shifting authority from producer to consumer, but they also place ‘responsibility for social and individual ills at the door of the

individual while ignoring the part that producers and the State may play’. The resulting conflation of pleasure and democracy leads to a ‘prescriptive consumerism’ that defines personhood in enterprise culture.

To push Macdonald’s department store analogy a little further, let us recall the way Soviet stores were run. In contrast to their Western (and postSoviet) counterparts, Soviet stores involved a complex system of standing in line, identifying available items, ordering them, paying for them, and actually receiving them, which effectively blurred any clear assignment of responsibility (usually for the lack of available goods). Although I hesitate to infer a conscious program of fusing education and entertainment (the central discussion in much of Western museum studies), the VDNKh in general, and the Pavilion for Atomic Energy in particular, were designed in stark contrast to the Soviet everyday shopping experience. Here, people were offered help and guidance; they received information brochures, and were shown movies. They were invited to ask questions and even to make suggestions for future improvements. However,

CASE STUDY


responsibilities were by no means more visible in the pavilion than in a department store.

What, then, was an obligatory definiens of being ‘a Soviet man’, and which role did the exhibitions in the pavilion play in suggesting, or even constituting such a ‘public identity’? Rather than envisioning the pavilion’s visitors as consumers, the Soviet ‘model of agency’ envisioned them as learners in a traditional enlightenment version. Not unlike in Western science museums, visitors were expected to deepen their understandings of the topics on display. But ‘learning’ in the Soviet context had several dimensions, not all of which could be found in a Western setting. First, there was a cognitive imperative: visitors were expected to attain a certain level of scientific literacy, and to then function as multipliers. This did not just apply to teachers — literally everyone was supposed to acquire and to disseminate knowledge. The second aspect was a practical imperative: visitors from industry were expected to facilitate the actual implementation of the new technologies on display. This orientation toward practical applications has been described as one of the defining characteristics of Soviet science. The final aspect, which also formed the basis of the first two, was a moral imperative: visitors were expected to be enthusiastic, feel pride, and become loyal supporters of the communist project. In a way, this was almost a religious imperative (comparable with a view of London’s Natural History Museum as a ‘cathedral of nature’) — a curious feature in the context of an explicitly atheist State.

The VDNKh’s approach to science popularization was thus not entertainment, and presumably not even persuasion, but was one that emphasized the overwhelming authority of “scientific exhibitions” themselves. This authoritative image of science was effectively invoked despite the fact that what constituted science in a socialist society had been a contested issue. The display of Soviet science and technology was intended to enroll visitors: to inspire, convince, and mobilize them to

become creative participants in the construction of Communism.

Theoretical Framework An integral part of any museum is an effort to discipline the visitor’s gaze, and to shape the visitor’s experience. The choice of artifacts, the labeling of exhibits, and the spatial and logical connections among them, reflect the agendas of exhibition organizers, sponsors, or political patrons. Yet to an even greater extent, exhibitions mirror their intended publics. Every public display projects its visitors’ desirable activities in and around the exhibition. Museums are therefore crucial places for negotiating identities. On the basis of predominantly Western case studies, museum researchers have developed a series of theoretical concepts for analyzing the display of science, which take into account the perceptions of visitors, the influence of economical factors, and political agendas.11 They have identified fundamental tensions between representing and celebrating science, and between the impulse to educate and the attempt to entertain. Some of these tensions have intensified historically (for example, the discussion about interactive exhibits and their alleged failure to convey historical dimensions of science. It is legitimate to ask whether such Western concepts are applicable to the Soviet context, and for which period, but I have found these approaches useful for two reasons.

First, Soviet scientists have always had a good reputation among international exhibitionmakers for their creative and inspired ways of popularizing science and technology. Science popularization in the Soviet Union was something that helped rather than hurt a scientist’s career. There is a long tradition of Russian, and later Soviet, scientists who supported the science popularization movement and considered popularization an integral part of their work. The political ramifications and constraints in the Soviet Union notwithstanding, science popularizers there have faced the same challenges as they would anywhere else. For example, they must figure out how to phrase and visualize complex

scientific contents in ways intelligible to a lay audience, and how to arouse the audience’s curiosity and enthusiasm. Soviet science generally was very explicit about its educational objectives, which were often synonymous with straightforward political goals. Science education therefore was both an enlightenment activity and a political goal; scientific literacy was considered a contribution to the political vision of a communist society.

There is some confusion about the exact meaning of the term ‘propaganda’, even in the Soviet sources I used, but it is crucial for understanding science popularization in the Soviet context. In its original meaning, “propaganda” denotes dissemination (from Latin propagare: to disperse, diffuse, disseminate) of political, scientific, and other knowledge, views, and ideas. In a more specific sense, propaganda can be focused on production and technology (propaganda proizvodstvenno-tekh-nicheskaia), with the explicit goal of supplying workers with technical knowledge, which is supposed to overcome existing differences between mental and physical work, and to raise ‘communist awareness’ among the masses. Propaganda also has the goal of affecting people’s mindset and of stimulating active responses. Communist propaganda had the explicit goal of enlightening, educating, and mobilizing the masses, “by enrolling them into the practical fight for socialism and communism”. The criterion for assessing the effectiveness of communist propaganda was ‘the level of social activity among the masses’. Bourgeois propaganda, by contrast, was depicted as an instrument used by the ruling classes to present their interests as those of everyone. At the same time, bourgeois propaganda allegedly denounced ‘propaganda’ as an instrument to manipulate mass consciousness in the interest of certain political groups. In contrast to some Western sciencepopularizers, who to this day claim to be politically neutral,12 the Soviet popularizers explicitly supported mixing science popularization with political ideology. They considered ‘scientific objectivity’ a bourgeois


concept to be replaced with a desirable ‘proletarian bias’.

The second reason why I have found Western museum theory valuable for analyzing this Soviet case is that a common origin in world fairs links science displays worldwide. There is an extensive body of literature on world fairs that examines the relations between science, the state, and the public. This literature shows how the display of science relates to the projection of social order. Robert Rydell has shown that world exhibition promoters were often explicitly motivated by economic ideas. World fairs “showed off the nation’s economic strength and artistic resources, highlighting new architectural forms and offering models for urban planning”. In addition to emphasizing economic motives, Rydell argues that they provided a “cohesive explanatory blueprint of social experience”. Although clearly not all museum exhibitions were equally influential, some of them represented authoritative means to shape, sustain, or change social order. The VDNKh was an attempt to sketch a communist social order based on sound scientific and technological performance, and to assign visitors new subject positions within that order.

Sources In winter 2001, I conducted research for this project in the scientific technical library and the archive of the VDNKh. The VDNKh’s official publications espouse a rhetoric of openness, stressing the unusual degree of technical information made available to visitors — even foreigners. I was granted access to all archival documents I requested. I was able to study annual reports about exhibition activities in and around the pavilion; to read provisional and final plans of the exhibits, texts, and models on display (socalled ‘tematikches-kie plany’, preliminary drafts of exhibition concepts, and ‘tematiko-ekspozitsionnye plany’, revised and authorized versions of the former), and to study lists of actual exhibits and the original labels to the exhibits, as well as guest books.13 In the VDNKh’s scientific technical library, I read

official publications including guidebooks and journals published by the VDNKh. I also looked at brochures and catalogues for the Pavilion for Atomic Energy — material that was more explicitly targeted at a specialized audience. The library also holds a list of legal decisions pertaining to the VDNKh, which allowed me to quickly identify relevant decrees issued by the Central Committee and/or the VDNKh administration. Finally, I asked archivists and librarians about their experience working at the VDNKh both prior to and following the perestroika years. I talked to former administrators of individual pavilions, and to a former curator and guide of the Pavilion for Atomic Energy.

The Academy of the People In 1959, the Soviet government under Khrushchev had scheduled a 7year plan for 195965. The motto was once again to ‘catch and overtake’ the most developed capitalist countries. The Communist Party had used this slogan since the late 1920s, ironically calling for overtaking capitalist societies by reaching their very goals. The VDNKh was supposed to exhibit past successes, but also ‘to tell about the way tomorrow will look like in the Soviet Union’. The creative efforts undertaken to reach this goal were described in an illustrated brochure, VDNKh SSSR, published in four foreign languages and Russian, which compared the Exhibition ensemble with an ‘academy of the people’, and portrayed it as ‘the anthem of Soviet man who has approached the threshold to Communism’. Workers, farmers, and intelligentsia were to be united: ‘the character of labor is being transformed fundamentally; the culturaltechnological level of workers is rising, and the prerequisites are created to level out the differences between mental and physical work’.

The first steps to establish an ‘AllUnion Agricultural Exhibition’ (Vsesoi-uznaia SeVsko-KhoziaistvennaiaVystav-ka, VSKhV) had been taken in the mid1930s: the Exhibition had opened in 1939. During World War II, the Exhibition was evacuated to Chelyabinsk, and reopened

in Moscow in August 1954. In 1956, the ‘AllUnion Industrial Exhibition’ (Vsesoi-uznaia Promyshlennaia Vystavka, VPV) was launched in the same territory. Its buildings, including the original Pavilion for Atomic Energy, were clustered around ‘Mechanization Square’. In the summer of 1959, these two exhibitions (and the AllUnion Construction Exhibition that was moved from the Moscow river bank) were united to form the ‘Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy’ (Vystavka Dostizhenii Narodnogo Khozi-aistva, VDNKh). Even before this merger, guidebooks portrayed them as a single exhibition ensemble. Complete tours included pavilions of both the Industrial and the Agricultural exhibitions, following preselected routes.

From 1959 to 1963, the VDNKh consisted of four sections: union and national pavilions (the Russian Federal SSR had three), industry and transport (the former Industrial Exhibition), agriculture (the former Agricultural Exhibition), and construction (the former Construction Exhibition). The pavilions’ contents tended to change frequently; the pavilion housing Atomic Energy since 1964, for example, was originally designed to exhibit the Black Soil Region, and served as the Russian Federal SSRs industry pavilion until 1964. In his Kul’tura ‘dva’, a structuralist analysis of Stalinist architecture, Vladimir Paperny argues that the VDNKh was de signed as a miniature Soviet Union within the Union’s capital Moscow. He stresses that the central republic, the Russian Federal SSR, was originally not represented by its own pavilion. Castillo calls the absence of a pavilion dedicated to the Russian republic ‘something of a Soviet exhibitionary tradition’. However, he also reports the creation of a pavilion representing the Russian Federal SSR in 1954. Since the establishment of the Pavilion for Atomic Energy in 1956, the Russian Federal SSR was in fact represented — it even featured three pavilions. In April 1963, a decree issued jointly by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers ended the mini Union model in an attempt to

CASE STUDY


systematize the assignment of pavilions.14 A section for science and culture replaced the section of union and national pavilions — a symbolic move indeed!

The VDNKh was managed by a committee including leading representatives from the Ministries, State and departmental committees, the Party organization, and trade unions. This committee was in charge of defining the major directions of the VDNKh and determined its fundamental tasks, which can be summarized as showing the achievements of each of the economy’s branches and their prospective development in its entirety — that is, displaying the full historical scope of each branch’s development. Together with regular museum activities (setting up exhibitions) the VDNKh’s tasks also included pedagogical activities (teaching specialists from the respective branches) and — the most original aspect — providing a forum to facilitate the exchange of experience. This practical orientation of science is a Stalinist legacy, and has been characterized as a defining feature of Soviet science. Technical documentation was to be distributed through the exhibition, and the fastest introduction into production was to be rewarded with medals and diplomas. Each republic was expected to send representatives to Moscow to visit the VDNKh, to take part in seminars, and to learn about the latest innovations.

A Place for Atomic EnergyThe original Atomic Energy Pavilion was part of the AllUnion Industrial Exhibition (VPV), which represented the major branches of Soviet industry from 1956 until 1959. The pavilion was located on a side street in the vicinity of Mechanization Square, and today houses exhibitions on (of all themes) environmental protection. In 1959, the first year of the VDNKh, the adjacent pavilion was annexed and the label changed from ‘Atomic Energy’ to ‘Atomic Energy for Peaceful Purposes’. Neither the archival documents nor the published sources I consulted attribute the emphasis on peaceful applications of nuclear energy to attempts to ‘detract popular atten

tion away from the image of science bent on nuclear war and destruction’. Instead, the Soviet Union was being associated with peaceful nuclear applications in industry, agriculture, and medicine through a consistent emphasis on the scientific character of Soviet industrial planning. Military applications were stressed as primary goals of the USA, which in turn legitimated Soviet efforts to defend peace against imperialistic aggression.

In 1964, as a consequence of the decree mentioned above, ‘Atomic Energy’ moved to a new building altogether. This new building was located on the central

square, close to the main entrance. Since 1989, it has been used for commercial purposes only. In recent years, even the label ‘Atomic Energy’ was replaced by one indifferently stating ‘Pavilion No. 71’. On the following pages, I will outline the ‘inner workings’ of the Pavilion for Atomic Energy — how exhibitions were organized, and who the actors and their tasks were.15 All of these aspects, especially the pavilion’s spatial and logical arrangement, and the organization of interactions within the pavilion, provided a repertoire of actions for both visitors and staff, thus contributing to the conception

VDNKh’s atomic energy exhibition extended far beyond its appointed pavilion. For a time, all pavilions were instructed to demonstrate modern methods of production with the use of the “peaceful atom”. Here is the Dairy Industry Pavilion’s convincing attempt.


of the ideal visitor. A detailed examination of the pavilion’s activities will reveal the models of agency implied by the pavilion’s exhibitions.

Ordering Space The pavilion’s spatial organization was designed to provide a stable framework that would reliably direct visitors through the exhibition, whether on guided tours or on their own. The original building (195663) had four halls, and visitors were guided through all of them in a circuit. The entry hall displayed scientific exhibits on the basic structure of atoms and the mechanics of nuclear fission, chain reaction, fusion, and so on. It also displayed the development of Soviet nuclear physics and particle physics, with due reverence to past and current Party leaders. In the second hall, one could find samples of uranium minerals and ores, and information about how they were processed and applied in chemical processes and nuclear reactors.

A working reactor took center stage in the next hall, the section on nuclear power engineering. The reactor was submerged in a basin filled with water, which simultaneously served as moderator, coolant, and shielding. The basin was 6 m deep and 4 m in diameter, and the reactor’s nominal power was 100 kW. A technician was in charge of operating the reactor, and conducted small experiments for the visitors. Visitors were invited to witness the Cherenkov effect, a bright blueishgreen shining caused by the partial transformation of the reactor’s radiation energy into light. The explicit rationale for putting a nuclear reactor on open display was ‘to enable visitors to get to know the construction and operation of a nuclear reactor more graphically’. According to both archival documents and published sources, it was the most popular exhibit for years, and when the VDNKh’s management (note: not the pavilion’s) ordered the reactor to be shut down in 1962 without giving reasons, the pavilion reported many complaints from disappointed visitors.

While the display of this reactor was unique, given the state of the art of

radiation safety at that time (195662), it was not the first demonstration reactor exhibited in public. In 1955, at the First Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, the USA had displayed a working reactor. This Geneva reactor, referred to as ‘Project Aquarium’, was a temporary exhibit that was accessible to the general public only for a limited time. Apparently, it inspired the organizers of the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, who planned to set up a working reactor as the centerpiece of the Science Hall. The idea was abandoned only after the Belgian king vetoed it. References to the US reactor displayed in Geneva are missing in the Soviet documents I read.

The section on nuclear power engineering also exhibited a large model of the Soviet Academy of Science’s experimental nuclear power station (1:40 scale), as well as smaller models of experimental and research reactors and of fusion reactors. In addition, there were detailed displays of Soviet nuclear power plants then under construction: the stage of their completion was meticulously updated every year. The section also featured a model of the nuclear icebreaker Lenin, which was in later years replaced by its successors, Ark-tika and Leonid Brezhnev. The final hall showed various research and diagnostic instruments based on the use of radioactive isotopes.

Only some of the objects on display had already been introduced to the economy. Others were inventions pending their patenting, and improvements or prototypes awaiting their actual implementation. In 1979, for example, the pavilion featured a model of the RBMK2400 (a scaledup version of the graphite water reactor RBMK1000), which was never actually built.16 There was no clear spatial separation of tasks between the original and the second, adjacent, building. It was not until 1963 that the pavilion’s management decided to use the second pavilion as a separate location for a thematic exhibition. When nuclear energy moved to the new building in 1964, the possibility of reaching various halls independently opened up new

perspectives for organizing space, and thus for addressing different audiences. In some years, the new pavilion’s floor space was even ‘rented out’ for nonnuclear exhibitions: in 1977, for example, the pavilion hosted an exhibition celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Russian Federal SSR.17

Structuring Experience From its outset, the pavilion had featured a remarkable variety of exhibitions, with constantly changing layout, function, and intended audience. There was always one main exhibition, which had a permanent character although it was updated annually. Special exhibitions were part of the main exhibition. In 1978, for example, the pavilion organized a special exhibition on ‘Peaceful Nuclear Explosions’.18 In 1983, a special exhibition posthumously honored the 80th birthday of one of the ‘fathers’ of the Soviet atomic bomb, Igor V. Kurchatov, who was revered as the archetype of the loyal, upright Soviet scientist, and as the main promoter of peaceful nuclear applications.19 Thematic exhibitions were targeted at particular audiences who were likely to play a role in the future implementation of the technology displayed. In 1984, for example, the pavilion featured a thematic exhibition on nuclear energy in the food processing industry. The first traveling ex-hibition (‘The Atom for Peace’) was organized in 1964. Such mobile exhibitions were shown in cities all over the Soviet Union in order to reach people outside the capital. The annual report for 1971 mentioned an increase in active marketing measures for traveling exhibitions.20 Movies were introduced to accompany and advertise the shows, the host cities provided wellequipped meeting rooms, and the exhibitions themselves included price lists of available products, as well as information on vendors. Both thematic and traveling exhibitions had the goal of conducting effective scientific and technological propaganda: to celebrate past achievements, to educate visitors about the advantages of nuclear energy applications, and to promote the future adoption of innovative technologies.21

CASE STUDY


The VDNKh was an attempt to sketch a communist social order based on sound scientific and technological performance, and to assign visitors new subject positions within that order.

Among the services offered by the pavilion were guided tours, small experiments or demonstrations performed by technicians, short movies, and a variety of free information brochures. In addition, there was a bookshop and an information point near the entrance. Practical changes came about relatively late, in 1980: instead of closing the entire pavilion for several months each year, parts of the pavilion’s exhibition remained accessible while others were renewed. The pavilion also accommodated lectures, workshops, and seminars, ranging from one to five days. Such events included ‘The Day of the Exhibitor’, and ‘The Day of the Propagandist’. I am not clear what the ultimate goal of these workshops was. It seems likely that they had the pragmatic aim of getting orders placed for new technologies, but my sources lack definite information on what happened next. Were requests handed over to the relevant ministries? Who decided what to implement where, and when? And, in a centrally planned economy, how autonomous were representatives from industry or public health in deciding which apparatus or instrument they wanted to order and apply to industry?

Judging from my material, the pavilion’s activities became more sophisticated starting in 1964, with the move to the new building. Together with an increasing emphasis on advising specialists, questions about patents, licensing, and visitor service were being discussed. It seems puzzling that this leap to professionalization went handinhand with appeals for a more centralized administration and coordination of exhibition activities, for an evaluation of the pavilion’s activities, and for Exhibitionwide standardized regulations.22 At first glance, this may seem like a naive attempt to secure a set of objective procedures in the context of inherently unstable and unpredictable political patronage. However, the archival documents suggest that this endeavor to adopt standardized rules was a strategic maneuver. Starting in 1982, the pavilion’s staff used the same VDNKh regulations it

had promoted earlier to put pressure on the State Committee for the Use of Nuclear Energy (Gosudarstvennyi komitet pois-poVzovaniiu atomnoi energii, GKAE). This agency had been established in 1960 under the Council of Ministers, replacing its predecessor, the Chief Administration for the Use of Atomic Energy (Glavnoe Upra-vlenie poispoVzovaniiu atomnoi energii, GUIAE). The GUIAE had been part of the Ministry for Medium Machine Building (MinSredMash), one of the most powerful Soviet ministries that administered the entire nuclear military industrial complex. In 1965, the GKAE lost its independent position under the Council of Ministers and was reintegrated into MinSredMash.

By invoking official regulations, the pavilion’s staff urged the GKAE to carry out its tasks and to take its duties seriously, for example to deliver models on time,23 to provide the pavilion with new technical equipment, and to renew popular scientific movies shown to the visitors, which they labeled ‘morally and physically outdated’.24 Despite these efforts, the GKAE’s special status was cemented in 1984: it was officially exempted from VDNKh regulations.25

Taking Parts The Pavilion for Atomic Energy was managed by a collective headed by a designated director and a chief curator. The curators — most of whom had backgrounds in physics or science education — selected and arranged the individual exhibits, drafted the labels to the exhibits, designed the exhibition layout, wrote exhibition plans,

and scheduled tours and movie screenings. Administratively, the pavilion was accountable to the State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy (GKAE) and to the VDNKh Committee. In 1978, the annual report announced a more restricted interbranch technology transfer. From that year on, implementations were regulated by certain rules, and responsibilities were more clearly defined. It was made explicit that there were ‘open’ and ‘classified’ developments, with the pavilion’s role defined as promoting the nonclassified technologies. This marked an important shift, as duties were moved away from the pavilion (and the VDNKh) to the GKAE. Whereas before, nuclear energy had been referred to as a branch of industry like any other, it was now considered ‘special’.26 This was probably not a true adjustment, but nevertheless this ‘special status’ needed some clarification, even to the actors immediately involved. The pavilion’s annual report for 1980 contains an illuminating passage: the pavilion’s management had written an official letter to the GKAE to find out why they no longer received any information about the effects of implementing the technologies displayed in the pavilion.27 In response, they were told that there was a difference between the ‘real’ nuclear power business and the VDNKh exhibits. This marked a turning point in the pavilion’s selfperception, and had important consequences for its position within the Soviet science system. Since its inception, the pavilion had considered this kind of feedback vital for one of its key tasks: facilitating the active and open exchange of infor


mation and experience about the technical performance and economical effectiveness of new technologies. Now, it had to find a way to legitimate why — in contrast to most of the other pavilions at the VDNKh — it did not exhibit the results of its popularization and promotion efforts.28 As a result of these changes, the arrangement of special exhibitions and accompanying seminars to exchange professional experience was handed over to the GKAE as well.29 In 1981, the pavilion abandoned the practice of identifying ‘pioneering collectives’ (the first who implemented new technologies) on the VDNKh’s ‘AllUnion Board of Honor’.30 And in 1982, the pavilion discontinued making recommendations for the introduction of particular exhibits — potentially a concession to the increasing difficulties encountered with their actual implementation.31

The pavilion’s managing collective wrote plans for every exhibition several months in advance. These plans comprised details of the objects to be displayed, including their labels and the institutes and factories that provided them. Members of the GKAE and the VDNKh committee revised these plans twice before approving them, and visited the pavilion before the exhibitions officially opened. The pavilion’s staff also had to submit an annual report to these agencies, which was usually about 15 pages long and summarized the pavilion’s activities over any given year, complete with basic statistics on visitors, exhibitors, and awards. They listed thematic, special, and traveling exhibitions, identified the most popular exhibits, reported on particularly successful events, and commented on the guest book entries. They also identified problems and made suggestions for handling them in the future.

It seems that for the pavilion’s managers, writing these reports was both a tedious obligation to their superiors, and an opportunity to reflect upon and evaluate their own work. Apparently, there was hardly any feedback to these reports: in 1966, the pavilion’s director specifically asked for a response to the annual report,

and when there was none, the 1967 report shrunk to a meager three pages. Two years later, the files included a response from a VDNKh administrator — with handwritten annotations from the pavilion’s staff. This again illustrates that the pavilion’s administration cared about their work; they were determined to establish explicit criteria for quality control. A related problem that was repeatedly addressed in the annual reports was the lack of autonomy in decision making. The pavilion’s staff clearly felt restricted by the amount of red tape they had to deal with, and by the lack of distinct regulations for exhibitors. In some years, the opening date of an exhibition had to be postponed due to delays in the delivery of exhibits. Despite the fact that there was obvious (and due to the bureaucratic procedures very laborious) topdown control, the pavilion’s superiors displayed a striking lack of interest in the actual results of the shows they presumably supervised.

The pavilion’s guides were particularly relevant for interacting with visitors: they told their groups previously approved stories, showed them short popular scientific movies, and handed out brochures. Coming from more diverse backgrounds than curators, they received intensive additional training, both in specially devised courses and through expert consultations ‘on site’. Guides were audited for political loyalty, and had to demonstrate on a regular basis their command of the technical knowledge that was deemed relevant for the current exhibition. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several of the pavilion’s guides successfully took part in VDNKhwide competitions for ‘best guide’.32 Other actors who worked in the pavilion included operators and technicians who performed live demonstrations in the exhibition halls, specialists from the GKAE who operated the information point in the pavilion from 1965 on, and exhibitors — scientific institutes, construction organizations, factories, and production companies who supplied the exhibits.

Who, then, were the visitors — the

people the pavilion wanted to reach with its exhibitions? The pavilion’s annual reports generally distinguished two main categories: specialists and nonspecialists. Engineers, physicians, ship builders, or military personnel were identified as specialists, whereas schoolteachers, students, workers, as well as regular members of the Party and trade unions, were characterized as nonspecialists. While the former received individual consultations upon request, the latter were offered standardized tours. Other categories of visitors mentioned in the pavilion’s documents were foreigners, both as official delegations and individuals, and prominent scientists. For example, in 1972, members of the Academy of Sciences visited the pavilion, and in 1973, the pavilion proudly reported a visit by physicist Sergei P. Kapitsa, the son of Nobel laureate Petr L. Kapitsa.

The VDNKh’s management was obsessed with counting: part of the standardized format of an annual report was to chronicle meticulously the number of visitors, exhibits, exhibitors, square meters of exhibition space, and so on. As far as I can tell, the purpose of this kind of documentation was not just to show off, but to anticipate future resource allocations. However, as Steven Solnick has shown convincingly, the pressure to meet and even overfulfill plans rendered this bureaucratic mechanism virtually ineffective. In 1981, the pavilion proudly reported an increase in visitors, which was subsequently explained by the pavilion’s extended opening hours.

My interest here is different from what has become known as ‘visitor studies’. Visitor studies are more or less statistically oriented and quantitatively analyzable polls. By contrast, I tackle the notion of ‘the visitor’ that ‘visitor studies’ operate with. And although I did not intend a quantitative assessment of visitors, I did count the visitors to the pavilion: from an alltime record of almost 1.5 million in 1959, the numbers decline consistently, dropping below 1 million in 1969 (with the exception of 1981: ca.

CASE STUDY


1.07 million). In 1985, the numbers were below 200,000; they jumped back up in 1986 (370,000), and there are no data available for the pavilion’s final years. The number and circulation of available information brochures, by contrast, increased steadily.33 The numbers cited in the annual reports indicate that individual visitors always outnumbered those who came as organized groups. The pavilion’s guides gathered individual visitors into groups whenever possible (guided tours had an average of 20 participants), but the vast majority of visitors still browsed through the halls on their own. Visitors were expected to listen attentively, to learn, but also to ask questions and request more information. Young children in particular were encouraged to push a few buttons and to operate the handson exhibits.

Visitors were also invited to write their comments into a guest book, which was diligently read by the pavilion’s staff and probably by other authorities as well. The pavilion emphasized that the relationship between visitors and pavilion staff was determined by a ‘common interest’ — the wish to know and celebrate Soviet achievements in nuclear technology — where the visitors’ interest was presumably distilled from guest book comments. The guest books contained additional information on individual visitors, since visitors usually signed their comments with their name, place of residence, profession, and employer. However, guest books are a precarious source. It is unclear who actually wrote the comments, let alone how representative or accurate they were. There are good reasons to assume that many of these comments, rather than expressing individual visitors’ opinions, reflect ‘desirable’ reactions and were carefully crafted along approved lines of official ideology: one needs to consider that the writers disclosed their full identity, and they were well aware that their comments would actually be read. On 22 December 1980, for example, for the Den’ energetiki [Day of the power engi-neer], I found the following entry in the guest book:

This comment is worth mentioning because it surpasses the usual expressions of gratitude and contains some hidden criticism by implying that quality and safety in the nuclear power industry might be enhanced. Also, the author considers it necessary to hedge his comment by mentioning that he is writing in the name of 60 (!) specialists.

The ‘common interest’ could thus have been — and most likely was — an artifact of the specific setting.35 The guestbook readers not only ticked the comments off, they actually reacted to them: I came across one case in which a guide who had repeatedly received negative visitors’ comments was subsequently fired.36 Visitors’ comments played an increasingly important role. In 1978 and 1979, the VDNKh conducted a competition for best visitor service, and in 1980, during the Olympics, visitor service was once again improved. This time, service for foreign visitors was emphasized by putting guides through some sort of intercultural training; the report also stresses a massive cleanup program in and around the pavilion.37 The emphasis on staff training apparently paid off: from 1976 on, the pavilion’s guides regularly won awards for ‘excellent visitor service’.38

I found the only explicit image of an ideal visitor in the annual report for 1984, where visitors were envisioned as learners: ‘The exhibition in the Pavilion for Atomic Energy has not just scientific character; it also has an enlightening function for various kinds of visitors: foreign tourists, visitors from the masses, and

students’.39 The expositions, conceptualized to be intrinsically scientific, were intended to ‘deepen the visitors’ understanding of the topic’. However, this was a different kind of learning than in earlier years, where the emphasis had been on the actual adoption and implementation of innovations.40 In 1984, visitors were no longer envisioned as active collaborators, but as more passive spectators who were expected to look, to acknowledge, and to feel proud. As Brigitte SchroederGudehus and David Cloutier found, at world fairs during the Cold War ‘the function to convey effective knowledge declined, [but] there remained — and prospered — the function of conveying convictions’. The VDNKh never seems to have lost its enlightenment mission. The significance of the practical imperative of learning

Ticket for Pavilion of Atomic Energy, 1957.

The construction specialists of the Kursk, Chernobyl’, and Smolensk nuclear power plants ... express deep acknowledgment and gratitude for a wellorganized exhibition and a high quality seminar. Broadening one’s horizon regarding the applications of nuclear energy will certainly have a positive influence on improving the design quality and the safe operation of nuclear power plants. For 60 specialists from the Institute ‘Gidroproekt’, Director of the Technical Department on Nuclear Power Plants [followed by a signature].34


decreased, while the cognitive and moral imperatives remained important. This shift might be interpreted as reflecting the stabilization of the nuclear industry by 1984 and its successful integration into the Soviet economy. It could also be attributed to the restricted role the pavilion had been assigned during the late 1970s, when the GKAE had taken over the tasks of training and implementation. Thus, we can read changes in the projection of the ‘ideal visitor’ as reflections of the pavilion’s shifting role within the system of science popularization, and as reactions to the overall development of the branch of industry that the pavilion represented.

While visitors were being assigned certain models of agency, a parallel development involved the pavilion’s staff: their own professional identity as ‘popularizers’ of nuclear energy was gradually taking shape. They came to occupy a peculiar position in the hierarchy of Soviet institutions, where they negotiated exhibition designs with responsible State and Party agencies. They also communicated with research institutes and design and construction bureaus about possible ways of

visualizing complex theoretical concepts and of exhibiting highly specialized, expensive frontier science. In addition, the pavilion had to carve out its own niche as an educational enterprise while cooperating with universities and different types of schools.

Setting GoalsThe pavilion was pursuing a series of tasks. First, it was expected to serve the technical progress of Soviet industry. The expositions were to show the latest achievements in automation, mechanization and other forms of progress, facilitate the distribution of technological knowhow and the promotion of new developments, and testify to the increased speed of applying the latest scientific and technical innovations to production processes. In this context, the pavilion was also a zone of coordination — at least in its early years. It received reports from companies and factories, where workers and engineers had successfully adopted new technologies they had learned about at the VDNKh. This feedback was incorporated into the next exhibition when models or prototypes were

exhibited next to successfully implemented technologies. Another major goal was to introduce workers and specialists from industry, agriculture, unions, and Party organizations to the world of nuclear energy. They were addressed as multipliers and expected to spread the word in their respective spheres of influence. The third task was to facilitate the exchange of experience with new technologies, with a clear emphasis on economic efficiency. As early as 1968, the stress on economic efficiency and profitability was perceived as too dominant and at odds with ‘the original idea of the VDNKh,’ which had been to link the demonstration of achievements with their actual implementation.41 This kind of economic thinking might have been perceived as incompatible with the idea of progress along logical, scientific lines.

The significance allotted to these different tasks shifted over the years. In 1964, the emphasis was clearly on teaching and on consulting specialists. For these ends, the pavilion maintained successful cooperation initiatives with several educational institutions. 1964 was an important and innovative year for several reasons. It was the first year in the new building, at a new location, but it was also the year the first traveling exhibition was designed (which was handed over to the Polytechnic museum42). A pavilionwide radio system was set up. The pavilion pushed a new organizational structure, claiming the VDNKhwide coordinating role for all things nuclear, including medical, biological, agricultural, and industrial applications that other pavilions had given some attention. The pavilion’s management explicitly set out the goals of standardizing regulations for exhibition activities, identifying economically efficient exhibitions, and significantly increasing the number of visitors. The management also filed complaints about outdated brochures, and requested additional staff members. The flexibility, or smennost’, of an exhibition became a key criterion.

The archival material does not convey these developments as reactions to changes in overall regime policy, but the

Demonstration reactor on open display in the Pavilion for Atomic Energy, 1957.

CASE STUDY


concurrent economic reforms, including the reintegration of the GKAE into an essentially classified ministry, are likely to have had repercussions for the pavilion’s work. Also, the international exchange of museological concepts and practices following the first three Geneva conferences on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy (in 1955, 1958, and 1964), which involved exhibitions on nuclear themes, may well have advanced and accelerated these internal improvements. By 1966, ‘representing nuclear energy in its entirety’ with a linear historical narrative was considered the foundation for teaching and for the exchange of experience.43 The reports started complaining about overlaps in the development and production of technologies. Responsibilities were unclear as to who produced and who distributed technologies. As an ‘inter disciplinary’ pavilion, the Pavilion for Atomic Energy suffered directly from conflicts of interest among different ministries.44 The stress on exhibiting and the unclear jurisdiction also prompted a request for more research on visitors’ responses.45

The task of ‘exchanging groundbreaking experience’ that had been the fundamental impetus for the original pavilion had disappeared from the annual reports by 1976. Instead, the exhibition’s tasks were explicitly determined as ‘active propaganda of the latest achievements of nuclear science and technology, and teaching of workers from different branches of the people’s economy’.46 Gorbachev’s per-estroika in the 1980s involved the reorganization of the entire system of education, and the pavilion was determined to establish itself as a permanent actor under the modified circumstances. The curators envisioned the pavilion’s role as attracting new cadres to the field of nuclear science and engineering. Therefore, they organized ‘days of knowledge’, a kind of orientation event for high school graduates who were considering studying nuclear physics or a related discipline at an institution of higher education.47

In 1986, the pavilion’s annual report recounted that during that year:

I find it noteworthy that the authors used such expressions as ‘to explain’, ‘to lay out’, and ‘to clarify’, in order to characterize their activity. Why their information sources were trustworthy or what these sources said, remained unmentioned in the report. Nevertheless, despite a lack of clear and consistent instructions from above, the curators and guides seemed to have taken up the challenge of mediating between the State officials, scientific experts, and the citizens who flooded the pavilion and inundated them with questions.49 Almost two years into perestroi-ka (the 1986 report was written in spring 1987), the pavilion’s staff must have been aware of the potential consequences of the Chernobyl disaster for their project. Consequently, the 1986 report advanced a remarkable suggestion, namely, to shift the exhibition’s emphasis from the celebration of past achievements and the promotion of future benefits to commenting on current problems of the nuclear industry and nuclear power, including the ecology of nuclear power, radiation control, and resource management.50 Although the pavilion’s guides were instructed to adapt their stories, and to include reports on the Party’s decisions about increasing the reliability of equipment and the safety of operations at nuclear power plants,51 the pavilion’s general settings proved slow, or altogether resistant, to change. In the report for 1987 any reference to Chernobyl was dropped, and with the exhibitions of 1989 the pavilion’s museum activities quietly ended, as did the documentation on them.

Against the backdrop of Chernobyl, the ‘models of agency’ that the pavilion had developed for its visitors — of enthusiastic spectators and credulous learners — went

out of balance. The cognitive imperative to learn about the Soviet Union’s nuclear achievements lost its relevance when people wanted to know what had led to the Chernobyl disaster; the moral imperative to support the Soviet polity could only turn into outright cynicism given the scale of the accident and the lack of reliable information about it. The popularizers’ credibility had suffered a severe blow. In the face of Chernobyl, they could no longer rely on technical performance — neither as a source of legitimacy, nor as a reason to celebrate and unconditionally support Soviet science and technology.

Conclusions: Handling Failure? The impulse to celebrate the State, to demonstrate and display technological prowess, along with an emphasis on ‘national’ distinction, never lost its relevance for the VDNKh. The archival material testifies to enormous leaps in professional sophistication, but the Pavilion for Atomic Energy continued to remain faithful to the world’s fair model. And although there was clearly more to world fairs than the celebratory facets that I emphasize here, it is difficult to imagine a selfcritical world fair. The Pavilion for Atomic Energy was incapable of including the display of failure, partly because of its being tied up in the larger, deeply modernist VDNKh project, and partly because of the fusion of educational, economical, and political objectives characteristic of Soviet state ideology.

Having addressed earlier in this paper some apparent parallels to Western discussions in museum studies and the Public Understanding of Science literature, I now want to stress several distinctive features of the Pavilion for Atomic Energy and the VDNKh. First, the pavilion had to deal with a constantly changing, complex, and often overlapping institutional hierarchy, while being deprived of rudimentary managerial autonomy. Not only did the pavilion have to negotiate its exhibitions with a variety of partially competing authorities — the main VDNKh administration, several ministries, the GKAE, publishing houses, export agencies,

Curators and guides had the special responsibility to inform [visitors] about the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and about the mitigation of its consequences. Using trustworthy information, the pavilion’s staff clarified the announcements made by the Council of Ministers and the speeches given by members of the governmental commission at special Politburo meetings regarding this problem.48


universities, production firms, scientific research institutes, unions, the censorship agency, and various Party organizations52 — there was also no clear assignment of responsibility for taking final decisions. At the same time, the VDNKh’s general orientation of representing Soviet state ideology remained essentially static.

The problems facing Soviet popularizers of nuclear energy were therefore quite different from those of their colleagues, say, from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where private companies designed entire sections. At the VDNKh, exhibitions were prepared without straightforward conflicts of interest: supposedly the Party, the country, the VDNKh, and even the visitors, had one common interest (see my discussion of guest books above) — taking part in the construction of a communist society. Ironically, the lack of transparent structures of accountability might have provided space for the preservation of an enduring technological enthusiasm on the part of the pavilion’s staff, which in turn facilitated a possibly unintentional conformity to the official version of Soviet uses of nuclear energy. It was only after Chernobyl that the pavilion’s staff began to question this view openly and to consider other options of displaying the blessings and quandaries of nuclear energy. In many ways, Chernobyl shook the faith in modernity, and unlike the nuclear industry itself, nuclear power’s celebratory representation did not survive the combination of the most severe accident at a nuclear power plant, a struggling economy, and a political system turned volatile.

A second distinguishing feature of science on display is the Soviet concept of public education. The rhetoric of ‘educating and empowering the masses’, while in many ways similar to modernist ideas elsewhere, rendered learning and teaching immensely powerful. By diminishing the relevance of aspects such as entertainment or consumption that dominated many Western discussions on science popularization, the Soviet model was both more patronizing and more effective. It is

precisely propaganda in its broader sense that was at work here: by disseminating political ideas through the lens of successful nuclear science and technology, the VDNKh specifically aimed to influence the public’s consciousness and to mobilize them morally, in order to get them actively enrolled in a common objective.

The visual display of new developments in nuclear science and technology in the pavilion symbolized a successful Soviet industry orchestrated by the Communist Party, and lent the exhibits the status of established knowledge, even though many of these models were still in the planning stage.53 But if the Soviet state and its leaders wanted to draw on science as a powerful publicly accessible and uni-versally valid rhetorical resource to legitimize their power, they needed a stage and some kind of public performance. On the pavilion’s stage, the boundaries between already adopted innovations and future perspectives, between experience and expectation, were consciously blurred in order to create an image of linear, rapid progress. The nuclear industry represented in the pavilion was by nature scientific and peaceful, and it promised improvements in everyone’s life, despite or even because of its technical sophistication.

The pavilion’s exhibitions reinforced a vision not only of particular technologies based on the use of nuclear energy, or of the country’s scientific and technological potential, but also of a social order. The peaceful atom was displayed in order to create and reinforce confidence based on scientific evidence, and as a consequence a strong common identity. The VDNKh’s Pavilion for Atomic Energy was one of the most prominent places warranting this interpretation. In their paper on the 1958 world fair in Brussels, SchroederGudehus & Cloutier (1994: 170) describe the Belgian organizers’ directive to display ‘what you are’, rather than ‘what you do’ as an attempt to prevent a showdown among the two main Cold Warriors. Like the fair’s organizers, the authors interpret the Soviets’ response — to exhibit their latest scientific and technological

developments — as showing ‘what we do’, thus violating the directive. I think they are mistaken: ‘what we are’ in the Soviet case was denned precisely by ‘what we do’: namely, science and technology, with huge Cyrillic letters (SSSR) printed on the artifacts displayed.

Nuclear energy, staged as pivotal to technical progress, contributed significantly to the Soviet political vision. Ian Welsh refers to the period from the late 1930s to the late 1970s as ‘peak modernity’, a period ‘when the ideological objectives of nation states and the scientific ambitions and aspirations of various constituent sciences were united behind visions of the planned transformation of society by rational, scientific means’. He sees this commitment to ‘heroic scientific projects intended to modernize the world’ as fairly universal, encompassing both capitalist and socialist countries. In the Soviet case, however, science and technology were not only invoked as sources of legitimacy, but were considered the foundations of social theory itself: Marxism was considered a science.54 The pavilion spoke in the name of science and the State, and by addressing different groups of visitors in skillfully customized ways it emphasized each individual’s potential contribution to and responsibility for the communist project. It thus aimed at enrolling all Soviet citizens in a joint politicotechnological program.

As I have shown in this paper, the pavilion did not envision a homogeneous type of visitor. Rather, it addressed heterogeneous audiences, different implicit visitors, in sophisticated ways. Of course, the call to implement new technologies was primarily directed toward specialists, and they were awarded medals and diplomas if they were successful. But nonspecialist visitors were addressed as well. They were encouraged to feel proud and enthusiastic about being part of a great historical project, and responsible for the construction of a just society. The old claim that science could develop best in a democracy was contested by portraying ingenuity as a character trait specific to the Soviet man. This constituted a strong incentive

CASE STUDY


The former Atomic Energy pavilion, now home to the “Republic of Song” weekend club


to identify with the implied sociotechnical model — even if the technical information displayed was beyond an individual’s grasp. In a sense, then, the exhibition’s effect on nonspecialist visitors, ‘molding’ them into Soviet citizens, was potentially even more profound than it was on specialist visitors. While specialist visitors could focus on the cognitive and/or practical imperative, lay visitors had to focus on the moral imperative — or become cynics.

Did the ‘disciplining of the visitor’s gaze’ work? The pavilion’s reaction to Chernobyl suggests that it did not. If the exhibitions had been a powerful instrument for shaping public opinion, there would have been no reason for the responsible agencies to discontinue using the pavilion as a nuclear energy museum. Economical crisis cannot be blamed, as the Soviet economy had been in trouble long before the perestroika years, and had still considered funding the VDNKh worthwhile. But Chernobyl was not the only problem that became visible as a consequence of glasnost (transparency). In her study of regional protest movements under Gorbachev, Glenys Babcock pointed out that ‘not even the most cynical Soviet citizens could have imagined the magnitude of environmental problems in the country or the enormous risks taken in the name of progress’.

The VDNKh’s Pavilion for Atomic Energy had shown the ‘technological fix’ to the problems facing the people’s economy that science and technology offered, and simultaneously had reinforced the faith in science propelling progress. The administration did not manage to accomplish their maneuver of adjusting the pavilion’s identity to the grim new realities of the postChernobyl nuclear era. It seems that even during advanced perestroika, it was impossible to render uncertainty, controversy, and failure visible at the VDNKh. Ironically, but typically for Soviet history, crisis revealed the ‘normal’: the intended function of the VDNKh in general, and the pavilion in particular. This place had been created to show achievements, to impress

through the public display of success. Visitors were envisioned as enchanted spectators, as curious spirits whose eagerness to learn was to be stimulated, whose pride of national accomplishment and distinction was to be substantiated, and whose creative participation in the construction of communism was to be enlisted. Which models of agency would a ‘problem show’ have implied? Perhaps critical minds, skeptical observers, or, to use Yaron Ezrahi’s (1990) terminology, attestive observers of transparent decisionmaking processes? Criticism of science and technology would have been incompatible with the Party’s authority, and ultimately with the perceived foundation of the Soviet state itself. Neither the late Gorbachev administration, nor postSoviet governors of the Russian Federation or Moscow were prepared to assume the respective roles in such a scenario.

And yet, the implied models of agency have changed dramatically since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. While in the previous model the State used to be depicted as a caretaker, ensuring that society developed in scientific, logical, and therefore predictable stages, it almost disappeared in the prevailing postSoviet model of agency, leaving citizens alone in a struggle for survival. The imperative to morally support a larger social vision, the main moral directive back then, has completely vanished from the new model. In spite of that disappearance, beliefs about the State’s responsibility to take care of society persist in today’s Russia, even when articulated as a desideratum. In combination with a nearly unshattered faith in technocratic expertise, this reflects a surprisingly enduring confidence in the feasibility of a just polity by rational, scientific means. It also shows the persistence and continuity of modernist beliefs. Exhibitions at the VDNKh today either continue along the conventional enlightenment format, which envisions visitors as enthusiasts (but has to allow for potential disinterestedness or cynicism), or they follow a clearly defined consumer model in the tradition of trade fairs, addressing specific,

professional target audiences. In general, today’s exhibitions aim at showing and selling, not at enrolling (that is, inspiring, convincing, and mobilizing) their visitors.

So have learners become consumers? Has the market model seamlessly superseded the celebratory model? It is an interesting paradox that during the VDNKh days, when visitors were envisioned as active, engaged learners, they were enrolled as committed, creative citizens by the Soviet state, and yet that same State deprived them de facto of the most basic forms of meaningful participation.55 Today, visitors to the VDNKh (or the WTs) are imagined as consumers: they are (almost with ostentation) let believe whatever they want. Learning, knowing, or becoming active in a political sense is considered optional, or even undesirable, behavior. If anything, they are ‘enrolled’ in celebrating the market and indulging in consumption. It is a bitter irony that due to an inability to spend money, their participation in this model of agency is just as severely limited as in the previous one.

Notes

1 A note on terminology: I use exhibition to refer to a coherent whole that is exhibited (or displayed) at a certain location, for a certain time (Exhibition with a capital ‘E’ sometimes stands for VDNKh). An exhibit is one part of such an exhibition, an object or a set of objects. Curator refers to a person responsible for the conceptual work preceding an exhibition, and the management of ongoing exhibitions. Exhibitors are the individuals, institutions, and organizations providing exhibits for an exhibition. All translations from Russian and German are mine, unless otherwise noted. I use the US Library of Congress conventions for transliterating Russian words, except in those instances, where they have entered habitual language use in a different version (for example, Chernobyl, glasnost). 2. In 1992, the ‘Exhibition of the Achievements

2 Since this essay was written, the ‘Worker and Collective Farm Woman’ statue to which Schmid refers has indeed been reconstructed. The revealing of the restored monument was held on the evening of December 4, 2009, accompanied by fireworks. The restored statue now stands atop a museum and exhibition center. - Ed.

CASE STUDY


3 In 1992, the ‘Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy of the USSR’ (VDNKh SSSR) was renamed the ‘All-Russian Exhibition Center’ (Vserossiiskii Vystavochnyi Tsentr, WTs). Since the Pavilion for Atomic Energy as such existed only until 1989, I have used the label ‘VDNKh’ throughout this paper, except in the archival references, where I use the current acronym.

4 See, for example, Karp & Lavine (1991) and Macdonald (1998a). Note also a renewed interest in and emphasis on ‘users’ and ‘publics’ in Science and Technology Studies (Wynne, 1995; Kline & Pinch, 1996; Yearley, 2000; Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003), and the strong orientation towards readers in contemporary literary studies and the new rhetoric (for example, Nelson et al., 1987; Gross, 1990; Simons, 1990; Selzer, 1993; Gross & Keith, 1997).

5 Otchet o rabote pavil’ona za 1973 g. [Report on the Pavilion’s Work in 1973], RGANTD (Samara) f.127, op.3, t.3, d.5158. I will henceforth refer to these documents as ‘reports’: they are annual descriptions of the pavilion’s activities produced by the pavilion’s staff. RGANTD stands for Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv nauchno tekhnicheskoi dokumentatsii [Russian State Archive for Scientific and Technical Documentation]. Pre-1974 archival documents pertaining to the history of the VDNKh have been transferred to the Samara branch of the RGANTD for reasons of storage capacity. Post-1974 documents are kept at the Archive of theW Ts (AWTs) in Moscow.

6 For an historical account of Soviet fairground architecture, with a focus on the development of national styles, see Castillo (1997).

7 For example Svetlyi put’, General’naia liniia, Svinarka i pastukh (Noever & MAK, 1994).

8 Anna Kotomina called my attention to Pugacheva’s song.

9 Other examples of miniature celebrations of Soviet glory are Moscow’s (and St Petersburg’s) subway stations; see Jenks (2000) and Neutatz (2001).

10 Compared with Mukhina’s earlier sculpture, this might indicate a shift from ‘native’ to ‘professional’ identities. I owe this speculative idea to Dmitrii Saprykin.

11 See Beetlestone et al. (1998), Bradburne (1998), Durant (1992), Farmelo & Carding (1997), Karp & Lavine (1991) and Persson (2000).

12 On Frank Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium, see Macdonald (1998a: 16) and Barry (1998).

13 All these sources are clearly fragmented: for example, I was not able to look at all documents from before 1974 (which are kept at the RGANTD in Samara).

14 Postanovlenie SM SSSR iTsKKPSS

No. 452 ‘Operestroike raboty VDNKh’ [Decree issued by the USSR Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR ‘On the Reconstruction of the VDNKh’], 18 April 1963.

15 I use the word ‘actors’ not only in a performative sense, but also as a term denoting people involved with the pavilion’s activities. However, given the staged character of the pavilion, the dramaturgical allusion is not completely unintended.

16 AWTs, f.4, op.35, ind.21, ed.khr., 1.5. 17 AWTs f.127, op.4, d.3394. 18 Cf. report 1978, AWTs f.4, op. 35, ind.20,

ed.khr.4, 1.2-3. 19 Cf. report 1983 (AWTs, f.4, op.35, ind.25,

ed.khr.3,1.3). 20 Report 1971 (RGANTD [Samara] f.127, op.3, t.l,

d.1575). 21 Cf., for example, the 1985 report (AWTs f.4,

op.35, ind.27, ed.khr.3). 22 Reports 1968 (RGANTD [Samara] f.127, op.2,

t.4, d.6315) and 1972 (RGANTD [Samara] f.127, op.3, t.2, d.3526).

23 Report 1982 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.24, ed.khr.5, 1.20).

24 Reports 1980 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.22, ed.khr.4,1.23), and 1981 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.23, ed.khr.6,1.19).

25 Report 1984 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.26, ed.khr.6,1.11). The State Committee existed until 1986, when after Chernobyl the Soviet nuclear industry’s management was reorganized (Sidorenko, 2001).

26 Report 1978 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.20, ed.khr.4, 1.7). 27 Report 1980 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.22, ed.khr.4,

1.13-14). 28 Report 1983 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.25, ed.khr.3,

1.14). 29 Report 1980 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.22, ed.khr.4,



1.18). 32 Cf. on 1960, RGANTD (Samara) f.127, op.l, t.2,

d.1627. 33 Report 1981 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.23, ed.khr.6,

1.19). 34 VDNKh SSSR, PaviVon ‘Atomnaia Energiia’,

Kniga otzyvov ipredlozheniiposetitelei pavil’ona, AWTs f.4, op.35, op.22, ed.khr.15.

35 Report 1985 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.27, ed.khr.7, 1.18).

36 Report 1968 (RGANTD [Samara] f.127, op.2, t.4, d.6315).

37 Report 1980, AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.22, ed.khr.4, 1.3.

38 Unfortunately, I do not have comparative data for other pavilions, nor have I been able to identify criteria for how these prizes were awarded.

39 Report 1984 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.26,

ed.khr.6,1.23). 40 For concepts of learning in museums

developed in Western contexts, see especially Hein (1988) and Hein & Alexander (1998).

41 Report 1968 (RGANTD [Samara] f.127, op.2, t.4, d.6315); see alsoTikhanov (1957: 3) and Petrunia (1973: 3-4).

42 Today, the Polytechnic museum has the only publicly accessible permanent exhibition on nuclear energy in Moscow that I am aware of. Nuclear energy is part of a hall devoted to energy production, and features a number of models. There is also a high quality exhibition administered by the Division of Exhibitions and Marketing (Vystavochno-marketingovyi otdel) within the Federal Agency for Nuclear Energy (the former Ministry for Atomic Energy, MinAtom. I am grateful to Galina V. Gorshtein for introducing me to this exhibition in the summer of 2004).

43 Report 1971 (RGANTD [Samara] f.127, op.3, t.l, d.1575, 1.1).

44 Report 1966 (RGANTD [Samara] f.127, op.2, t.2, d.2752).

45 Report 1966 (RGANTD [Samara] f.127, op.2, t.2, d.2752, 1.15).

46 Report 1976 (AWTs f.127, op.4, ed.khr.1707, 1.4). 47 Report 1987 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.29,

ed.khr.9, 1.10). 48 Report 1986 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.28, ed.khr.3,

1.14). 49 Personal communication with a former

guide and curator, Moscow, January 2001. 50 Report 1986 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.28,

ed.khr.3, 1.25). 51 Report 1987 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.29,

ed.khr.9, 1.9). 52 This phenomenon has been thoroughly

described for Western contexts (Schroeder Gudehus, 1978; Schroeder-Gudehus & Rasmussen, 1992; Schroeder-Gudehus et al., 1993; Lewenstein, 1996; Molella, 1997, 1999; Gieryn, 1998).

53 See report 1980 (AWTs f.4, op.35, ind.22, ed.khr.4, 1.2) and Biagioli (1990).

54 For post-Stalinist struggles between scientists and Marxist philosophers over the authority to define what ‘science’ was or should be in a socialist society, see Ivanov (2002).

55 I am indebted to Charles Thorpe for emphasizing that the very idea of a workers’ democracy clashed with the reality of the authoritarian, bureaucratic Soviet state.

Originally published in Social Studies of Science, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Jun., 2006). New York: Sage Publications, Ltd.


Iakov Chernikhov on How to Bridge Fantasy and Functionality

How I Do It

For decades, Iakov Chernikov’s artistic and educational experiments have been influ-encing designers, architects, and illustra-tors around the world. They reveal that, through rigorous adherence to construc-tive principles, namely the linking of all formal, com positional, and technical ele-ments into a single coherent whole, archi-tects can be liberated to explore the deep-est recesses of their aesthetic fantasies while remaining confident that their pro-posals will be perfectly functional, once the correct technological or program-matic circumstances are in place. In this imaginary interview, based on fragments of the architect’s writing, the founder of Chernikhov Creative Solutions talks to Fair Enough about his inspirations, techniques, and the nature of beauty.

A master explains his methods and madness

VISIT CHERNIKHOV CREATIVE SOLUTIONS AT BOOTH A6



Iakov Chernikhov

What I am trying to do is establish the clear and precise basis for constructive concepts and principles, and to elucidate their essence, their logic, their rules

and their laws.

HOW I DO IT


Fair Enough: Chernikhov Creative Solu-tions specializes in a design approach that you call ‘constructive’. What exactly is con-structive design? Constructive principles are as ancient as man’s creative abilities. Primitive man, in building his dolmens, triliths, crypts, and other erections was unconsciously operating with exactly these principles. Over the centuries, the forms generated by those principles have become complex and highly differentiated, in proportion to the differentiation of cultures over that period. In many creative works of the historic past, constructive elements were not clearly expressed or displayed in their own right, but were masked by decorative treatments. Underneath the surface of great works of any style, however, one finds that the overall design of a building, in its plan, elevations and threedimensional composition, unquestionably possesses that unity which derives from a basis of constructively connected planar and spatial elements.

Today, Man’s need to construct the objects that surround his life imperiously dictates that he seek a rational and principled exit from what has become a vague and indefinite situation. Both the mighty construction effort and the grandiose technology of our time are advancing at such a pace that man, surrounded by them, must grasp, understand and study all the stages, laws and qualities of how objects are constructed. We not only want to know the fundamentals underlying constructive work; we must know them. In other words, the need to understand constructive principles has become the paramount need of our time.

What I am trying to do is establish the clear and precise basis for constructive concepts and principles, and to elucidate their essence, their logic, their rules and their laws.

This effort you describe, to define the laws of constructive designs, is inspired and in-fluenced by your role as a teacher, at the Moscow Architectural Institute, among oth-er places. How do you instill these principles in an unfamiliar young designer? Every individual has the capacity of imagination, since it is a characteristic derived from nature. The task of manifesting each person’s cre

ative capacities, however, is a very exact and difficult one. The whole question demands that we examine very carefully the tasks that occupy a student during architectural education, and the kind of objects which the student is called upon to depict.

Unquestionably, one of the best means of nurturing a new type of architect and design is the conscious application of those forms which are in general termed ‘nonobjective’.

Specific functions or subject matter as such do not play any part in this course of teaching. Not once do we use real briefs or problems. The whole methodology is based upon the development of ‘combinations’ and ‘assemblages’ of lines, planes, and volumes, independent of what the given elements may represent. Just as an appropriate assembly of sounds gives us musical products, so too we construct and assemble a representation in which lines, planes and volumes can be musically tuned. Thus we create a skilled composer of new forms.

But isn’t one of architecture’s defining as-pects its responsiveness? As your compatri-ot Alexey Shchusev once said, an architect is unlike other artists in that he is forced to take his creative motive from without, in an externally defined task. Even a correctly analyzed brief cannot have any formal expression if the executant is not sufficiently the master of the disciplines of spatial and formal invention. The development of a live capacity for fantasy must be the central theme of all our work. The interesting result of this nonobjective approach is that we produce an executant who is freely capable of handling tasks that are based on real subject matter, for the nonobjective and real are erected upon identical principles of form.

With the help of socalled nonobjective elements we have the possibility of creating a series of the most fantastic formal constructions which are not initially constrained by any direct practical application, but in return possess properties which make them available for real and direct application in the future. Having been trained through the development of multiple series of constructive structures and through designing multiple diverse combinations, we shall be fully equipped

Iakov Chernikhov, The Fundamen-tals of Contempo-rary Architecture, pg 26.

Iakov Chernikhov, The Construc-tion of Architec-tural and Machine Forms, pg 33.

The Construc-tion of Architec-tural and Machine Forms, pg 29.

Iakov Chernikhov, The Art of De-scriptive Draw-ing, pg 7.

The Art of De-scriptive Drawing, pg 25.

The Fundamen-tals of Contempo-rary Architecture, pg 21.



Everything is beautiful which follows regular

laws and anything which follows regular

laws is also functionally appropriate.

HOW I DO IT


for the moment when a completely new and original formal solution is required of us in the future. By this training in the free generation of logically constructed fantasies, our inventive capacities will be developed to their full potential.

How exactly do you do that? To achieve the specific objective which I have outlined, it is necessary to set tasks in the ‘construction’ of planar and volumetric solutions. We define ‘ construction’ to be a combination of surfaces and volumes in which one part of a body or surface is rationally, compactly and integrally linked to another. Initially we set tasks in construction with line, in the ‘the constructive solution of planes in space’. From the construction of planar solutions we then move on to studying construction with volumes. In parallel, we compose the depiction as a whole, and manipulate it constructively as a ‘composition of colors’. The end products of this process can be quite amazing images.

So producing amazing images is the goal of this approach? The point of these exercises is not just to achieve compositions that please us. All constructions will be built on sets of rules governing the compositions as a whole, and also on sets of rules governing the detail of form and color. We shall bear in mind that in general everything is beautiful which follows regular laws and that anything which follows regular laws is also functionally appropriate.

As a total process, this will give us the possibility ‘to become accustomed to assembling’ a representation, and to inoculate the pupil with a feeling for form, volume, and space — a feeling for rhythm and a feeling for beauty.

But emphasizing functional appropri-ateness and regularity has produced many buildings that are not particularly beautiful or inspiring. At some point, following reg-ular laws can become an alibi for formula-ic design.

The constructive approach by no means denies art nor supplants it by technology and engineering, nor does it ignore aesthetic content and the means of artistic effect, as is maintained by certain art historians of our time. It

does not seek to solve particular aspects of a problem in isolation, but aims at the best utilization of all the possibilities, both the formal and compositional, and the technical and constructional, by linking them together in a creative process of synthesis.

The task of the architect is all the more complex precisely because it must have a measure of both practical utility and art. Architecture becomes an art from the moment when the form or image it has created is perceived as an entity ‘of an artistic order’. The art of the architect is manifest in his capacity to utilize artistically the practical possibilities which are available to him.

Leo Tolstoy regarded art as that activity through which one person consciously transmits, through certain eternal signs, the feelings he has experienced, and other people are infected by those feelings, which then influence their lives. In this definition, there is already a clear conception of the greater social mission of art. Art socializes human feelings, on the basis of a collaborative living experience, on the basis of the ‘infectiousness’ of the beautiful.

Equally important to a correct understanding of the nature of art and the essence of the beautiful are the views developed by Marx, as the first to see art as a part of the superstructure of the economic base, and those others who endorsed the materialist analysis of the history of art.

Considering your own position in that his-tory, what do you feel now defines beauty? The conception of beauty in our time is not determined by the cost of materials, not by their richness and variety, but by the compositional and constructive appropriateness, or by the expressiveness, level of resolution and formal consistency with which the final object manifests its function and social purpose.

Thus the architect is required to create an object that answers aesthetic concerns and the requirements of convenience to an identical degree, and gives a clear visual answer to both.




The Fundamen-tals of Contempo-rary Architecture, pg 52; 76.




Based on translations of Chernikhov’s writings by Catherine Cooke.

Last words

ESTETIKALTDLISSITZKYTHERUSSIANCOUNCILFORRETROACTIVEDEVELOPMENTYOUNGPIONEERPALACEATELIERVKH

UTEMASTRAININGCHERNIKHOVCREATIVESOLUTIONSSHAPINGINSPIRATONDACHACOOPARCHIPELAGOTOURSARKSTROYSHCHUSEVARCHITECTSMOSCOWMETROWO

RLDWIDEKHIDEKELELEMENTSCIRCULARITYLOMOFFU–VDNKHPREFABCORPNARKOMFINNEWBYTLABESTETIKALTD

LISSITZKYDACHACOOPYOUNGPIONEERPALACEATELIERVKHUTEMASTRAININGCHERNIKHOVCREATIVESOLUTIONSSHAPING

INSPIRATONFINANCIALSOLUTIONSTHERUSSIANCOUNCILFORRETROACTIVEDEVELOPMENTARCHIPELAGOTOURSARKSTROYSH

CHUSEVARCHITECTSKHIDEKELELEMENTSCIRCULARITYMOSCOW

magazine of "fair enough" exhibition

Documents

architecture of enlightenment

curator strelka institute

peep showeternal russian

sergey gordeev

sergey adonyev

venezia2 fair

expert assessmentlissitzky

dacha coop