Paper Architecture in Soviet Union
Liberation vs. Utopia
Aarohi Bakeri
Diploma Unit 7
2018-2019
A huge city enveloped in a dense gloom.
Its streets criss-crossed lines of children’s notebooks.
It’s here that the enormous madhouse looms.
A void within the order of the cosmos.
Behind its façade lies a cold courtyard, filled up with
Firewood, blanketed in snowdrifts.
But if these are described by means of words
Then is the courtyard not a conversation?
For many years in Russia architecture must have seemed no more than a conversation: whispers in a courtyard, recollections and traveller’s tales at table, the equivalent of that Russian literary tradition of writing done ‘for the drawer’, privately, for circulation among friends. This was less the result of outright proscription than of indifference. A nation engaged in the industrialization of all buildings had little place for fantasy, and if art was ‘Aptart’ (made and exhibited in aparments), architecture was a little more than a courtyard in the mind.
Throughout History, architecture in the Soviet Union was not restricted to designing shelters, homes or offices, but was seen as a visual form of propaganda. Early avant-garde movements such as constructivism and rationalism worked with and for the state, harnessing artistic innovation to the needs of a rapidly emerging society and becoming actively involved in the practical aspects of planning that society. While such creations as Nikolai Ladovsky’s gravity defying schemes, Konstantin Melnikov’s project for the Moscow Bureau of the Leningrad Pravda (1924) with rotating floors and and certain of Iakov Chernikhov’s futurist industrial architectural fantasies (1933) proposed technically impossible structures, even these visionary proposals were inspired by the belief that architectural design must be directed towards creating a new social reality.
Experimentation of social and aesthetic realms of architecture was soon forgone- by the rigid government body, designs reflecting the political shifts with changing leaders.
Nikita Khrushchev served as the leader of the Soviet Union from 1953, to 1964; and this period after the second world war was marked by severe housing shortage, aggravated under Joseph Stalin. As he took power, Moscow could only house half the residents; and as a response, in the newly planned micro districts, to resettle thousands of people Five story ‘Khrushchyovkas’ were rapidly constructed. He declared the Socialist realist architecture as over-decorated, and the Academy of Architecture was abolished. Unadorned utilitarianism replaced the critically conglomerated cultural heritage. Architecture was used as a tool to solve the housing problem, focusing energy on building and rebuilding. Modern technology- Prefabrication was extensively used to build the urgently needed mass housing, disassociating the ‘aesthetic discourse’ deemed necessary. Such ‘faceless functionalism’ continued throughout the Breshnev period, (1964-82) as economic constraints, corrupted bureaucratic processes, shortage of construction materials and capable labourers heightened, leading to more unimaginative planning.
The state was the only client and there was no work for architects trying to be independent. This was marked by the period of Stagnation. It was under Breshnev’s rule that all those rigid, large buildings that have disfigured moscow’s image were erected- those huge fortifications of state-owned enterprises, that have even surpassed the western disaster of ‘glass-box architecture’. The stagnation and lack of fantasy led the architects of the Breshnev era to rebel against the ‘Petrification’ and to deploy counterforces on paper. This ‘paper architecture’ was not the resultant of the induction of a new situation, but was a protest against the corrupted state architecture of former years. Their projects on paper meant to explore the inner realm of fantasy which was almost forbidden in the outer realm of reality.
The term ‘Paper Architecture’ refers to the avant-garde work of architects in Russia, involved in making Utopian, Dystopian or Fanstasy projects that were not designed to be built, following the suppression which also abolished the Academy of Architecture in 1957. In the 1980’s, a group of young architects from the Moscow Architectural Institute recognised themselves as Paper Architecture in response. Rather than working with standardised building methods, the group of students which included Michael Belov, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Mikhail Flippov, Nadia Bronzova and Yuri Avvakumov and others, produced paper architecture as means to bypass the restrictions, and to critique the dehumanising nature of Russian architecture of the time and the lack of care for traditional building. The group exhibited collectively as ‘Paper Architects’ chose to not participate in the system where cheap and quick buildings were being built, disregarding the users’ needs, skilled labour was avoided, where architecture had become a mechanism of large scaled bureaucratic machinery. These architects were not a granted building commissions and had little chance to practice a form of alternative architecture. In this context, the point of outlet was a refusal to engage and work within a bankrupt system. Successors of the VkhUTEMAS of the 1920’s, this group of young architects were proud to work with paper, and not with stone or concrete. Tatlin’s Tower was instrumental in this movement of alternative cultural imagination. Paper architects surfaced in the 1970’s and 1980’s, remembering and recycling the utopian dreams of the 1920’s.
In the late seventies, Japan offered an alternative avenue for architects confined to practicing as functionaries, dissatisfied and angered at their current state. International Competitions which were organised and funded by foreign magazines and corporations offered an added creative outlet. The competitions which were organized by the Japan Architect magazine inclined to be theoretical rather than practical and was engaging the young designers, restrained to the recurring official architectural practice. The paper architects designed individually or in small teams, despite of participating in the same competitions, would meet and discuss before sending their proposals to critique their work.
They led a parallel existence in which they dedicated themselves to international competitions, winning many of them. These young and brilliant architects regarded project-making, rather than building as a way of life. Immateriality was almost a sign of integrity; these architects did not want to compromise the radically of their imagination . What started as an experiment, as a getaway tool gained momentum and evolved into a serious movement towards the late 80’s.
Amongst the group of Paper Architects, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin collaborated from 1978 to 1993, retreated into their imagination to create outstanding etchings as a form of rebellion against communist architecture. Drawing inspiration from design of Egyptian tombs, Claude Nicolas Ledoux, the and urban master plans envisioned by Le Corbusier, they conceived fanatically detailed renderings, composing and filling the paper with buildings, arches, scaffoldings, domes, buildings and other schematics. After meeting at the Moscow School of Architecture in 1972, they developed a unique approach, combining architecture with fine arts. Through their art, Brodsky and Utkin criticized the aesthetic standards of the society until the end of their partnership after the fall of the Soviet Union. The presence of the past is an integral theme throughout their work, borrowing from a heterogenous range of styles and eras. Their designs refer to the whole of architectural history and are evidently populated with western icons and images, the pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt, Renaissance and mannerist details, modernist towers. This cosmopolitanism reflects Russia’s historical status as a fringe culture, constantly importing European ideas and trends.
Their work resonates the inept urban planning of the Soviet Union, identifying the modern city as a sick, slowly dying organism. Their agenda is to save it through imaginative transformation and emphasis is on the effect of cities on the phycology of the inhabitants- and how to improve. Brodsky and Utkin’s etchings characteristically include not just buildings, but surrounding environments and larger urban worlds. Works from that period often incorporated implicit or explicit social agendas towards larger transformation of society, often supplemented by manifestos. Brodsky and Utkin’s work provided no explicit social program, narrative and symbol replace manifesto and icon.
The Chrystal Palace, which was awarded the first price in a 1982 Japanese Competition, organized by Japan Architect instigated their development to a means of visual and verbal expression that they would continue to exploit throughout the eighties.
(Image of the Chrystal Palace)
Chrystal Palace is a beautiful but unrealizable
dream, a Mirage which calls you always, seen
at the edge of visible. But as each dream in
close examination, will prove the other thing
than it seemed afar. A person who wants to
visit it will makw a long way through the town
borderland, blocks of slums and dumps but
coming at last to the Palace find neither roof nor
walls- only the huge glass plates, stuck into the
huge box of sand. A mirage remains simply
a Mirage, though it can be touched. Passing
from one glass chink to another, a visitor will
walk the palace… and find himself at
the border of a small square, where the landscape
commences… Did he learn the very essence of the Chrystal
Palace? Will he have a desire to visit it once more?
Nobody knows…
Reminiscing the remaining architecture from Moscow’s social and architectural history, and condemning the loss of about half of the buildings which were destroyed, the ‘Columbarium Habitabile’ takes the shape of an impossible scheme for rescuing further buildings from unavoidable destruction. It contains a large courtyard building with niches to store buildings of individual homes scheduled for demolition. Residents of those houses would have to live the ‘shelf-life’, if they think of it as intolerable, they must depart and a wrecking ball suspended in the centre of the courtyard demolishes their house to make room for another. Another project, The Intelligent Market, addresses the universal existential nuances of human experiences, reflecting the lack of social or philosophical system in encountering life’s complexities. Having lived most of the life under a totalitarian regime, the ‘Villa Claustrophobia’ takes the form of an inverted panopticon, in which solipsism replaces surveillance. ‘The island of Stability’ recalling the idea of a ruin, is composed of old buildings and sculptures heaped in a public plaza. ‘The Stageless Theater’ presents an alternative form of an opera house, on wheels, where the audience rides through the city witnessing streets, puddles, stray dogs- where everyone plays their own roles, only to themselves.
Their explored the territory of the mind; integral in the individual’s need to emphasise their individuality in an oppressively standardised external reality. Brodsky and Utkin began working without official endorsement or recognition under a regime fundamentally hostile to individual expression and have cultivated self-reliance bred of such enforced isolation. It is the universality and timelessness of their offering that allow this work to bridge national, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Their work does, however, comment on the discrepancy between political propaganda’s false promises of social utopia and the hard facts of a disappointing reality.
'Agitation is another theme of paper architecture,'' said Mr. Avvakumov, whose firm is named Agitarch.
Yuri Avvakumov’s work aims at critically re-evaluating the architectural, cultural and ideological heritage of Constructivism and the Russian Avant Garde. The project, Temporary Monuments, engages in a reflection on the ideological implications of large scaled architecture and on the intrinsic meanings of basic construction elements such as scaffolding and ladders, cranes and staircases. Known not only as a paper architect, Y. Avvakumov played the role of a curator, a mediator and organized several exhibitions to showcase the work of the paper architects. As a member of the Youth division of the Union of Architects, he managed the paper architects’ submissions to magazine competitions; and also authored monthly competition reviews in the Western Magazines.
Before the 1980’s, it was not possible to participate in the Western Magazine Competitions independently. Approaching the New leaders at the Union of Architects made this possible in 1981. And as the Soviet architects began winning international competitions, they were encouraged and appreciated. However, comments about architecture being “hard-earned bread” while paper architecture was “a sweet dessert” continued for a long time. Paper architects were called deserters, escapists, and dissidents. But the practice was never banned.
Resemblances within the experimental projects of Ivan Fomin and El Lissitzsky suggest that paper architecture is regarded as a successor to the architecture of twenties, when most of the projects also stayed on paper. The competition, and project for the Palace of Soviets in 1930 was incidentally moulded into a global event for paper architecture. Resemblance could be drawn also to the group NER, whose projects were also not meant to be built, but were designed and discussed for theoretical examination. Founded in the 1960’s, this group could be referred to as the immediate predecessor for paper architecture. The founders of the group, Alexei Gutnov and Ilya Leshava were also teaching at the Moscow School of Architecture, and hence were directly or indirectly the teachers of many paper architects.
While the western followers of the Russian avant-garde embraced the original social message of the movement and tried to be as utopian as possible, the Russian architects embraced the artistic potential, blatantly defying official collective imperatives. Thus, if the artists from two sides of the iron curtain shared forms, they did not share their cultural signification or affective memory.
Archigram was an avant-garde architectural group established at the Architectural Association, London in the 1960’s, that was neofuturistic, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist, drawing inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was solely expressed through hypothetical projects. They continued to take on experimental projects, and were published in magazines. They were brought to light by the exhibition they mounted, Living Cities, in 1963. They started publishing their own work, and the pamphlet Archigram I was produced in 1961to manifest their ideas. Their project, ‘Plug-In-City’ is a mega structure with no buildings, an extensive framework into which houses could be slotted in- The people were the raw material getting processed in the giant machine. Imagined in the future ruined context post a Nuclear war, ‘The walking City’ is composed of robots in the form of giant, self-contained living pods which could move around in the city. Despite of offering an impressive vision of a future machine age, social and environmental issues were not discussed.
Responding to the contemporary architectural culture of the early 1980’s, Alvin Boyarksy, director of the AA declared that the times have changed. He was referring to the shift from the focus of the 1960’s on ‘technology, systematic thought, and a tough approach to the making of the city’ to the concerns of the 1980’s, which included new interests in the lessons and nuances of historical thought in tandem with the preoccupations of a younger generation.. involved in process finding. This transition expanded the horizons of critical inquiry, which resulted in a dialogue of questions and considerations, from historical references to contemporary culture, from literary and philosophical ideas to social and cultural practices. The efflorescence of interest in architectural drawing reflected not only the growing prominence of drawing as a medium of discourse, but also the centrality of the discourse itself. As Tschumi ovserved, ‘any new attitude to architecture had to question its mode of representation.’ It also underscored the growing importance of drawing as one of the primary mediums of disciplinary and cultural self-reflection.
‘We fight the battle with the drawings on the wall’
We create a very rich compost for students to develop and grow from and we fight the battle with the drawings on the wall. We’re in pursuit of architecture, we discuss it boldly, we draw it as well as we can, and we exhibit it. We are one of the few institutions left in the world that keeps its spirit alive.
-Alvin Boyarsky, 1983
Boyarksy had consciously expanded the role of drawing to include three dimensional work and art installations at the AA, and this was reflected in the work of architects who drew inspiration from contemporary philosophical discourses on language and meaning. Tschumi’s 1986 exhibition La Case Vide directly implied this link: its French title means empty box, a structure or space that is devoid of any preconceived purpose. This was a direct reference to the winning entry for the Parc De La Villette Competition, Tschumi’s first majour built work, which at its core had a grid of follies, or empty structures, that could be freely appropriated by park users. When he made the drawings for this exhibition, Tschumi had just broken ground for the project, the commission for which was awarded based on speculative drawings in the exhibition. In this remaking, drawing has now transitioned from an imaginative design tool that anticipates built work into a form of reflection at looking back at built architecture.
So what kind of architecture is produced within these drawings and ultimately recorded within the context of the collection? For one, it is an architecture of diverse concepts and techniques, a record of the search, in the pursuit of architecture, for new visual languages that permeated the work of AA students and teachers such as Coates, Hadid, Koolhaas, Libeskind, Tschumi and Zenghelis in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but also the earlier works of the 1960’s and early 1970’s such as the radical architecture collages and other works by the Florence based Superstudio, the Vienna based Himmelbau and the London-based Archigram. Hadid- It also reflects her own foreigness- as a woman in a field dominated by men, as an Arab in the western world, as well as intertwining of Western, Arabic and Russian avant-Garde.
‘ As regards the images themselves, one cannot say that they reproduce architecture. They produce it in the first place’
-Walter Benjamin, Rigorous study of Art: on the First Volume of the Wissenschaftliche Forschungen, translatated by T. Y. Levin, 1988
Drawing was the architecture, the pure expression of the idea with all of its latent possibilities.
Alvin’s genius was to see the potential behind nascent ideas and images and to promote these through exhibitions, magazines and publications with the unwavering conviction that they could challenge existing conventions and form new paradigms for architecture.
The AA’s exhibition Nostalgia of Culture: Contemporary Soviet Visionary Architecture of 1988 marked a meeting of kindred spirits between the ‘paper architects’- Alexender Brodsky, Ilya Utkin, and many others who were emerging from the dark years of Stalinsist architecture and the Khruschev’s forceful reactions to it- and the culture of the AA, which had survived and thrived through the preceding crass decade of post modern architecture.
Paragraph 6+7:
Perestroika and decline of paper architecture in Russia.
Implications and existence of the same in the west through economics and politics.
Paragraph 8:
Role of Competitions in keeping paper architecture alive, and what it means today for Russia and the West. (and how the boundaries have merged since the politics don’t factor). And how it is an essential tool to allow radical re-thinking of architecture.
Gorbachev launched glasnost (“openness”) as the second vital plank of his reform efforts. He believed that the opening up of the political system—essentially, democratizing it—was the only way to overcome inertia in the political and bureaucratic apparatus, which had a big interest in maintaining the status quo. In addition, he believed that the path to economic and social recovery required the inclusion of people in the political process. Glasnost also allowed the media more freedom of expression, and editorials complaining of depressed conditions and of the government’s inability to correct them began to appear.
NY times
The interest encouraged Soviet competitions, publication of the results, and intense discussion within the field. In 1986, discussion fueled debates at the Eighth Congress of Soviet Architects, where a group within the Union of Architects proposed restructuring the whole profession. They called for a ''program for perestroika in architecture,'' to include the creation of independent studios and design co-ops, privately based architectural practices similar to Western architectural firms. That fall the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministries of the U.S.S.R. issued a decree that architects should, again, have ''a function in raising the quality of individual experience through an enhanced level of esthetic ideas.'' Now, according to the architects who visited Frankfurt, there are approximately 200 independent co-ops in the Soviet Union, and their clients include factories, unions and foreign companies.
But the enthusiasm of architects over the revived status of their field has been tempered by frustrations. First, there is the problem of getting work in an economy still centrally planned and operated by a vast bureaucracy. Some co-ops have failed. And there are problems deeply rooted in the construction industry. For example, in designing a sanitarium for children, Mikhail Belov, a Moscow architect who traveled to Frankfurt with the paper architecture exhibition, has access only to crude prefabricated building panels unsuited to the project, and to indifferent workers with underdeveloped skills. The many practical difficulties may mask more basic concerns. The drawings were primarily literary speculations. What will the architects build now that they can build?
To grasp the character of paper architecture, one must make a distinction between utopia and fantasy. The utopian thinking that had developed in the theory and practice of 19th and 20th century European architecture and in the architecture of the USSR denies pluralism.
A utopian project is based on a universal perception of space which results in a general possibility of realisation, the specific spatial conditions (geogragrhial as well as human) may in fact influence the project, but cannot fundamentally change it.
fantasy resembles utopia in many respects but it is more comprehensive. Fantasy also encompasses a possible vision of the world, although, unlike utopia, fantasy does not really claim this vision to be the key to the solution of urgent human problems. Fantasy proceeds from the principle of a pluralistic world and the variety of the spatial conditions of human life.
Fantasy is, in a large measure arbitrary. It can appear and disappear. Fantasy is subject to human will, while utopia on the other hand forces humans under its will and often also under its arbitrariness. Utopia has an imperative nature; on the one hand, it impresses the controlling power, while on the other hand it incorporates in itself utopian features: the unity of totalitarian power corresponds to the unity of the authors will and derives from their combination the fictitious unity as well as the real uniformity.
The realisation of the western utopias remained isolated cases of chaotic and pluralistic cities, whereas the Soviet Projects were gradually incorporated into the practice of a city planning and thus created a non pluralistic monotony or a hierarchal environment which in turn influenced the a whole generation of architects.