Constructivist Architecture in the USSR by Anatole Kopp (review)

succeeded in doing so is obvious in the years ago (Ville et rkvolution, Paris: thinking of Constructivist architects such beauty and potency of the images he created, first in pastels on linen and later in oils. With titles such as Wind and Clouds, Fog Horns and Througha Frosty Moon, the simple forms he invented, painted in a few harmoniouscolors, stay with the viewer for a long time. In fact I had first liked Dove’s paintings when I saw them in a book some 25 years ago, Anthropos)andforhisrecentexamination of Stalin architecture (L’architecturede la pkriode stalinienne, Grenoble: Presses universitaires, 1978). Kopp, one of the few Western specialists who is an architectural historian, a practicing architectandknowledgeableoftheRussian language, now returns to the avant-garde period in Soviet Russia and addsmuch to as Moisei Ginzburg, Nikolai Ladovsky and Ivan Leonidov. In this sense, Kopp’s concentrationonthesociopoliticalchanges of 1917and thereafter and their effect on the emergence of Constructivist architecture needs to be supplemented by reference to these pre-Revolutionary precedents. Indeed, in spite of Kopp’s extrinsic argumentation, it might be and that was enough for me to think of our growing, but still incomplete, corpus proposed that Constructivism would have him as oneof thebest American painters. of data on the experimental movements emerged even without the political force Unfortunately the indifferently printed of the 1920s. Kopp divides his book into of October 1917. black-and-whiteillustrations accompany- eight sections that advance chronologi- Kopp, however, is concerned with the ing the text fail to bring out the beauty cally, if somewhat sporadically, from concrete extensions of Constructivism as and dignity of these works. However, 1917throughtheearly 1930s.Headdresses well aswith thetheoretical basis,and here Cohn’s thorough research and graceful particular attention to the social context his expertise as an architect bears fruit. progression of ideas more than make up of Constructivism rather than to purely His analyses of the key projects of the for this lack. Here is art criticism at its formal analysis and does much to clarify 1920s, such as the Palace of Labor best, without the cryptic effusions of the positions of the various groups then composition (entries by Ilia Golosov, Noi somewriters on art, orthe barren clinical associatedwithmodernSovietarchitecture, Trotsky,etal.), areenlightening,especially analysis of others. A large part of the such as ASNOVA (Association of New in the discussion of stylistic precedents book is devoted to the sources of Dove’s Architects) and OSA (Society of Con- and proposed building materials (e.g. ideas. Take the spiral, for example, a temporary Architects). reinforced concrete for the Palace of shape often employed by the painter, a TheConstructivist movement, founded Labor). Koppimpliesthat Constructivism form “observable in the nebulae of formally in Moscow in 1921, has, evolved away from such utopian schemes galaxies, the horns and claws of animals, unfortunately, become synonymous with (utopian because the Soviet Union did plant whorls ... in the shell of the an entire complex of artistic and not possess the material and technochambered nautilus”. Yet the spiral is architecturaltrends, and the term isoften logicalassetsto implementsuchambitious also a fascinating mathematical curve, used loosely to describe any artifact that structures in the early 1920s) towards a the only one which “can increase in size has a strong geometric composition. For more democratic application-towards without changingshape,and thewidth of the Constructivists of the 1920s, the the ‘social condenser’, such as the house whoseturnsincreasesat a fixedratioto its movement bore specific qualities: it was, communeand the F-typesplit-levelhouse. length”. Dove writes “the futureseemsto above all, an art of three-dimensional The Constructivist building, therefore, be gone through by a spiral spring from construction, a spatial exercise-hence became “a sort of mechanism for the past”, an idea he derived from thestrongorientationoftheConstructivists transforming habits, for transforming Madame Blavatsky, whose theosophical towards architecture and design. Kopp is former man” (p. 70). But, as Kopp writings greatly influenced the painter in right to identify the early legitimate explains in Chapter 5, the problem with later life.Yet again Dove emergeshisown manifestationsof Constructivismprecisely the house commune is that it could have man, faithful to his search to reconcileart with architecture and not with theabstract functioned only on the basis of the total to his...