Russia’s aesthetic revolution: How Soviet building still influences today’s architects - The Independent
In the courtyard of London’s Royal Academy of Arts stands the 20th century’s most avant-garde strand of architectural genetics. The veering red spiral, intersected by a girder jutting through it like a rocket launcher, is a copy of the original model of the Monument to the Third International, designed by Vladimir Tatlin in 1920. Had it been built to its intended scale as the headquarters of the Communist party, it would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower. In a world awash with “iconic” architecture, nothing comes even close to radiating the raw potency of this truly revolutionary form.
That is why the Royal Academy’s new show, Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35, deserves to be stampeded. The word “revolution” has become discredited, and this show thoroughly re-energises its meaning in art and architecture. The key fragments of Russian revolutionary creativity still glow like radium, living on in its remaining art and buildings, and hard-wired into the imaginations of some of the 20th and 21st century’s most influential architects.
Today, art and design is rarely prompted by bold and difficult ideas about human and civil improvement. Even Rem Koolhaas, architecture’s most provocative intellectual, admits that his profession has been reduced to playing eternal catch-up with corporatised aspirations and trend data. Gil Scott Heron, the godfather of rap, once proclaimed that “the revolution will not be televised.” But it has been, through the nose-cones of cruise missiles and the high-res prisms of global marketing strategies, in which we all have perpetual walk-on parts.
In the Royal Academy’s Sackler Galleries, you will enter a creative world stripped back to its bare nerve fibres by the Third International, the meeting that created the Soviet bloc in 1919. The exhibits blow-torch the flaccid “designer” mentality that has robbed most contemporary art and architecture of fractiously humane otherness. This show is an irony-free zone, a laboratory containing some of the stark experiments that ignited the most radical movement that modernist art and architecture has ever known.
In the 1920s and 1930s European modernist designers, primarily influenced by the ideas and work flowing from the Bauhaus school of art and design in Germany, were mostly interested in luxurious forms – ocean liners, cars, aircraft, private villas. Their Russian counterparts preferred the imagery of warships and communal living blocks.
And the greatest of those was the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow, which predated Le Corbusier’s much more famous equivalent, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, by two decades. The Narkomfin building still stands and, as the superb recent photographs by Richard Pare in the exhibition show, physical decay has failed to blunt the power, originality and ethical heft of its architecture.
Russian revolutionary design continues to inform contemporary architecture. Zaha Hadid, for example, has always worshipped at the altar of Suprematist art from that period. The radically fragmented structures designed by Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl had already been thought of by Soviet revolutionary artists. And in London, the inverted L shape of Peckham Library was clearly prefigured by El Lissitzky’s Cloud Iron, beating Will Alsop to that architectural punch by a mere 75 years…