- Narkomfin narratives We are honoured to reblog here the essay by Vladimir Paperny originally published in the book O’NFM_6: Narkomfin, edited by Danilo Udovicki-Selb, published by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag Tübingen, 2015, given the kind permission of author, editor and publisher. Apart from being flattered by our film Dom Novogo Byta quoted in it as a source, the piece […]
- Sotsgorod Sotsgorod, Problems of Building Socialist Cities is Nikolai Milyutin‘s most well known theoretical contribution. Milyutin was a convinced supporter of the radical reform of everyday life and the refusal of bourgeois values, which in his mind still gave form to the majority of post-revolutionary architecture. He advocated the collectivisation and industrialisation of human settlement, with an eye on […]
- Disurbanism At the end of the 1920s, the attention of constructivist architects, in particular those of OSA, increasingly shifted toward a radical critique of the city itself, focusing on visions designed to overcome urban concentration, and introducing concepts of diffuse urbanisation, linear and green cities, ultimately theorising the concept of disurbanism. This term was basically the result […]
- SA_1929 Standardisation has been one of the main themes of the architectural debate in the post revolutionary context on Soviet Russia, strongly influenced by the contemporary international debate. Constructivists, and in particular the OSA group and the Sovrmennaja Arkhitektura magazine, identified in the issue of creating modular standardised components which could be industrially produced a key […]
- Moisei Ginzburg Moisei Ginzburg was one of the most active members of the constructivist movement, and a leading figure in many groups and institutions, from OSA which he founded together with Aleksander Vesnin to the Russian Academy of Arts and Sciences. The author of numerous theoretical texts, such as ‘Old and New’ and ‘Contemporary aesthetics’, he is often […]
- SA n.5, 1930 SA, Sovrimanja Architektura, the magazine of the constructivists, published before this design was developed, a Russian translation of Le Corbusier’s celebrated 5 points of the new architecture, in which Le Corbusier based the new discourse on the use of concrete, and insisted on the meaning pilotis, ribbon windows, the free plan, the free façade and […]
- SA n.5, 1929 The building commissioned by Nikolai Milyutin, who was the people’s commissar for finance of the Russian federation, to Moisei Ginzburg and Ignati Milinis is an exceptional building, it is a prototype of a new kind of architecture , an architecture in which daily life, in which residential life would be re-articulated on a collective base. […]
- Social Condenser ”…the principal objective of constructivism… is the definition of the Social Condenser of the age…” OSA Group (Union of Contemporary Architects) conference in 1928 Moisei Ginzburg It published the journal SA (Sovremmennaia Arkhitektura or ‘Contemporary Architecture’). Da Kopp, Città e Rivoluzione,