Constructivism in architecture

Key ideas and features:

– the vocation of architecture is creating new forms for a new life, rejecting outdated capitalist forms of the past;

– denial of the traditional artistic and figurative approach to architectural shaping;

– identification in the external form of the structure of the object;

– transformation of architecture into functional design and construction;

– an attempt to consciously solve the problem of organizing space for urban residents;

– the search for new forms of socialist settlement and distribution of the productive forces of the country of the victorious proletariat;

– development of experimental forms of new functional types of buildings (experimental housing and everyday life). The fundamentals of constructivism were better suited for industrial construction. In residential architecture, the new style turned out to be somewhat simplified – in the proportions of the main articulations, in the calm rhythm of windows on the planes of walls, practically devoid of decor and vertically dissected by window openings of staircase nodes or ledges;

– experiments in the field of mass performances (for example, the so-called synthetic theater);

– creation of fundamentally new urban ensembles and complexes in the reconstruction of the largest cities. The search for the shape of the ideal socialist city. The idea of a three-sector city planning:

1) the center of education of a classless society;

2) government center;

3) industrial center.

– attempts to radically transform the subject environment (experiments of the masters of Soviet design);

– application of new industrial technologies and materials – iron, concrete, etc .;

– maximum simplicity, functionality, lack of decoration, which were also economically beneficial;

– the main types of implemented structures mainly satisfied the infrastructure needs of society: government buildings, shops, sanatoriums, printing houses, research institutes, factories, workers’ clubs, hydroelectric power plants.

– the search for new types of structures that meet new social processes.

– decisive importance was given to the functional organization of the space in accordance with the needs of production, everyday life or cultural processes, as well as to structures and building materials.

– bringing in a harmonious combination of functional and technical elements of architecture with the help of rhythm, meter, proportions.

Representatives:

1. Ivan Leonidov;
2. Konstantin Melnikov;
3. Vladimir Tatlin;
4. Lazar Lissitzky;
5. The Vesnin brothers (Victor, Alexander, Leonid),
6. Moses Ginzburg.

Tatlin Tower, a monument to the III International, 1919.

The Tatlin Tower was conceived as the headquarters and monument of the Comintern, at the same time, as a symbolic monument of the era.

The construction of steel and glass was conceived as a symbol of the reunification of people, divided during the construction of the Tower of Babel. The Tatlin Tower should become a bridge between heaven and earth, an architectural embodiment of the world tree. Shaping is based on a screw – a dynamic form. The 400-meter-high tower project was a combination of two inclined metal spirals with a logarithmic taper towards the top, consisting of buildings of various geometric shapes located one above the other, harmoniously interconnected. Buildings on all seven floors had to rotate on their axis. The tower was to be crowned with radio masts; a special spotlight system that would project text onto the clouds. The Tatlin Tower is a combination of the artistic and the utilitarian. The through construction made of metal forms, it looks like a spiral. It had three working rooms for government bodies in the form of a cube, a pyramid, and a cylinder. Double glass walls are designed to keep warm.

House of State Industry in Kharkiv

Built according to the project of Leningrad architects S.S. Serafimov, S.M. Kravets and M.D. Felger. It became the world’s first building entirely made of reinforced concrete and a recognized symbol of the new “socialist” architecture. In fact, Derzhprom is not a building, but a whole ensemble of three buildings, connected by pendant passages that were fantastic for their time. Each of the buildings, in turn, is divided into many heterogeneous rectangular arrays, creating a brilliant play of light and shade at the corners, wide glazed fields, steps and towers.

Melnikov Pavilion

Workers’ clubs (houses or palaces of culture) performed the most important function of cultural education, revolutionary Soviet agitation, propaganda and reproduction of new forms of entertainment and active collective leisure of the working people. In the 1920s, the workers’ club became an important means of spreading socialist culture and a new way of life.

The development of the architectural ideology of a new type of public buildings, together with the psychology of recreation, was understood as a function of the diversity of form. In contrast to the workers’ clubs implemented in the West, Soviet club work is carried out in an open arena, in front of the masses, and therefore the club must have a system of halls. No hall can accommodate the multifaceted type of work: politics, national defense, economic construction, industrialization, building socialism, the work of voluntary societies, the work of the trade union, production meetings, theater, cinema, native district, factory, people’s life, etc. This need can only be met by a hall system.

In the architecture of the first Soviet pavilion at the international exhibition in Paris (1925), architect K. Melnikov, a Soviet workers’ club, a new type of public building, was exhibited. This small exhibition pavilion, which was first exposed by the USSR in the international arena, combines the features of a bright representative building with an exposition of the new culture and everyday life of workers. A two-storey building, rectangular in plan, cut diagonally by a pedestrian staircase esplanade passing under a kind of “roof” of inclined intersecting planes painted in red (the symbol of the state flags of the USSR). The dynamics of the pavilion symbolized the rapid construction of a new state and, at the same time, a new avant-garde culture.

Competition for the project of the Palace of Labor by Vesneni in Moscow  (not implemented), 1923.

In 1923, a competition for the project of the largest public building for Moscow and the whole country – the Palace of Labor – was announced. To accommodate this building, a site was intended along K. Marx Avenue, on the site of the former Okhotny Ryad, – the 47th old trading quarter in the immediate vicinity of the Kremlin and Manezhnaya Square. According to the terms of the competition, the Palace of Labor was supposed to contain, first of all, a huge meeting room with 8000 seats. The version of Vesneni synthesized the avant-garde ideas of the era of the beginning of Soviet architecture, and was aimed at creating the architectural appearance of a new palace – a palace of the masses. The project met the basic requirements of the competition: constructiveness, utilitarianism, rationality and economy. The general construction of the masses of the structure is determined by the needs of better lighting of numerous rooms. The main elements of the building are a tower with multifunctional rooms and a conference hall of the Moscow City Council with 2,500 seats, which is located above the internal passage and adjacent to a large hall with 9,000 seats. The authors envisioned the transformation of both premises into one: on especially solemn occasions, the Moscow City Council, without even leaving its own premises, had the opportunity to attend a nationwide rally with the participation of eleven and a half thousand participants in full force. The 132 m high tower was supposed to contain a meteorological station, an astrophysical observatory, a central Moscow radio station, an information bureau, a museum of social sciences, a library, etc. Elements of information support actively formed the outer planes of the structure: it was supposed to place light screens on the tower with various information about time, weather conditions, political and social events, etc. (In the ideas of transforming the external surfaces of a building into informative dynamic and variable planes of Vesnina for several decades ahead of the so-called “media architecture”, which entered the world arena at the beginning of the next century). The ground floor of the palace housed a dining room with 6,000 seats, a power station and utility rooms. The internal structure of the building included many mechanical vertical communications – movable stairs and elevators. The vertical dynamics of the structure with a clearly demonstrated structural frame was emphasized by lattice towers and cable-stayed webs of radio antennas.

The architecture of the Dnieper hydroelectric power station (Dneproges named after V.I. Lenin) in the city of Zaporozhye.

The first examples of Soviet industrial architecture were energy facilities, the first Soviet power plants – Volkhovskaya HPP (1918-26), architect. A. Munts and others, in Transcaucasia (Zemo-Avchal hydroelectric power station, architects A. Kalgin, M. Machavariani), 1927, in Moscow (MOGES, architect I. Zholtovsky) and others still had predominantly retrospective architecture.

Samples of new industrial architecture are created with the beginning of the construction of the first industrial giants. Along with industrial construction, a new Soviet industrial architecture also developed. Its model is the architecture of Dneproges.

It was decided to build the most powerful hydroelectric power station in Europe at that time – the first hydroelectric station of the Dnieper cascade. In 1929, a closed competition for the best architectural design of the hydroelectric power station complex was announced. The turbine hall of the hydroelectric power station, a quarter of a kilometer long and as high as a ten-story building, was supposed to accommodate nine turbine generators and each had a capacity that exceeded the capacity of the entire Volkhovstroy (the first Soviet hydroelectric power station).

The approval of the best competitive option was preceded by a broad public discussion, as a result of which preference was given to the creative work of a team of architects headed by V.A.Vesnin: N. Ya. Kolli, G. Orlov, S. G. Andrievsky. Vesnin combined power, lightness and ideology. The creative team of V. Vesnin won the competition, first of all, thanks to the use of the newest method of architectural design developed in Soviet constructivism with the use of “control over the hygiene of perception” of the architectural form. Vesnin did not consider it possible to dismember the architectural and engineering parts. The hydroelectric power plant was designed as part of a whole complex of structures. It consists of a sluice cascade, a dam and a station. It was necessary to find the right balance of all these parts. The main task set was the correct solution to the lighting problem, since it was the main factor that affected the work inside the building. Light is given at the bottom, in the bay window. Under these conditions, little sunlight from the south comes. This light pass gives only reflective light, does not hit the eyes and does not shine in any of the devices. The task of solving the lighting was the main one, and it gave the general solution to the entire box or shell of this structure. The Dnieper hydroelectric power station was built at an accelerated pace in 1930-1932. The main feature of the project and construction was its fundamentally complex nature: the construction of the “socialist city” of Zaporozhye unfolded there – its project was also advised by A. Vesnin. “Sotsgorod” was created near the dam of the power plant, on the left bank of the Dnieper, in contrast to the traditional buildings of the former city of Aleksandrovsk.