Earlier this year, Floating Worlds and Future Cities, an exhibition and symposium in New York, brought into focus the largely forgotten figure of Lazar Khidekel, and sought to place him properly as one of the pioneers of Suprematism.
Khidekel could even be considered the first Suprematist architect, and was instrumental in helping Suprematism move beyond painting towards built form, urbanism and cosmic civilisation.
Khidekel was just 14 years old when admitted to the Vitebsk school of art, under Marc Chagall. In 1919, Kasmir Malevich founded a group called UNOVIS - Champions of the New Art - which also included El Lissitsky, Nina Kogan, Nikolai Suetin and Ilya Chashnik as well as Khidekel.
In 1921, (at the age of 17!) together with Ilya Chashnik, Khidekel headed the architecture and technical department at Vitebsk School of Art, and set about implementing a radical curriculum.
"The training of architects who at the same time will be the organisers and designers of the architectural units of the blocks that will constitute the streets and cities; the training of architects who will also be able to design and plan the economic centers."
The official website at www.lazarkhidekel.com offers a tantalising glimpse of Khidekel's talents. The Suprematist works are drawings or paintings on paper, and lack the polish of finished works by Malevich or Ilya Chashnik, but are formally just as stunning.
But it is in the architectonic works that we see Khidekel's unique talent, in translating the essence of Suprematist composition to architectural forms. His Architectons matched Malevich's own sculptural explorations, but Khidekel also went further in designing projects meant to be built, such as the Aeroclub project of 1922.
As well as practical architectural projects, Khidekel continued to dream of floating cities and futurist visions of space and form. Malevich had called for his students "to show the entire development of volumetric Suprematism in accordance with the sensation of the aerial (aero) type and dynamic", and Khidekel responded with his designs for Aerograd, a city on stilts, hovering above water.
Arguably, only Gustav Klutsis with his designs for a Dynamic City was operating in the same raridied atmossphere, of a cosmic reach for architecture breaking free from the Earth.
Later, at the architectural college in Petrograd, Khidekel continued to develop his architectural ideas to more practical applications, as well as working with Malevich, Suetin and Chashnik to create Architectons and Planits.
In 1926 Khidekel created the first realised Suprematist built form, a Workers Club. It was originally credited to Malevich and published in Berlin. A restrained piece of modernism, it is reminiscent of similar avant grade designs of the Bauhaus or De Stijl architects such as Rietveld or JJP Oud.
In later years Khidekel continued to work on architectural projects, while continuing to create visionary drawings of structures and cities hovering just above the landscape, or orbiting the earth in space.
"Khidekel’s distinction was that this initial vision of Suprematist structures floating in space remained a central part of his art and architecture for the next forty years, and richly informed his later development as a professional architect."
It is not surprising that architects and designers are beginning to rediscover Khidekel's and recognise his visionary works as prefiguring many later projects.
In the article "Discovering Khidekel" by WAI Architectural Think Tank, Khidekel is dubbed "The Last Suprematist", still prone to dizzying spatial visions long after his peers and Suprematist mentor Malevich had retreated to a less utopian position.
"With each brushstroke of watercolor the Bolshevik utopia of utilitarian icons was painted obsolete. With the elongated appearance of each monochromatic volume a new form of revolution was achieved.
Khidekel architectural visions transcended the rhetorical games of the revolution by developing complete cities out of sublime architecture. Long before Friedman’s Architecture Mobile, Constant’s New Babylon, and Isozaki’s Clusters in the Air, Khidekel imagined a world of horizontal skyscrapers that through their Suprematist weightless dynamism seemed to float ad infinitum across the surface of earth."
While the city hovering above the ground still remains a powerful trope in both science fiction and architectural fantasy, Khidekel's visions still manage to look futuristic, arguably more so than most of the Metabolists or Situationist projects that today feel retro-futurist, inextricably tied to the past.
Khidekel's work remains endlessly floating towards the future.
In graphic design, an 'exclusion zone' is an area around a logo which must be left clear. Corporate brand and logo usage guidelines demonstrate the proportion of vertical and horizontal space around a logo into which no other element can intrude.
In urban design, exclusion zones are becoming commonplace in relation to sponsorship of sporting events. The Brand Exclusion Zone is the newest form of urban demarcation, and can be used not only to affect signage and advertising, but also restrict personal freedom of choice. Within this context, the London 2012 Olympics represents one of the most radical restructuring of the rights of the city in London. The 'canvas' of London will belong exclusively to the Olympic marquee brands.
In essence, London has abdicated all rights and responsibilities to the International Olympic Committee, and implemented legislation which creates radical new spatial demarcations not only within the Olympic Park, but because of the distributed nature of the Olympic venues, across the whole of central London. London has surrendered the traditional rights to the city to the demands of the Olympic 'family' and their corporate paymasters. What the IOC want, London will give. London will be on brand lockdown.
The most carefully policed Brand Exclusion Zone will be around the Olympic Park, and extend up to 1km beyond its perimeter, for up to 35 days. Within this area, officially called an Advertising and Street Trade Restrictions venue restriction zone, no advertising for brands designated as competing with those of the official Olympic sponsors will be allowed. (Originally, as detailed here, only official sponsors were allowed to advertise, but leftover sites are now available). This will be supported by preventing spectators from wearing clothing prominently displaying competing brands, or from entering the exclusion zone with unofficial snack and beverage choices. Within the Zone, the world's biggest McDonald's will be the only branded food outlet, and Visa will be the only payment card accepted.
This brand apartheid is designed to prevent "ambush marketing", the gaining exposure of an brand through unofficial means. One of the best known examples of this was in the World Cup in 2010, where a bevy of 36 Dutch beauties in orange dresses provided by Bavaria beer gained considerable media attention, to the chagrin of the official World Cup beer, Budweiser. At London 2012, branding 'police' will be on hand to ensure that nothing like this happens, with potential criminal prosecutions against those responsible. Organising committee LOCOG will also take steps to ensure that no unofficial business tries to associate itself with the Olympics by using phrases like 'London 2012', even on such innocuous things such as a cafe menu offering an 'Olympic breakfast'. The Olympics authorities are looking to control both language and space.
And it's not just London. All the venues for the 2012 Olympics will be on brand lockdown. In Coventry, even the roadsigns will be changed so that there is no reference to the Ricoh Arena, which is hosting matches in the football tournament. Even logos on hand dryers in the toilets are being covered up. The Sports Direct Arena in Newcastle will have to revert back to St. James Park for the duration of the Olympics.
Traditionally, the most epic guerrilla marketing war has taken place between sportswear rivals Nike and Adidas. Whereas Adidas has long been an official sponsor of major sporting events such as the World Cup and the Olympics, Nike has cast itself as the hip, streetwise alternative, and taken considerable steps to trump Adidas in gaining exposure at major sporting events.
1996 was ambush marketing's breakout year, with Nike making a concerted effort to upset the official sporting sponsors of both the Euro 96 football tournament in England and the Olympic games in Atlanta:
"The 1996 edition of the European Championships, Uefa’s premier international quadrennial soccer tournament, provided an example of ambush marketing that changed the face of sports sponsorship. English sportswear company Umbro had paid for the rights to be the official sportswear supplier of the championships, only to find that Nike had purchased all the poster space and advertising sites in and around Wembley Park underground station, the main travel hub for England’s national stadium, Wembley. Nike’s move completely negated the power of Umbro’s official partnership. The same thing happened for the World Cup in 1998 when Nike hijacked Adidas’ official association in much the same way. As a consequence Uefa, European soccer’s governing body, has spearheaded the use and enforcement of marketing exclusion zones surrounding stadia, forcing the official sponsorship agencies of the competition in question to buy all the advertising space within a 1.3 mile radius of the stadia. The IOC too was quick to adopt this counter-ambushing strategy. The ability to implement such exclusion zones is now a key element in the process to decide future Olympic host cities."
In World Cup 2010 in South Africa, Nike circumvented the billboard advertising ban by projecting onto the side of a building in Johannesburg. As the authorities get wiser, Nike get smarter.
Whereas the Beijing Olympics represented an embracing of China into the coven of Westernism, the London Olympics will show us just how venal unfettered capitalism can be, how its default modus operandi is paranoia, and rather than a celebration of human endeavour and athleticism, it demonstrates more that the power of branding requires such strict parameters of control that nothing can be left to chance. Brand Exclusion Zones are just one manifestation of the privatisation of public space that London is fast-tracking. For a more thorough analysis of the much hyped legacy of London 2012, I urge you to read Anna Minton's Ground Control, recently updated to include a new chapter on the Olympics.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the marketeers are way ahead of the urbanists in understanding how the city works. The spatial politics of brand paranoia will be part of the true legacy of the London Olympics.
"How do I get to Broadway? ...I want to get to the center of things"
"Walk east a block and turn down Broadway and you'll find the center of things if you walk far enough."
Jon Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
The continuity of the gridiron gave rise to an open urban frontier that, by definition, extended infinitely. Before 1950, the urban gridiron flowed seamlessly into the continental grid, creating a continuum for which there was no interior and exterior.
In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas describes the origins of the strict gridiron street pattern of Manhattan, as commissioned in 1807 by Simeon de Witt, Gouverner Morris and John Rutherford. Even though the island was barely inhabited, the grid inscribed upon the island created thousands of city blocks, the future of the city defined and delimited.
"The Grid is, above all, a conceptual speculation.
In spite of its apparent neutrality, it implies an intellectual program for the island: in its indifference to topography, to what exists, it claims the superiority of mental construction over reality.
The plotting of its streets and blocks announces that the subjugation, if not obliteration, of nature is its true ambition.
All blocks are the same; their equivalence invalidates, all at once, all the systems of articulation and differentiation that have guided the design of traditional cities. The Grid makes the history of architecture and all lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another.
The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The grid defines a balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos."
Koolhaas describes Manhattanization as a process, an irresistible force of artifice conquering nature.
Manhattan Extended
In 1922, long after the grid had been filled, the famed engineer T Kennard Thomson proposed extending Manhattan island to the south, with a land reclamation project that would add 'Six square miles of New Land' and '12 Lineal Miles for New Wharves.
Kennard's proposal was a cut down version of his earlier 1916 plan for a Really Greater New York which planned over 50 square miles of additional land. The plan included filling in the existing East River and building a New East River channel to cut through Long Island.
Extend NY
The conceptual project ExtendNY by Harold Cooper goes even further, extending the Manhattan street grid around the world.
Mapping a rectilinear grid onto a sphere is not a straightforward exercise, but the result is a Google Maps overlay that allows you to see on what NY 'street' you live. (I live on the corner of 63, 696 Street and East 10794 Avenue)
Like Bud Korpenning's futile search for the heartbeat of a city in Manhattan Transfer, the city becomes ever more unknowable, less well defined, fuzzier, it extends everywhere. Everywhere is simultaneously center and periphery.
"In the bottomless night, glowing brightly out there,
Is Mars, my native red star.
But the pull of the Earth is heavy to bear
And its atmosphere weighs on my heart."
Alexander Bogdanov, A Martian Stranded on Earth
"Fifty years ago I got to see Lenin in that same hall, with his broad shoulders and high chest - talking from a small raised tribune. He moved spontaneously and effortlessly on the tribune, addressing different parts of the audience… I recall him now as the flame that burns on the Field of Mars. The revolution came and ascended the stairs."
"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet,"
In the same week (04/11/11) that the "astronauts" in the pretend space mission to Mars emerged from their 500 day solitary confinement, the Phobos-Grunt probe, which was supposed to go to the actual Mars, developed a fault which kept it in orbit around Earth. As metaphors go this is pretty compelling: the Soviet Union/ Russia may be drawn towards Mars, but seem ever to be bound by the gravity of Earth. Twas ever thus. Soviet visions of Mars have always been far more powerful than the sporadic attempts at exploration of the Red Planet.
But why was the Soviet Union so obsessed with Mars? Was the Red Planet the perfect symbol of the dream-myth of Communism? Or was it just the coincidence of the colour red? In this post I will explore the influence of Mars on Soviet art and culture as the canvas for a projected fantasy, a planet wide 'field of dreams'.
Mars as Utopia
Mars has always been a metaphor for an alternate Earth. Since HG Wells' War of the Worlds, the premise of alien society on Mars has been a common literary theme. In Soviet art and culture, the planet of Mars often became a world to be conquered or colonised, or most interestingly used as an example of a Communist utopia . Whereas HG Wells used the Martians as part of an anti-imperialist revenge fantasy to represent his disgust at British Empire atrocities in Tasmania, others used Mars to imagine a post-imperialist society. It was a theme that Russian writers and artists would turn to repeatedly.
The first Bolshevik Utopia in literature is widely regarded is Bogdanov's Red Star. A rather turgid novel, it was written in 1908, shortly after the 1907 coup which saw Csar Nicholas resume Imperial power, after the Russian Revolution of 1905, which is when the novel is set. In it, a Earthling revolutionary Leonid is taken to Mars to be taught their ways, where he meets one of the most important members of Martian society, Menni, and falls in love with a Martian called Netti.
Whilst perhaps not a Utopia, life on Bogdanov's Mars is fairly idyllic. It is a socialism based on abundance, not scarcity, yet the Martians do not aspire to materialism. A planned economy and advanced cybernetic control and communication systems for a population of billions allows Martian's to only work when they want, own as much material possessions as they desire, and eliminate the needs for money. Spatially, most of the surface is either inhabited or left as parkland, there is no genuine wilderness, and a complex system of irrigation is required for agricultural land. There is little detail on the degree of urbanisation of Mars, and little depiction of the rural culture. The capital city, Centropolis, houses the majority of people, and Leonid also travels to another city on the other side, but there is no mention of suburbs. Martians fly between major cities at tremendous speed.
"Drawing upon Wells and Western SF for the myth of superior beings on Mars with advanced technology, as well as upon the then popular theory of Martian-made canals, Bogdanov in Red Star uses the already classic formula of the visitor from outside voyaging to the alien country and then returning home. During the revolution of 1905, Martian agents on Earth choose the social revolutionary Leonid as the human most fit to come with them to their planet and see the future in operation, both because Russia is the country most attuned to the times to come and because Leonid personally is endowed with "as little individualism as possible" and therefore stands a chance of adjusting to a collectivist and egalitarian society. Just as in the 1920s and '30s the Soviet leaders would bring leftist visitors from the West to show them how well communism worked, so the Martians offer their guest a model for subsequent human social organisation."
Dramatic tension in the book is introduced by way of failing resources, due to overpopulation. The Martians have to chose between waging war on the barbaric people of Earth, or braving the storms of Venus to secure the supplies of 'minus-matter' they need. While concepts of recycling and conservation are barely considered by Bogdanov, nor what happens to all the waste they must have produced to have completely exhausted Mars' natural resources, he does at least consider the issues that may face a post-revolutionary society.
Bogdanov wrote a further book set on Mars, Engineer Menni, written in 1913 as a prequel to Red Mars. Engineer Menni details the creation of the communist state on Mars and the over through of the feudal house of Aldo. It is possible to read Engineer Menni (who also is a central character of Red Star) as an allegorical tale, with the evolution of the socialist society on Mars predicting the coming revolution on Earth. Through the lens of the society on Mars, Bogdanov was able to show what post-revolutionary Russia might look like, and indeed a planet wide Soviet Union.
Before he dies, Engineer Menni has a series of apocalyptic visions--of the exhaustion of energy, of the dying Sun, of the end of life, of the engulfing void--and he must somehow overcome his nihilistic despair.
"We have exploded and cast into the sun all of our planets in turn, except the one upon which we stand at this moment. The energy released gave us an additional hundred thousand years. We have spent most of that time trying to find the means to resettle in other solar systems. Here we have failed utterly. We could not completely conquer time and space."
The third book was meant to be based on the poem he wrote called "A Martian Stranded on Earth', but Bogdanov died before it was completed. As a pioneer of blood transfusions (a theme which is also present in Red Star) he exchanged blood with a student who has both malaria and TB - he died but the student lived.
Stalin was a big fan of Engineer Menni and Red Star, and drew inspiration from these novels in his zeal to build the disastrous White Sea Canal. Stalin's interpretation of Engineer Menni is remarkable. In Loren Graham's "The ghost of the executed engineer: technology and the fall of the Soviet Union", he writes:
"Stalin was a great admirer of canal projects, and he was fascinated by the role of engineers in their construction, especially engineers whose expertise was necessary but who could not be trusted because of their political views. Two of his favourite novels before the Revolution were Aleksandr Bogdanov's Red Star and Engineer Menni. In these works of science fiction, the builders of socialism on the planet Mars have to rely on an engineer named Menni, educated before the Socialist Revolution, who is both brilliant and traitorous, Menni recommends a path for a canal that purposefully delays construction and causes the deaths of many labourers. Menni is arrested, the mistakes are rectified, and the canal is completed. Stalin believed that, if kept under surveillance, even hostile technical specialists could be forced to yield their expertise for the benefit of the state."
New forms for a new planet
In setting works on Mars, writers and filmmakers could explore new forms, and new spatial arrangements, and discover a synergy with much of the work of avant-garde artists and architects, both Suprematists and Constructivists.
"One of the war cries of the Russian Futurists was The War of the Worlds' Martian roar 'ULL-AA', which would in 1919 provide the title for one of Viktor Shklovsky's manifestos for the alienation effect, 'Ullya, Ullya, Martians'. In order to truly estrange , to provide the distance from everyday life’s stock responses and learned indifference that, for Shklovsky, is the key element in great art (be it Tolstoy or the circus), the alienation effect is taken literally to mean the visitation by the alien nation. Shklovsky writes of an avant-garde work being 'worthy of my brothers, the Martians'. This is what much of the Russian Avant-Garde saw themselves as. Like Tatlin's Third International Tower , whose iron legs and perpetual motion are akin to the Martians' walking tripods, this was something as fearsome, uncanny and technologically terrifying as the alien invasion, and intended to be every bit as threatening to existing society."
Svetlana Boym, writing in Ruins of Modernity, also notes Shklovsky's admiration of Tatlin's tower:
"from the very beginning, the Tatlin Tower engendered its double - a discursive monument almost as prominent as the architectural original. Victor Shlovksy is one of the few contemporaries who appreciates the unconventional architecture of the Tower, which for his is an architecture of estrangement. Its temporal vectors point towards the past and the future, toward 'the iron age of Ovid' and the 'age of construction cranes, beautiful like wise Martians'."
Krutikov's Space City of the Future, designed in 1928, imagined a floating city supported by a anti-gravity coil. Meanwhile in 1919 Gustav Klucis made compositions for an ideal Dynamic City, Malevich devised his Planits, and El Lissitsky's Proun constructions became ever more otherworldly.
Constructivist visions of Mars
The other pre-eminent Russian work of fiction set on Mars is Aelita, by Alexei Tolstoy, written in 1923, six years after the second Russian Revolution of 1917 and the instigation of a Socialist state. In it the character Los travels to Mars to lead a popular uprising against the Elders. When the rebellion is crushed Los and Aelita, the princess of Mars, seizes control to establish her own totalitarian regime. Again the book can be consider as an allegorical tale, though of course Tolstoy could write from a historical perspective rather than predictive as Bogdanov had to.
It was made into a film Aelita, Queen of Mars by Iakov Protozanov in 1924. The Constructivist style of its film sets, designed by Isaac Rabinovich, and with outlandish costumes by Alexandra Exter, depicted the advanced state of Martian society, as something for the new USSR to aspire to. While it was a major influence on Flash Gordon, Metropolis, the film fell out of favour in later years, perhaps for being a little too accurate in prefiguring Soviet society under Stalin.
Also in 1924, an animated film Interplanetary Revolution, was made by N. Khodataev, Z. Komisarenko, and Y. Merkulov. In it capitalists escaping to Mars discover the revolution has spread throughout the galaxy.
Mars in American Science Fiction
In contrast to the early Russian works, early American science fiction saw Mars as little more than an exotic stageset, the backdrop for picaresque adventures such as those of John Carter, in the Edgar Rice Burroughs series of pulp novels. Beginning with A Princess of Mars in 1911, the Barsoom series of ER Burroughs was eventually made up of 11 books written up to 1943. Mars is considered little more than a desert environment, based upon the astronomical observations of Percival Lovell, and beset with warring tribes and ferocious monsters.
Red Planet = Red Menace
But it wasn't just the Soviets who would align themselves with the Red Planet. In the 1950's, American cinema was more than ready to equate Martians with Soviets and the burgeoning Red Scare. The 1953 film version of The War of the Worlds made the Martian invasion an allegory for a Communism invasion, and there were similar themes in 1952 Red Planet Mars, and 1953 Invaders from Mars.
Expanding the scope further, alien invaders as a metaphor for the red menace was a common theme of many sci-fi movies of the time, 19954 Them, 1955 This Island Earth, and 1956's Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and Earth vs The Flying Saucers).
Operating in stark contrast to the Hollywood melodrama of Martian invasion, Pavel Klushantsev's Road to the Stars (1954) is a serious attempt by a Soviet filmmaker to show how the Soviet conquest of space would play out. A young man learns about spaceflight, before a sequence shows a lunar landing. The final sequence shows a lunar base, manned explorations of Mars, the moons of Saturn, and 'beyond the infinite'. The film was rushed to completion and released shortly after the launch of Sputnik 1 shocked the world.
A Red City for a Red Planet
The lure of the Red Planet to the Communists was surely the chance to begin afresh with a tabula rasa, where Communism did not have first to overthrow an incumbent capitalist society, and sweep away its aristocratic past. If there had to be a Socialist Revolution (as in Red Star), it was a total, world revolution.
In 1929, the sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich, part of the radical Constructivist architectural group OSA created a plan for a Red City of Planet of Communism. This disurbanist plan reimagined a city not as a series of concentric rings radiating out from a central hub, which owed its typology to the urbanism of a feudal era, but as a series of rhythms, a distribution of resources, functions and occupancies.
"The whole world is at our service, and first and foremost, transport and communications… We ask ourselves, how shall we resettle all the urban populations and economic activities? Answer: not according to the principles of crowding, but according to the principle of maximum freedom, ease and speed of communication."
Okhitovich saw further than any other contemporary urban theorist, that distributed electrical power, advanced telecommunications and high-speed transport networks created new possibilities for human habitation, and could eradicate the tension between the urban/rural that bedevilled the Soviet Socialist project. The disurbanist proposal was not anti-urban, it was a continuous urban field, city as network, city as process. Thus Okhitiovich prefigured contemporary dialogues on infrastructure ecologies, network displacements effects. As Catherine Cooke writes:
"'The City', wrote Okhitovich, 'is not some kind of sum of people living in "one" place. The city is a socially, not territorially, determined human entity … It is an economic and cultural complex'. Moreover: 'The question to be elucidated now is, must the different functions of the city exist in one physical body; will they become estranged by separation, as the parts of a biological organism would be? In other words, is the ever increasing crowding of people, buildings etc on one spot inevitable or not? Let us examine by what means people are fastened to one place; from what does this attraction to one another derive, this mighty centripetal force?'"
Okhitovich's utopianism matches that of Bogdanov completely, the potential to build a new class consciousness by rejecting the forms of the past, and build a worldwide Socialist settlement. Ultimately, Okhitovich was too much the post-Marxist visionary, unable to scale back from the grand plan, too open to be attacked for failing to directly address the immediate issues of peasant dwellings. Under Stalin, visionary design that did nothing for the common man was considered itself bourgeois, and Okhitovich's fate was sealed under the Stalinist Terror, betrayed by rival architects Mordvinov and Alabian.
Okhitovich didn't specify which planet this Red City might be built on. It was a city reaching around the world, one that could not be confined to national boundaries. Could it be that Okhitovich planned his utopian city not to be on Earth at all? Could it have been meant for Mars?
In Soviet Russia, Mars travels to you
As with so much in Soviet society, the theoretical vision was far in advance of the practical application. As Phobos-Grunt's orbit slowly decays, dooming it to crash back to Earth later this month (January 2012), its destiny is also to be a Martian stranded on Earth.
Following on from the previous post about OMA's Boompjes project from 1980, here is the amazing image of the observation tower that formed part of the scheme. The tower is a pure Constructivist monument, a homage to Leonidov and El Lissitzky. Compare it to Lenin Tribune design of El Lissitzky from 1924.
As this article on the fantastic Russian Utopia site puts it:
The tribune designed by El Lissitzky became an icon of the Modernist movement. Leninism became a dogma. When both were subjected to revision, it became clear that invigoration socialism was more difficult than updating Modernism.
If you don't find this worms-eye axonometric view of a Constructivist tower in Rotterdam totally awesome, then you're probably reading the wrong blog.
My favourite architectural image is on display at the moment. Seeing something 'in the flesh' that you've looked for so long in a book was one of those knee-wobble experiences, a pure hyperkulturemia moment.
It's this:
It's on display as part of the OMA/Progress exhibition currently on at the Barbican. Overall I found the exhibition to be rather disappointing. I am a huge fan of the work of OMA/ Rem Koolhaas but this exhibition seemed to try too hard to downplay the heroic imagery and signature form-making and instead be wilfully as scrappy as possible. In an attempt to counteract the 'starchitect' syndrome and demonstrate the amount of research and the full design process it becomes rather impenetrable. There's much to explore but not much eye candy. Which is why the image of the Boompjes housing project really stands out. It's beautiful.
This has been just about my favourite architectural representation ever since I first saw it in the catalogue of the Deconstructivism exhibition at the MoMA in 1988, curated by Mark Wrigley and Philip Johnson.
It's a triptych created by OMA as a design research project for a housing on the Boompjes in Rotterdam in 1980.
Here's what OMA say about this project on their own website:
At the end of 1980 OMA was asked by the city of Rotterdam to conduct a study of high rise building in the city, and to illustrate the investigations with a planning proposal for a site in the centre. In consultation with the Town Planning Department, a site was selected on the Maasboulevard along near the Maasbridges. We see the angle between the river and the lower side of the grid as a 'hinge' between the city and the river. Here the river is closest to the centre. The shifting of the centre through the injection of gigantic buildings in the second reconstruction makes this point most suitable to take over the role of the 'window' in the disclosing of the riverfront. The site is peculiar. On one hand it is embedded in a network of traffic lanes, like the new suspension bridge across the Maas whose approach makes its way into the city through two inexplicable twists. On the other hand there lies a unique opportunity to connect the river with the city. The city is visible, but hardly accessible; any structure will be noted in passing, at bewilderingly different speeds and angles.
The building and the bridge are designed as an undetachable whole. Built as a composition of towers inserted in a slab, the project carries on the experiments in slaboid mutations and new building types that were done after the war in the bombed areas. It forms a transparent screen along the riverfront.
On the riverside the screen acts as a row of stone towers against a glass horizon, introducing a skyline in the Rotterdam skyline, and on the city side it acts as a stone slab with glass towers and slits, that portray pieces of the river.
Due to their different angles, the glass surfaces on the city side reflect the light in different directions and mostly they only reflect air and water, not buildings.
The building is designed toward the kinetic experience, caused by the passing of the site with different speeds across the bridges and the boulevard: The towers all have a different angle to the slab: some fall backwards, others are contained, others twist away and the steel tower has altogether escaped.
The average height of the building in 72 meters. For a tower this is not so high, for a slab it is (according to Dutch standards). The composition of these elements in this project claims a fair height to be effective in the skyline of the Rotterdam harbour, where the juxtaposition of extremely high constructions with lower city districts is a frequently appearing image.
Now that the city nears completion, the riverfront – more precisely, the so-called Maasboulevard, a curved dike that protects the rest of the city – remains under-exploited and is one of the last frontiers for further development.
The two structures for Rotterdam are located exactly at this point; they form a ‘cornerstone’ of the old ‘modern’ centre, and face, across the fault, the multitude of anti-modernist revisions.
This project had a triple purpose: to activate the riverfront; to propose a ‘solution’ for the bridgehead of the old bridge that will become redundant after the inauguration of the new one; and to suggest an apartment building for a site against the old bridge. The site is peculiar: one side is quayside, the other is formed by a riverside highway, one the side of a bridge. It is visible, but hardly accessible; any structure on it will be noted in passing, at bewilderingly different speeds and angles.
There's so much to enjoy in this image - more than you can make out in this small version above, and like all great art rewards patient engagement. It is not a painting, nor is it a traditional architectural drawing, even if it can be read alternately as either. The image mixes and collapses several modes of representation onto one composition, which might be a fairly common concept today but wasn't back in 1980, and owes more to Suprematism than traditional architectural renderings. It is not an image that can be 'read' easily, it does not illustrate the Boompjes proposal but is an exploration, part of the design process. It collapse a huge number of influences and themes onto the space of the drawing. In my opinion it does not represent the project - it is the project.
The central part of the composition in the middle panel is an isometric representation of the site and OMA's proposal, which consists of a slab block articulated by with a number of projecting and slanting towers ("experiments in slaboid mutations"), a Constructivist viewing platform/ tower, and a number of other urban interventions. Extending beyond this is the urban context, with certain landmark elements, such as the Maas river and the two bridges the Willemsbrug and the Spoorbrug. There is also the White House, a Rotterdam landmark as a prototype skyscraper and one of the few buildings left standing after the Nazi bombardment in the Second World War, delineated but not filled in, as our several other nearby tall buildings, shown to provide context. There is also a small drawing of the building plan.
The isometric view of the main building with its five glass tower elements are reflected below, each given its own colour. Viewing this in 1988 I read these as the structure's virtual reflection, its presence in a Gibsonian cyberspace. Thus the drawing shows the proposed building but also its own mediation. The tower element is a pure Constructivist composition inspired directly by El Lissitzky's platform for Lenin. In the right hand panel is a tiny city map, a larger scale plan, and some other unknown elements. Similarly, the left hand panel contains a series of shapes, which I think relate to the programmatic use of each of the four tower, plus some attempts I think to explore the 'kinetic' view of the project from different viewpoints and speeds, again a homage to Suprematism and a similar concept to that of the early work of Zaha Hadid.
In the book Rem Koolhaas /OMA by Robert Gargiani, he examines this project as an example of Koolhaas' Contextualist period:
'The concept of Contextualism was critically examined in the project for the complex of the Boompjes in Rotterdam, prepared by Koolhaas in 1980-82 and commissioned by the City Government. The lot is outside the historical centre, on the banks of the Meuse along Maasboulevard, near the Spoorbrug and the Willemsbrug. This area was emblematically chosen by OMA, without any indication from the city, for its character as a residual zone in a content that was even more chaotic and varied than that of the Binnenhof, at the converging point of different sectors of the city that had been razed by bombing during World War II. The area belongs to the category of the Terrains Vagues of Constant, and therefore particularly relevant for the expression of Contextualism without any precise character. The fact that the government was interested in testing "the impact of the high-rise building on the city-scape", also following the success of Delirious New York, allowed Koolhaas to invent a volumetric situation based on that of the skyscrapers of New York, like the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Rockefeller Center, specifying a functional program on the models of the New York hotel and the Soviet workers' club. The complex. 72 meters in height and composed of the assemblage of multiple volumes, is configured according to the criteria of Malevich and Ferriss as an abstract edified bulk, "designed from the outside in", as Koolhaas put it.
The other drawings OMA created for this project do not really interest me (apart from a fantastic worms-eye axon of the Constructivist tower, of which more later). They are about building form, concrete proposal. Whereas the isometric triptych, called the Rotterdam Summation in the MoMA catalogue, is about urban appearances, the self-image of the city.
It's clear to see the development of themes in this project with subsequent OMA projects, but the influence of this image upon the realm of architectural representation should also not be underestimated. I shall be going back to see it again at least once before the exhibition ends on 19th Feb 2012.
In 1972, Wim Crouwel and his Total Design company created an identity system for the Municipality of Rotterdam. The Gemeente Rotterdam identity used a hexagon grid to visually represent the city in an abstracted way.
At the recent exhibition of the work of Wim Crouwel at the Design Museum, there are some more examples of the identity and its application. These images are mostly taken from the fantastic book TD63-73 about Total Design, by Unit Editions.
As the book TD63-73 puts it:
"Rendering the entire shape of the town (sic) with 'honeycomb" shapes was a way to future-proof the identity: it could easily be adapted and able to respond to respond to any further development of the town's borders and harbours."
It is reminiscent of the hex maps of many board games, the hexagon map of London (previously written about here), and also the NikeGrid London:
Liam Young and Kate Davies, lecturers at the Architectural Association, are leading a study visit to Chernobyl and Baikonour next July, as part of their Unknown Fields nomadic studio.
"This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight, we will pack our Geiger counters and spacesuits as we chart a course from the atomic to the cosmic to investigate the unknown fields between the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in the Ukraine and Gagarin’s launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Beginning in the shadows of nuclear disaster we will survey the irradiated wilderness and bear witness to a sobering apocalyptic vision. We will skirt the retreating tide of the Aral Sea and mine the ‘black gold’ in the Caspian oilfields and caviar factories. We will wander through the cotton fields of Kazakhstan and tread the ancient silk road before reaching the shores of the cosmic ocean bathed in the white light of satellites blasting into tomorrow’s sky. In these shifting fields of nature and artifice we will re-examine our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world and document a cross-section through a haunting landscape of the ecologically fragile and the technologically obsolete."
I'm glad that others have recognised the spatial and architectonic qualities of Baikonour. There are of course the hauntological aspects, the disused and abandoned launchpads, and the tragedy of the collapse of the hangar in 2002 where the last Buran was stored, crushing with it the dream of resurrecting the Soviet shuttle program that was hinted at by Leonid Gurushkin's announcement of 2001. "We have been dreaming of this time," said Gurushkin.
But it is too easy to regard Baikonour as a monument to failed dreams, and forget that it is still a working spaceport. It is a truly disurbanist settlement, to a much greater degree than the compromised linear city plan for Magnitogorsk or the other Sotsgorod. It is a town whose locus is off-world, the earthly counterpart to a true Kosmograd yet to be built.
If, like me, you maintain that the Soviet Space program enabled the secret continuation of the Constructivist project after the rise of Stalin, then Baikonour is a site of key architectural importance.
This is another in a series of posts on Kosmograd sponsored by Portakabin:
Continuing the theme of the Lost Cosmonaut, this has been a continuing inspiration for the artist Jeremy Geddes.
In a series of paintings, Geddes explores the romance and the desolation of the cosmonaut, floating in space, or crashed to Earth. The figure of the Cosmonaut is often placed in a deserted urban setting.
There's a line from the Silver Jews song People which goes:
"People send people up to the moon, when they return well there isn't much, people be careful not to crest too soon.".
Many astronauts, most well documented being the Apollo astronauts who went to the moon, could never reconcile their lives afterwards and depression and alcoholism were commonplace, and Neil Armstrong became a recluse. Many Soviet cosmonauts experienced similar post-mission trauma, including Yuri Gagarin.
If cosmonaut art is you thing you should also check out this series by Justin Van Genderen, beautiful montages inspired by the Soviet space program.
This is another in a series of posts on Kosmograd sponsored by Portakabin:
The Cosmonaut is crowd-sourced and crowd-funded film from the Riot Cinema collective based in Spain.
They hope to create a feature length film with support from private funding. On the website there is currently a trailer, plus a host of supporting material, including a full script, and a full business plan. There's also an "aesthetic dossier" - a collection of related imagery from the Soviet space program, adding background and context to the project.
The theme of the film, of a lost cosmonaut returning to earth to find everything changed, is a familiar enough theme, and there are also aspects of the script which reminded me of fictional works such of Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin, Gibson and Sterling's Red Star, Winter Orbit, Solaris, even Capricorn 1 or the eternal triangle of Jules et Jim; and real events from Soviet space history such as the death of Komarov, At its heart is the romance of the Soviet space program, a consensual hallucination, the belief that when you dream something hard enough you can make it happen.
Much of the film is set in Star City, the cosmonaut training facility just outside Moscow, and the filmmakers, who have describe it as a like a movie set, hope to be able to film on location there.
The motif of The Cosmonaut film is a hummingbird, Kolibri, a fictional name given to Brezhnev's plan to land a Soviet on the Moon by 1970. As described here:
"Back came the ritual reply - a Soviet manned lunar landing must be achieved by the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Lenin (April 22, 1970). On that date a Soviet man would plant the Red Banner and unveil a bust of Lenin on the lunar surface. Unlike the US President, Brezhnev would never get to see a manned launch to the moon."
In the shop you can purchase merchandise and also make a donation to be a producer on the film, earning a mention in the credits. Currently they have about 2400 producers and 19% of the funding they require, so why not show your support of this exciting venture.
This is another in a series of posts on Kosmograd sponsored by Portakabin:
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