Kropotkinskaya (Russian: Кропо́ткинская , IPA: [krɐˈpotkʲɪnskəjə] ) is a station on the Sokolnicheskaya Line of the Moscow Metro . One of the oldest Metro stations, it was designed by Alexey Dushkin and Yakov Lichtenberg and opened in 1935 as part of the original Metro line, named after Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin .
184-672: The station was originally planned to serve the enormous Palace of the Soviets (Dvorets Sovetov), which was to rise nearby on the former site of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour . Kropotkinskaya was therefore designed to be the largest and grandest station on the first line. However, the Palace project was cancelled by Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, leaving the Metro station as the only part of
368-759: A blend of various identifiable prototypes. Iofan himself said the two main inspirations behind his design were the Pergamon Altar and the Victor Emmanuel II Monument which was, in turn, inspired by the Pergamon Altar. The choice was natural for Iofan, because he had often seen the Vittoriano while living in Rome, and because he studied under one of its creators, Manfredo Manfredi . The other identifiable and undisputed design cue
552-478: A clear winner but cautiously praised an entry by Heinrich Ludwig , an enormous pentagonal enlargement of Lenin's Mausoleum devoid of any stylistic cues. On 18 July 1931, the USDS announced a public, open, international competition, with entries due by 20 October (later extended to 1 December 1931). In September, the USDS amended the terms and explained the design of the palace would not be awarded to
736-476: A compromise between the two, combining modernist forms and stylized decoration. The dominant figure in the rise of modernism in France was Charles-Édouard Jeanerette, a Swiss-French architect who in 1920 took the name Le Corbusier . In 1920 he co-founded a journal called ' L'Espirit Nouveau and energetically promoted architecture that was functional, pure, and free of any decoration or historical associations. He
920-439: A fixed fee. Armando Brasini agreed to submit a proposal at no cost. From a professional standpoint the best proposal came from Le Corbusier. The Soviet press praised his innovative, logical and convenient floor plan as late as 1940, but the jury felt the high-rise exoskeleton supporting the saddle roof was inappropriate for downtown Moscow. Most of the sixteen drafts selected by the jury were modernist in inspiration, but
1104-643: A flat and straight boulevard. The Pushkin Museum building, which partly obstructed the course of the Alley, would be moved north to Gogolevsky Boulevard . Most of it would be absorbed into the palace plaza. The plaza would extend far south-west along the axis of the Alley, and north-west into present-day Arbat District . The Zamoskvorechye island west of the House on the Embankment would disappear, making way for
1288-574: A generation of architects, including Louis Sullivan , Victor Horta , Hector Guimard , and Antoni Gaudí . At the end of the 19th century, a few architects began to challenge the traditional Beaux Arts and Neoclassical styles that dominated architecture in Europe and the United States. The Glasgow School of Art (1896–99) designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh , had a façade dominated by large vertical bays of windows. The Art Nouveau style
1472-433: A height of 30 metres (98 ft). The "even smaller" Constitution Hall and Reception Hall in the stylobate measured 70 by 36 metres (230 by 118 ft) and 122 by 20 metres (400 by 66 ft). Floors in the office tower were planned to have a usable height of 10 to 12 metres (33 to 39 ft), for even more session halls of various government branches. The exact number of floors was not disclosed. Enormous as it was,
1656-473: A hostile, subversive influence of the capitalist West that was promptly revealed and suppressed by the party. The reform was effected through the party decrees of the 1930s, starting with the USDS review of the international competition. In the late 1950s and 1960s modernism became the official style of the Soviet state, and recent history was rewritten again to exonerate the party. Soviet theorists argued that
1840-467: A hotel near Chandler, Arizona , and the most famous of all his residences, Fallingwater (1934–37), a vacation house in Pennsylvania for Edgar J. Kaufman. Fallingwater is a remarkable structure of concrete slabs suspended over a waterfall, perfectly uniting architecture and nature. The Austrian architect Rudolph Schindler designed what could be called the first house in the modern style in 1922,
2024-441: A lengthy tour of European and American cities. Their main objectives were the reevaluation of the 1934 design against best American practices , and the research and purchase of modern construction technologies. Moran & Proctor , a leading foundation engineering firm, became the first American company to be hired for the project and would assist the USDS throughout the 1930s. More visits and more contracts, facilitated through
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#17327810985542208-649: A lighthouse-like tower in the center to inspire hope. His rebuilt city was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. Shortly after the War, the French architect Le Corbusier , who was nearly sixty years old and had not constructed a building in ten years, was commissioned by the French government to construct a new apartment block in Marseille . He called it Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, but it more popularly took
2392-528: A list of necessary changes. Stalin expressly ruled out the alternative designs by Zholtovsky ("...smacks of Noah's ark"), and particularly by Shchusev ("the same cathedral, but without a cross. Possibly, Shchusev hopes to add a cross at a later day"). The fourth and final competition between five selected teams was held in August 1932 – February 1933. This time, all proposals were very similar in composition, although still different stylistically. On 10 May 1933
2576-600: A major exposition of modernist design in Cologne just a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. For the 1914 Cologne exhibition, Bruno Taut built a revolutionary glass pavilion. Frank Lloyd Wright was a highly original and independent American architect who refused to be categorized in any one architectural movement. Like Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , he had no formal architectural training. From 1887 to 1893 he worked in
2760-465: A multi-role public building that shared entertainment and administrative functions; as time went by, the administrative side predominated. The word was never applied to residences of political leaders: their private affairs remained a closely guarded secret. During the 1920s, modest "palaces of labor" or "palaces of culture" were actually built. The coveted national palace had to be exceptionally large, impressive and technologically advanced to stand above
2944-763: A neo-gothic or neoclassical style, but these buildings were very different; they combined modern materials and technology (stainless steel, concrete, aluminum, chrome-plated steel) with Art Deco geometry; stylized zig-zags, lightning flashes, fountains, sunrises, and, at the top of the Chrysler building, Art Deco "gargoyles" in the form of stainless steel radiator ornaments. The interiors of these new buildings, sometimes termed Cathedrals of Commerce", were lavishly decorated in bright contrasting colors, with geometric patterns variously influenced by Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, African textile patterns, and European cathedrals, Frank Lloyd Wright himself experimented with Mayan Revival , in
3128-501: A new style for government buildings, sometimes called PWA Moderne , for the Public Works Administration , which launched gigantic construction programs in the U.S. to stimulate employment. It was essentially classical architecture stripped of ornament, and was employed in state and federal buildings, from post offices to the largest office building in the world at that time, Pentagon (1941–43), begun just before
3312-474: A new style. They became leaders in the postwar modernist movement. World War II (1939–1945) and its aftermath was a major factor in driving innovation in building technology, and in turn, architectural possibilities. The wartime industrial demands resulted in shortages of steel and other building materials, leading to the adoption of new materials, such as aluminum, The war and postwar period brought greatly expanded use of prefabricated building ; largely for
3496-470: A nursery school, and other serves, and the flat terrace roof had a running track, ventilation ducts, and a small theater. Le Corbusier designed furniture, carpets, and lamps to go with the building, all purely functional; the only decoration was a choice of interior colors that Le Corbusier gave to residents. Unité d'Habitation became a prototype for similar buildings in other cities, both in France and Germany. Combined with his equally radical organic design for
3680-428: A pioneer in the architecture of collective housing , though his Moroccan colleague Elie Azagury was critical of him for serving as a tool of the French colonial regime and for ignoring the economic and social necessity that Moroccans live in higher density vertical housing. Late modernist architecture is generally understood to include buildings designed (1968–1980) with exceptions. Modernist architecture includes
3864-443: A plausible explanation until the 2000s publications by Harald Bodenschatz [ de ] and Christiane Post. In the late 1990s Dmitry Chmelnizki advanced a different explanation. The competitions were set up by Stalin personally as a complex political provocation. In the opening, self-educational phase, Stalin familiarized himself with all active architectural schools and selected the general direction that would soon become
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#17327810985544048-484: A prominent architectural commentator. Its goal was to bring together designers and industrialists, to turn out well-designed, high-quality products, and in the process to invent a new type of architecture. The organization originally included twelve architects and twelve business firms, but quickly expanded. The architects include Peter Behrens , Theodor Fischer (who served as its first president), Josef Hoffmann and Richard Riemerschmid . In 1909 Behrens designed one of
4232-618: A proponent of monumental fascist architecture, who rebuilt the University of Rome, and designed the Italian pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, and planned a grand reconstruction of Rome on the fascist model. The 1939 New York World's Fair marked a turning point in architecture between Art Deco and modern architecture. The theme of the Fair was the World of Tomorrow , and its symbols were
4416-456: A row of white pylons in the center of a large lawn, it became an icon of modernist architecture. In Germany, two important modernist movements appeared after the first World War, The Bauhaus was a school founded in Weimar in 1919 under the direction of Walter Gropius . Gropius was the son of the official state architect of Berlin, who studied before the war with Peter Behrens , and designed
4600-518: A similar theory. Opponents like Sergey Kuznetsov argue the existing evidence of Stalin's personal involvement is too scarce to make far-reaching conclusions. There are very few transcripts and quotations reproduced in the Soviet media. The protocols of the Politburo and the journals of Stalin's office in the Kremlin contain very few records related to the palace. Chmelnizki, on the contrary, rates
4784-507: A simple two-tone color scheme. The designers selected greyish blue Ukrainian labradorite for the basement and pale grey granite from the Daut River [ ru ] valley for the rest of the structure. The palace's internal transport infrastructure was designed assuming 50,000 visitors daily. The routes to the grand hall and to the office tower were physically separated; the former relied primarily on stairs and escalators ,
4968-402: A single architect or a group or firm. The USS claimed no single group could overcome the project's unprecedented challenges; it requires a joint effort of "all living creative forces of the Soviet society". The message foreshadowed the imminent nationalization of the formerly independent professional community, but no one, even the party insiders like Iofan, Alabyan or Shchusev , could predict
5152-407: A single tall, compact, and monumental structure, avoiding any resemblance to church architecture. The main hall, seating 15,000 people, had to face the Kremlin. The Ginzburg and Ladovsky teams remained true to modernist ideas. Karo Alabyan and company produced an impressive and novel modernist design—"a ship of state" with three lean "funnels" flanking the river. The other architects followed
5336-517: A smooth transition from the granite-clad tower to the all-metal statue. The pose and the proportions of the statue also changed. This revised design was presented and discussed at a conference of the Union of Soviet architects in July 1939. A book by Nikolay Atarov [ ru ] describing the design and the construction process in plain language was published one year later. The total height of
5520-521: A study of Casablanca's bidonvilles entitled "Habitat for the Greatest Number". The presenters, Georges Candilis and Michel Ecochard , argued—against doctrine—that architects must consider local culture and climate in their designs. This generated great debate among modernist architects around the world and eventually provoked a schism and the creation of Team 10 . Ecochard's 8x8 meter model at Carrières Centrales earned him recognition as
5704-408: A temporary halt to the construction of new skyscrapers. It also brought in a new style, called " Streamline Moderne " or sometimes just Streamline. This style, sometimes modeled after for the form of ocean liners, featured rounded corners, strong horizontal lines, and often nautical features, such as superstructures and steel railings. It was associated with modernity and especially with transportation;
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5888-593: A tight visual ensemble with Iofan's House on the Embankment. Most of the Technical Council disagreed. On 30 May, they recommended the sites in Zaryadye or Bolotnaya Square as second-best alternatives; the cathedral site was ranked least acceptable. Tired of insubordination , Voroshilov invited the stubborn professionals to a meeting with Stalin. On 2 June 1931, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich , Voroshilov, Meyer and eight selected architects from
6072-642: A wide reflective pool . The tip of the island would become a base to the memorial of the Chelyuskin and the projected Pantheon of the Aviators. After World War II, the Ivan Zholtovsky workshop proposed an even larger, and certainly unreal, redevelopment plan for the central squares. Nothing ever came from these fantasies except for the construction of the New Arbat Avenue in
6256-463: Is a machine for living in." He tirelessly promoted his ideas through slogans, articles, books, conferences, and participation in Expositions. To illustrate his ideas, in the 1920s he built a series of houses and villas in and around Paris. They were all built according to a common system, based upon the use of reinforced concrete, and of reinforced concrete pylons in the interior which supported
6440-720: Is a name often given to the Modern architecture that emerged in Europe, primarily German-speaking Europe, in the 1920s and 30s. It is also frequently called Neues Bauen (New Building). The New Objectivity took place in many German cities in that period, for example in Frankfurt with its Neues Frankfurt project. By the late 1920s, modernism had become an important movement in Europe. Architecture, which previously had been predominantly national, began to become international. The architects traveled, met each other, and shared ideas. Several modernists, including Le Corbusier , had participated in
6624-488: Is known as Brick Expressionism . Erich Mendelsohn , (who disliked the term Expressionism for his work) began his career designing churches, silos, and factories which were highly imaginative, but, for lack of resources, were never built. In 1920, he finally was able to construct one of his works in the city of Potsdam; an observatory and research center called the Einsteinium , named in tribute to Albert Einstein . It
6808-628: Is the Art Deco "ribbed style" of exterior walls, which had already been used by other Soviet architects. The dome of the grand hall was inspired by the Centennial Hall in Breslau . Less obvious, speculative sources range from Fritz Lang 's Metropolis to Athanasius Kircher 's Turris Babel . During the competition period, the state dissolved formerly independent architectural movements and de facto nationalized all architects under
6992-511: The ASNOVA , but gained little recognition. The decision to build the "House of Congresses" ( Russian : Дом съездов ) was made at the end of 1930 or in early 1931, and announced in February 1931. The influences behind the decision cannot be reliably ascertained. Dmitrij Chmelnizki [ de ] claims Stalin was the project's sole initiator; Sergey Kuznetsov counters that the idea
7176-476: The Amtorg network , would follow in subsequent years. From a purely architectural perspective, the most important experience was gained at the site of the partially completed Rockefeller Center . Iofan used the stepped-slab motive of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in later projects, and directly inspired careful realignment of the palace's staggered layers. These and other subtle exterior changes proceeded throughout
7360-657: The Austrian Postal Savings Bank (1904–1906). Wagner declared his intention to express the function of the building in its exterior. The reinforced concrete exterior was covered with plaques of marble attached with bolts of polished aluminum. The interior was purely functional and spare, a large open space of steel, glass, and concrete where the only decoration was the structure itself. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos also began removing any ornament from his buildings. His Steiner House , in Vienna (1910),
7544-538: The Brezhnev era. It was certainly not unique to Hamilton's entry: similar ribbed facades, a staple of American Art Deco , were also used by Alexey Dushkin , Iosif Langbard , Dmitry Chechulin and Iofan himself. European left-wing architects could not accept the fact and appealed directly to Stalin. The leaders of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) realized very well that
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7728-455: The Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building , in the heart of Chicago in 1904–1906. While these buildings were revolutionary in their steel frames and height, their decoration was borrowed from Neo-Renaissance , Neo-Gothic and Beaux-Arts architecture . The Woolworth Building , designed by Cass Gilbert , was completed in 1912, and was the tallest building in the world until the completion of
7912-620: The Chapel of Notre-Dame du-Haut at Ronchamp , this work propelled Corbusier in the first rank of postwar modern architects. In the early 1950s, Michel Écochard , director of urban planning under the French Protectorate in Morocco , commissioned GAMMA ( Groupe des Architectes Modernes Marocains )—which initially included the architects Elie Azagury , George Candillis , Alexis Josic and Shadrach Woods —to design housing in
8096-546: The Chrysler Building in 1929. The structure was purely modern, but its exterior was decorated with Neo-Gothic ornament, complete with decorative buttresses, arches and spires, which caused it to be nicknamed the "Cathedral of Commerce". After the first World War, a prolonged struggle began between architects who favored the more traditional styles of neo-classicism and the Beaux-Arts architecture style, and
8280-619: The First All-Union Congress of Soviets announced the creation of the Soviet Union . On the same day Sergei Kirov proposed construction of a new national convention center, which was duly approved by the congress. This, according to the official Soviet narrative, was the beginning of the story of the Palace of the Soviets. Before the congress, in January–May 1919, Petrograd had held an architectural competition for
8464-649: The Hay Mohammedi neighborhood of Casablanca that provided a "culturally specific living tissue" for laborers and migrants from the countryside . Sémiramis , Nid d’Abeille (Honeycomb), and Carrières Centrales were some of the first examples of this Vernacular Modernism . At the 1953 Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), ATBAT-Afrique —the Africa branch of Atelier des Bâtisseurs founded in 1947 by figures including Le Corbusier , Vladimir Bodiansky , and André Wogenscky —prepared
8648-506: The IG Farben building , a massive corporate headquarters, now the main building of Goethe University in Frankfurt. Bruno Taut specialized in building large-scale apartment complexes for working-class Berliners. He built twelve thousand individual units, sometimes in buildings with unusual shapes, such as a giant horseshoe. Unlike most other modernists, he used bright exterior colors to give his buildings more life The use of dark brick in
8832-598: The Moskva River . The draft disposed with former Constructivist novelty The shape of the main hall changed from a parabolic dome to a stack of flat cylinders and, according to Katherine Zubovich, acquired "more italianate form". Le Corbusier despised it as " childish megalomania ". Ivan Zholtovsky bizarrely combined Italian Renaissance with the Pharos lighthouse and the Colosseum . Hamilton's Art Deco draft
9016-694: The Palais de Tokyo and Palais de Chaillot , both built by collectives of architects for the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne . In the late 1920s and early 1930s, an exuberant American variant of Art Deco appeared in the Chrysler Building , Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center in New York City, and Guardian Building in Detroit. The first skyscrapers in Chicago and New York had been designed in
9200-590: The Russian Revolution of 1917, Russian avant-garde artists and architects began searching for a new Soviet style which could replace traditional neoclassicism. The new architectural movements were closely tied with the literary and artistic movements of the period, the futurism of poet Vladimir Mayakovskiy , the Suprematism of painter Kasimir Malevich , and the colorful Rayonism of painter Mikhail Larionov . The most startling design that emerged
9384-589: The Temple of Amun at Karnak . Contrary to popular opinion, the marble used in the station did not come from the demolished Cathedral. The spacious platform is covered with squares of gray and red granite and the walls, originally tiled, are now faced with white Koyelga marble. The station is illuminated by concealed lamps set into the tops of the columns. A model of the station won two Grand Prix awards at expositions in Paris (1937) and Brussels (1958). In March 1941
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#17327810985549568-428: The uniqueness of the future palace: it should be radically different from any existing public building. It sent a clear message that the entries would be judged not by professionals but by politicians, who do not and would not align with any existing professional faction. By the end of June, the USDS had collected 15 entries representing all active movements, as well as Iofan and his brother Dmitry . Most, including
9752-570: The "Palace of Labor"; in October 1922 the Moscow Architectural Society [ ru ] launched a competition for a different "Palace of Labor", endorsed by the same Sergei Kirov. Both projects were large enough to seat any conceivable convention, and none of them could materialize in a country devastated by wars and revolutions . In post-revolution Russian language the word palace ( Russian : дворец ) denoted
9936-424: The "freed proletarian" was merely 18 meter (60') tall. Structural engineering issues had not been addressed at all. The Politburo was not completely impressed with the result, and instructed Iofan to install a giant statue of Lenin, 50 to 75 meter (160 to 250') tall, on top of the palace. The official narrative published in 1940 presented this proposal as Stalin's personal initiative. Molotov hesitated, arguing that
10120-523: The 1920s and 1930s it became a highly popular style in the United States, South America, India, China, Australia, and Japan. In Europe, Art Deco was particularly popular for department stores and movie theaters. The style reached its peak in Europe at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925, which featured art deco pavilions and decoration from twenty countries. Only two pavilions were purely modernist;
10304-478: The 1920s at an unprecedented and so far unexplained pace. By 1931 he had a proven record of completing high-profile projects, including the enormous House on the Embankment with its cinema hall [ ru ] —the largest modern auditorium in Moscow. Stalin certainly endorsed Iofan's appointment, probably on Yenukidze's recommendation. Iofan was difficult to work with soon forcing Kryukov to resign. In
10488-473: The 1930s usually appealed to the "improved welfare of the masses". Constructivism was presented as a temporary, low-cost ersatz architecture. Once the nation had overcome the bitter poverty of the 1920s, "the people" (i.e. the communist state) disposed with stopgap solutions and rightfully embraced "quality" architecture. After World War II the "welfare of the masses" fell to an all-time low and Soviet critics adjusted accordingly. They painted modernism as
10672-578: The 1950s and 1960s. The group met once more in Paris in 1937 to discuss public housing and was scheduled to meet in the United States in 1939, but the meeting was cancelled because of the war. The legacy of the CIAM was a roughly common style and doctrine which helped define modern architecture in Europe and the United States after World War II. The Art Deco architectural style (called Style Moderne in France),
10856-433: The 1960s. A geological survey of the site began in 1933 and continued into 1934. Drilling to depths of 110 metres (360 ft) confirmed the feasibility of construction. The uppermost limestone sill was too thin to carry the main building's weight, but the second one, 20 metres (66 ft) below the water level, was sufficiently solid. Groundwater in the area contained very little sulfates and chlorides , and
11040-428: The 20th century and became dominant after World War II until the 1980s, when it was gradually replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture . Modern architecture emerged at the end of the 19th century from revolutions in technology, engineering, and building materials, and from a desire to break away from historical architectural styles and invent something that
11224-623: The Chicago office of Louis Sullivan , who pioneered the first tall steel-frame office buildings in Chicago, and who famously stated " form follows function ". Wright set out to break all the traditional rules. He was particularly famous for his Prairie Houses , including the Winslow House in River Forest, Illinois (1893–94); Arthur Heurtley House (1902) and Robie House (1909); sprawling, geometric residences without decoration, with strong horizontal lines which seemed to grow out of
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#173278109855411408-725: The Esprit Nouveau pavilion of Le Corbusier, which represented his idea for a mass-produced housing unit, and the pavilion of the USSR, by Konstantin Melnikov in a flamboyantly futurist style. Later French landmarks in the Art Deco style included the Grand Rex movie theater in Paris, La Samaritaine department store by Henri Sauvage (1926–28) and the Social and Economic Council building in Paris (1937–38) by Auguste Perret , and
11592-705: The German Werkbund, and became the head of the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933. proposing a wide variety of modernist plans for urban reconstruction. His most famous modernist work was the German pavilion for the 1929 international exposition in Barcelona. It was a work of pure modernism, with glass and concrete walls and clean, horizontal lines. Though it was only a temporary structure, and was torn down in 1930, it became, along with Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye , one of
11776-425: The German projects gave that particular style a name, Brick Expressionism . The Austrian philosopher, architect, and social critic Rudolf Steiner also departed as far as possible from traditional architectural forms. His Second Goetheanum , built from 1926 near Basel , Switzerland and Mendelsohn 's Einsteinturm in Potsdam, Germany, were based on no traditional models and had entirely original shapes. After
11960-429: The Iofans, leaned toward modernist architecture. Iofan had considered various alternatives, and ruled out compact centric floor plans in favor of a sprawling group of buildings aligned along the north–south axis of the cathedral site. The two halls were placed at the ends of the axis, with spacious inner courtyards and a lean, tall tower in between. The draft did not impress contemporary observers. The USDS did not name
12144-474: The Kremlin and Red Square. There were no large or otherwise valuable buildings to raze; demolition of existing low-rise buildings and the relocation of their inhabitants required little time or effort. Left-wing architectural factions immediately disputed this economically sound choice. In April–May the Technical Council reviewed various alternatives and confirmed the selection of the Okhotny Ryad site. Molotov and Voroshilov thought differently. On 25 May,
12328-444: The Netherlands, and Adolf Loos from Czechoslovakia. A delegation of Soviet architects was invited to attend, but they were unable to obtain visas. Later members included Josep Lluís Sert of Spain and Alvar Aalto of Finland. No one attended from the United States. A second meeting was organized in 1930 in Brussels by Victor Bourgeois on the topic "Rational methods for groups of habitations". A third meeting, on "The functional city",
12512-424: The Politburo co-opted Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Helfreich . Iofan remained the chief architect, but he now had to deal with two experienced and influential co-authors. The theatrical, dramatic visionary architecture that emerged from this collaboration was approved and publicized to great pomp in February 1934 despite a complete lack of technical and economic estimates. The official narrative presented
12696-413: The Politburo announced the final decision in favor of Iofan. The winning design closely followed Iofan's earlier proposal — a compact, ziggurat -like stack of three cylinders perched on a massive stylobate and flanked with colonnades, ramps and grand staircases. Total height of the core structure reached 220 meters (720'), but there was no office tower and no statue of Lenin yet. The proposed statue of
12880-404: The Politburo, advised by Molotov and Voroshilov, voted in favor of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour site. Hannes Meyer and the ASNOVA supported this option. Iofan had secretly studied all the alternatives beforehand and was quite comfortable with the cathedral site. It required extensive demolition and presented so far unknown technical challenges, but it was the largest site and it formed
13064-446: The Schindler house. Schindler also contributed to American modernism with his design for the Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach . The Austrian architect Richard Neutra moved to the United States in 1923, worked for a short time with Frank Lloyd Wright, also quickly became a force in American architecture through his modernist design for the same client, the Lovell Health House in Los Angeles. Neutra's most notable architectural work
13248-489: The Shchuko-Helfreich proposal or be removed from the project. He complied, and the design evolved along the middle road between the two extremes. Placement of a giant statue on top of an already enormous structure caused a disproportional, nonlinear increase in building height. To make the statue visible from the ground, architects had to mount it on a tall but narrow, tapering pedestal—a "skyscraper" standing on
13432-527: The Soviet Pavilion for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925; it was a highly geometric vertical construction of glass and steel crossed by a diagonal stairway, and crowned with a hammer and sickle. The leading group of constructivist architects, led by Vesnin brothers and Moisei Ginzburg , was publishing the 'Contemporary Architecture' journal. This group created several major constructivist projects in
13616-462: The Soviets") metro station, placed just outside the watertight perimeter, was built in less than a year in 1934–1935. Modern architecture Modern architecture , also called modernist architecture , was an architectural movement and style that was prominent in the 20th century, between the earlier Art Deco and later postmodern movements. Modern architecture was based upon new and innovative technologies of construction (particularly
13800-824: The Spanish architect, whose pavilion of the Second Spanish Republic was pure modernist glass and steel box. Inside it displayed the most modernist work of the Exposition, the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso . The original building was destroyed after the Exposition, but it was recreated in 1992 in Barcelona. The rise of nationalism in the 1930s was reflected in the Fascist architecture of Italy, and Nazi architecture of Germany, based on classical styles and designed to express power and grandeur. The Nazi architecture, much of it designed by Albert Speer ,
13984-480: The Technical Council convened in the Kremlin, where Stalin presented his arguments in favor of the cathedral site. Kaganovich feared the destruction of an Orthodox shrine would spark an antisemitic backlash and suggested a site in Sparrow Hills , but Stalin's viewpoint prevailed. Historians disagree over the interpretation of this meeting. According to Kuznetsov, the decision had not yet been finalized, and
14168-495: The United States entered the Second World War. During the 1920s and 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright resolutely refused to associate himself with any architectural movements. He considered his architecture to be entirely unique and his own. Between 1916 and 1922, he broke away from his earlier prairie house style and worked instead on houses decorated with textured blocks of cement; this became known as his "Mayan style", after
14352-456: The United States led to the design and construction of enormous government-financed housing projects, usually in run-down center of American cities, and in the suburbs of Paris and other European cities, where land was available, One of the largest reconstruction projects was that of the city center of Le Havre, destroyed by the Germans and by Allied bombing in 1944; 133 hectares of buildings in
14536-460: The architects could still propose other sites. According to Sona Hoisington, the decision was final, but its main objective was not the palace but the destruction of the cathedral, with the project being a purely political statement, made without prior feasibility studies and completely disregarding the economics. According to Chmelnizki, the decision was final; it was the first step in the development of Stalinist architecture . On 5 June 1931,
14720-487: The architects of the 1930s abandoned constructivism voluntarily and then forged the new monumental style on their own. The "excesses" of Stalinist architecture were the architects' fault only. The party, which carefully advised the professionals, bears no responsibility for what was actually built. A toned-down version of the same narrative persisted until the 2000s, notably in the works of Selim Khan-Magomedov [ ru ] . Western authors, likewise, did not produce
14904-405: The architectural theorist and historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc . In his 1872 book Entretiens sur L'Architecture , he urged: "use the means and knowledge given to us by our times, without the intervening traditions which are no longer viable today, and in that way we can inaugurate a new architecture. For each function its material; for each material its form and its ornament." This book influenced
15088-446: The army; the installed structural steel was disassembled in 1942 for fortifications and bridges. After World War II , Joseph Stalin lost interest in the palace. Iofan produced several revised, scaled-down designs but failed to reanimate the project. The alternative Palace of the Soviets in Sparrow Hills , which was proposed after Stalin's death, did not proceed beyond the architectural competition stage. On 30 December 1922
15272-539: The autumn of 1931 the chair of the USDS passed to party apparatchik Vasily Mikhailov [ ru ] , the architect's former superior at the House on the Embankment project. Kryukov, Mikhailov, Rykov, Yenukidze and Iofan's colleagues at the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee would be killed in Stalin's purges, but the unsinkable architect would survive unharmed and retain his office, despite
15456-524: The balance between the statue and the building. Shchuko and Helfreich thought otherwise, and did not hesitate to perch the giant statue on top of the building, extending its height by 100 metres (330 ft). Initially, their base structure was a slab-sided rectangular block rather than Iofan's stack of cylinders. Iofan objected, but Shchuko appealed directly to the Construction Council. The politicians summoned Iofan and forced him to accept
15640-618: The best-known landmarks of modernist architecture. A reconstructed version now stands on the original site in Barcelona. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they viewed the Bauhaus as a training ground for communists, and closed the school in 1933. Gropius left Germany and went to England, then to the United States, where he and Marcel Breuer both joined the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design , and became
15824-646: The buildings designed between 1945 and the 1960s. The late modernist style is characterized by bold shapes and sharp corners, slightly more defined than Brutalist architecture . The International Style of architecture had appeared in Europe, particularly in the Bauhaus movement, in the late 1920s. In 1932 it was recognized and given a name at an Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized by architect Philip Johnson and architectural critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock , Between 1937 and 1941, following
16008-462: The center of the fast-growing American cities, and the availability of new technologies, including fireproof steel frames and improvements in the safety elevator invented by Elisha Otis in 1852. The first steel-framed "skyscraper", The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, was ten stories high. It was designed by William Le Baron Jenney in 1883, and was briefly the tallest building in the world. Louis Sullivan built another monumental new structure,
16192-409: The center were flattened, destroying 12,500 buildings and leaving 40,000 persons homeless. The architect Auguste Perret , a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete and prefabricated materials, designed and built an entirely new center to the city, with apartment blocks, cultural, commercial, and government buildings. He restored historic monuments when possible, and built a new church, St. Joseph, with
16376-407: The change appeared to be a natural development within the professional community. The overwhelming majority of Soviet, Russian and foreign authors, with the notable exception of Antonia Cunliffe, agree the competitions represented a deliberate rejection of modernism in favor of monumental historicism . The connection has always been public but subject to different interpretations. Soviet authors of
16560-434: The choice of the top three winners surprised and embarrassed everyone involved. The Politburo made the decision secretly, and the Construction Council announced it publicly five days later on 28 February 1931. The three prizes were awarded to Boris Iofan, Ivan Zholtovsky and the virtually unknown British-American autodidact Hector Hamilton . Iofan presented a revised version of his earlier proposal, re-aligned along
16744-477: The combined volumes of the six tallest American skyscrapers. This was especially important to the Soviet state for propaganda purposes . Boris Iofan 's victory in a series of four architectural competitions held between 1931 and 1933 signaled a sharp turn in Soviet architecture, from radical modernism to the monumental historicism that would come to characterize Stalinist architecture . The definitive design by Iofan, Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Helfreich
16928-535: The competition for the headquarters of the League of Nations in 1927. In the same year, the German Werkbund organized an architectural exposition at the Weissenhof Estate Stuttgart . Seventeen leading modernist architects in Europe were invited to design twenty-one houses; Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe played a major part. In 1927 Le Corbusier, Pierre Chareau, and others proposed
17112-554: The competition was a matter of politics, rather than art, and that Stalin had the final say. They were willing to cooperate with the dictator and felt betrayed when it turned out he had his own plans. Their message amounted to an ultimatum , threatening to retract all support to the Soviet Union. It is not known if Stalin ever read these letters, but the withdrawal of unwanted "allies" certainly suited him well. The third, closed, competition among 12 invited teams of architects
17296-429: The complex that was actually built. Kropotkinskaya was constructed in a massive open trench measuring 176 metres (577 ft) long by 25 metres (82 ft) wide. The tunnels from Biblioteka Imeni Lenina were constructed using the cut and cover technique. The combination of unrestricted space and dry soil made for ideal conditions, and construction of the station took only 180 days from start to finish. Kropotkinskaya
17480-547: The concrete cube-based Ennis House of 1924 in Los Angeles. The style appeared in the late 1920s and 1930s in all major American cities. The style was used most often in office buildings, but it also appeared in the enormous movie palaces that were built in large cities when sound films were introduced. The beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 brought an end to lavishly decorated Art Deco architecture and
17664-406: The concrete slab. Columns of the second segment were placed at a 22° angle, forming a tent over the grand hall up to the 140-metre (460 ft) mark. Above it, a traditional vertical frame would be used. Two massive steel rings, similar to the hoops that hold the staves of a barrel together would hold the tent. These rings, weighing an estimated 28 thousand tons, were the largest, the heaviest and
17848-572: The construction of clusters of slender eight- to ten-story high-rise apartment towers for workers. While Gropius was active at the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe led the modernist architectural movement in Berlin. Inspired by the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands, he built clusters of concrete summer houses and proposed a project for a glass office tower. He became the vice president of
18032-399: The construction of three new thermal power stations . Internal cleaning and waste disposal systems contained twelve central vacuum cleaning stations of 750 kW each, and thirty industrial garbage disposal units with a combined capacity of seven tons/day. Heavy air conditioning equipment would have been located below ground level, the conditioned air would be delivered to each seat in
18216-439: The core. The core's concrete foundations rested on limestone bedrock 20 metres (66 ft) below the level of the Moskva River . The much lighter, 90-metre (300 ft) tall stylobate could safely rest on the uppermost limestone sill , 3–5 metres (9.8–16.4 ft) below the ground. The stylobate design used a traditional steel frame; on the contrary, the frame of the core was radically unconventional. Instead of running
18400-485: The crowd. The idea of placing a giant statue of Lenin on top of the national administrative center (originally, the Comintern building) goes back to a 1924 proposal by Viktor Balikhin , then a graduate student at Vkhutemas : " Arc lamps will flood the villages, towns, parks and squares, calling everyone to honor Lenin even at night ...". The proposal was later popularized by Balikhin's rationalist movement,
18584-459: The designer Marcel Breuer . Gropius became an important theorist of modernism, writing The Idea and Construction in 1923. He was an advocate of standardization in architecture, and the mass construction of rationally designed apartment blocks for factory workers. In 1928 he was commissioned by the Siemens company to build apartment for workers in the suburbs of Berlin, and in 1929 he proposed
18768-471: The designers and engineers were also awarded the Stalin prize of the USSR of the second order for architecture and construction. Kropotkinskaya opened with only one entrance vestibule, located at the end of Gogolevskiy Boulevard. This U-shaped structure was designed by S.M. Kravets and features two separate pavilions joined by a central arch. In late 1950s the station was given a slight reconstruction replacing
18952-587: The earliest and most influential industrial buildings in the modernist style, the AEG turbine factory , a functional monument of steel and concrete. In 1911–1913, Adolf Meyer and Walter Gropius , who had both worked for Behrens, built another revolutionary industrial plant, the Fagus Factory in Alfeld an der Laine, a building without ornament where every construction element was on display. The Werkbund organized
19136-663: The earth, and which echoed the wide flat spaces of the American prairie. His Larkin Building (1904–1906) in Buffalo, New York , Unity Temple (1905) in Oak Park, Illinois and Unity Temple had highly original forms and no connection with historical precedents. At the end of the 19th century, the first skyscrapers began to appear in the United States. They were a response to the shortage of land and high cost of real estate in
19320-469: The existing city; there was nothing distinctly "Soviet", either. The state demanded "supermonumentality", and found it in Iofan's Art Deco proposal, which was then replicated in lesser projects across the country. The decree of 10 May 1933 expressly warned Iofan that the politicians felt free to "help" him by attaching other architects to the design process. The threat materialized on 4 June, when
19504-402: The face of Lenin would not be seen from the main plaza, but had to bow to Stalin and Voroshilov. According to Andrey Barkhin, the true purpose of the fourth stage was to narrow down stylistic choice to one of two alternatives: either following an existing, historical model, or creating something completely new. Iofan managed to suit both sides: although his proposal looked novel, it was in fact
19688-449: The first glass and metal curtain wall . These developments together led to the first steel-framed skyscraper, the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1884 by William Le Baron Jenney and based on the works of Viollet le Duc. French industrialist François Coignet was the first to use iron-reinforced concrete, that is, concrete strengthened with iron bars, as a technique for constructing buildings. In 1853 Coignet built
19872-490: The first iron reinforced concrete structure, a four-storey house in the suburbs of Paris. A further important step forward was the invention of the safety elevator by Elisha Otis , first demonstrated at the New York Crystal Palace exposition in 1854, which made tall office and apartment buildings practical. Another important technology for the new architecture was electric light, which greatly reduced
20056-590: The floors of the lobbies, for cleaning the soles of the visitors' shoes. Moscow's planners viewed the palace as the hub of the Ilyich Alley , a new southwest-to-northeast axis aligned along present-day Komsomolsky Prospect , Volkhonka Street , Manezhnaya Square and Sakharov Prospect . The concept developed by the Vesnin brothers and Ivan Leonidov in the 1920s was incorporated in the 1935 urban reconstruction plan [ ru ] in its basic form, and
20240-747: The foundation of an international conference to establish the basis for a common style. The first meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne or International Congresses of Modern Architects (CIAM), was held in a chateau on Lake Leman in Switzerland 26–28 June 1928. Those attending included Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens , Auguste Perret , Pierre Chareau and Tony Garnier from France; Victor Bourgeois from Belgium; Walter Gropius , Erich Mendelsohn , Ernst May and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from Germany; Josef Frank from Austria; Mart Stam and Gerrit Rietveld from
20424-449: The grand hall via a network of ducts running under each row of seats. The placement of air intakes required further research on the distribution of pollutants in the air; the designers knew that the intakes should have been raised to at least 40 metres (130 ft), but the exact height was not yet known. Apparently dust prevention and cleaning the dust were paramount concerns. The designers even provided for vibrating brushes, installed in
20608-739: The headquarters of a shipping company, and was modeled after a giant steamship, a triangular building with a sharply pointed bow. It was constructed of dark brick, and used external piers to express its vertical structure. Its external decoration borrowed from Gothic cathedrals, as did its internal arcades. Hans Poelzig was another notable expressionist architect. In 1919 he built the Großes Schauspielhaus , an immense theater in Berlin, seating five thousand spectators for theater impresario Max Reinhardt . It featured elongated shapes like stalagmites hanging down from its gigantic dome, and lights on massive columns in its foyer. He also constructed
20792-457: The incriminating connections. Iofan prepared the terms of architectural competitions and controlled all the USDS's paperwork, giving him an advantage over any potential competitor. This obvious conflict of interest provoked speculation that the competitions were rigged in Iofan's favor, or that he was the chosen architect from the very start and the competitions were merely a ruse. In the 2010s archival research confirmed this hypothesis, which
20976-400: The industrialization many constructivist buildings were erected in provincial cities. The regional industrial centers, including Ekaterinburg , Kharkiv or Ivanovo , were rebuilt in the constructivist manner; some cities, like Magnitogorsk or Zaporizhzhia , were constructed anew (the so-called socgorod , or 'socialist city'). The style fell markedly out of favor in the 1930s, replaced by
21160-424: The inherent danger of fires caused by gas in the 19th century. The debut of new materials and techniques inspired architects to break away from the neoclassical and eclectic models that dominated European and American architecture in the late 19th century, most notably eclecticism , Victorian and Edwardian architecture , and the Beaux-Arts architectural style . This break with the past was particularly urged by
21344-408: The instructions and presented compact, monumental but uninspiring proposals. Iofan settled for a tall stack of four cylinders, wrapped in rows of white "ribbed style" pylons. The jury declined to appoint a winner and announced yet another round of competition. Stalin, on the contrary, privately notified Kaganovich, Molotov and Voroshilov that "Iofan's plan is unconditionally the best..." and compiled
21528-486: The latter on elevators . There were to be 130 passenger elevators carrying 25 people each, 27 service elevators and 20 elevators with firefighting equipment. Since no elevator could travel the whole height of the building, visitors to the top floors had to make two or three transfers, sometimes via escalators or stairs. Electrical consumption of the palace was specified at 90 MW peak, and 90 million kWh per annum. Fault-tolerant, redundant electricity supply required
21712-454: The military and government. The semi-circular metal Nissen hut of World War I was revived as the Quonset hut . The years immediately after the war saw the development of radical experimental houses, including the enameled-steel Lustron house (1947–1950), and Buckminster Fuller's experimental aluminum Dymaxion House . The unprecedented destruction caused by the war was another factor in
21896-451: The modernist Fagus turbine factory. The Bauhaus was a fusion of the prewar Academy of Arts and the school of technology. In 1926 it was transferred from Weimar to Dessau; Gropius designed the new school and student dormitories in the new, purely functional modernist style he was encouraging. The school brought together modernists in all fields; the faculty included the modernist painters Vasily Kandinsky , Joseph Albers and Paul Klee , and
22080-476: The modernists, led by Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens in France, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Germany, and Konstantin Melnikov in the new Soviet Union , who wanted only pure forms and the elimination of any decoration. Louis Sullivan popularized the axiom Form follows function to emphasize the importance of utilitarian simplicity in modern architecture. Art Deco architects such as Auguste Perret and Henri Sauvage often made
22264-707: The more grandiose nationalist styles that Stalin favored. Constructivist architects and even Le Corbusier projects for the new Palace of the Soviets from 1931 to 1933, but the winner was an early Stalinist building in the style termed Postconstructivism . The last major Russian constructivist building, by Boris Iofan , was built for the Paris World Exhibition (1937), where it faced the pavilion of Nazi Germany by Hitler's architect Albert Speer . The New Objectivity (in German Neue Sachlichkeit, sometimes also translated as New Sobriety)
22448-438: The most expensive elements of the frame. The statue of Lenin, weighing around 6,000 tons, was to be built around its own steel frame, and clad in monel sheeting with an estimated lifetime of two thousand years. External walls followed the American pattern of hollow-body brick infill and granite exterior cladding. According to the official narrative, Stalin instructed the designers to avoid unnecessary visual clutter and use
22632-434: The most innovative expressionist projects, including Bruno Taut 's Alpine Architecture and Hermann Finsterlin 's Formspiels , remained on paper. Scenography for theatre and films provided another outlet for the expressionist imagination, and provided supplemental incomes for designers attempting to challenge conventions in a harsh economic climate. A particular type, using bricks to create its forms (rather than concrete)
22816-552: The name of the Cité Radieuse (and later "Cité du Fada" "City of the crazy one" in Marseille French), after his book about futuristic urban planning. Following his doctrines of design, the building had a concrete frame raised up above the street on pylons. It contained 337 duplex apartment units, fit into the framework like pieces of a puzzle. Each unit had two levels and a small terrace. Interior "streets" had shops,
23000-504: The need of supporting pillars, replaced stone and brick as the primary material for modernist architects. The first concrete apartment buildings by Perret and Sauvage were covered with ceramic tiles, but in 1905 Perret built the first concrete parking garage on 51 rue de Ponthieu in Paris; here the concrete was left bare, and the space between the concrete was filled with glass windows. Henri Sauvage added another construction innovation in an apartment building on Rue Vavin in Paris (1912–1914);
23184-425: The new policy. Architects kept on producing and publishing modernist drafts until at least 1935, but such proposals had no chance to be built. Rudolf Wolters , who came to Novosibirsk in the summer of 1932, reported that by the time of his arrival the provincial party executives had already received orders from Moscow to build "in classical style" only. On the national level, no such orders were formally published;
23368-605: The newly rebuilt Cathedral or the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts . In a long-term future, a transfer to the Kalininskaya Line is planned to open. The future station will be called Volkhonka. [REDACTED] Media related to Kropotkinskaya at Wikimedia Commons Palace of the Soviets The Palace of the Soviets ( Russian : Дворец Советов , romanized : Dvorets Sovetov )
23552-412: The official style. Then, he artfully degraded the social status and self-esteem of the architectural profession—which was a prerequisite to nationalization. Finally, he destroyed the ties that united the architects into firms, groups and movements. In the end, the former diverse and independent professional community was reduced to a homogenous mass of obedient individuals. Anna Selivanova later published
23736-498: The original cast of the upper pillars was replaced by marble and the floor was relayed with granite. The reconstruction finished with a new entrance which faces the Cathedral and Moskva River which was opened on 16 July 1960. Because of the demise of the Palace of Soviets project, much of Kropotkinskaya's planned ridership never materialized. As of 2013 the station serves about 42,050 passengers daily, many of them tourists visiting
23920-547: The outcome as a joint effort of the three peers, but the reality was more complicated. In the second half of 1933, Iofan's team in Moscow and the Shchuko-Helfreich team in Leningrad operated separately. Iofan did not want to alter his 1933 design radically or to increase its already substantial height. Contrary to the instructions received in May, he preferred placing the statue of Lenin on a standalone pedestal or tower, to maintain
24104-518: The outcome was sealed by the Politburo . In December the stripped hulk of the cathedral was publicly blown up . The Okhotny Ryad site was also demolished for the construction of the STO Building [ ru ] (1932–1935) and Arkady Mordvinov 's residential block on Tverskaya Street (1937–1939). The idea of destroying cultural heritage was not a novelty to the Soviet regime, as in
24288-721: The outcome. Another covert purpose of the competition—suppression of undesirable architecture in a manner similar to the " Degenerate art " campaign in Germany—would be revealed by Alexey Tolstoy (another party insider) later, just before the announcement of the winners. Tolstoy clearly warned the architects that Gothic architecture , " American skyscraperism " and " corbusianism " had become distinctly unwanted. The expert jury chaired by Molotov received 112 brief proposals and 160 proper drafts, including 24 by foreign architects. Dignitaries like Le Corbusier , Walter Gropius or Erich Mendelsohn were preselected and invited by Iofan for
24472-515: The palace's grand hall was much smaller than Albert Speer 's Volkshalle , designed to hold 180 thousand people, but the Russian palace surpassed the Volkshalle in total height. The completed palace would have consisted of two parts resting on two independent foundations: the circular core with the grand hall, the office tower and the statue of Lenin; and a rectangular stylobate adjacent to
24656-408: The palace, including the statue, was set at 416 metres (1,365 ft), taller than the recently completed Empire State Building . Being a much wider structure, the palace was estimated to weigh over 1.5 million tons, and have a gross volume of over 7.5 million cubic meters (9.8 million cu. yd.). Its net internal volume would have surpassed the combined volume of six largest American skyscrapers of
24840-457: The pavilion of the Soviet Union, topped by enormous statues of a worker and a peasant carrying a hammer and sickle. As to the modernists, Le Corbusier was practically, but not quite invisible at the Exposition; he participated in the Pavilion des temps nouveaux, but focused mainly on his painting. The one modernist who did attract attention was a collaborator of Le Corbusier, Josep Lluis Sert ,
25024-411: The period between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches in the Soviet Union fell from 29,584 to less than 500 (1.7%) as a result of demolitions or conversions into secular buildings. In April 1931, the chosen architects and architectural groups received terms of the first, preliminary competition. The brief, prepared by Iofan and signed by Kryukov, reiterated the monumentality and emphasizing
25208-637: The period. The palace would require 350.000 tons of structural steel , six times more than the Empire State Building and almost twice as much as the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge ). The grand hall seating 21 thousand people had to have an inner diameter of 130 metres (430 ft), an outer diameter of 160 metres (520 ft), a height of 100 metres (330 ft) meters and internal volume of 970,000 cubic meters (1.3 million cu. yd.). The "small" hall had 5,000 seats and
25392-470: The pit down to the bedrock, the workers removed 160,000 cubic metres (5,700,000 cu ft) of rock and 620,000 cubic metres (22,000,000 cu ft) of soft soil. The core's concrete foundations, consisting of two concentric rings with an external diameter of 160 metres (520 ft), were completed in January 1938. In a related but independent development, the nearby Dvorets Sovetov ("Palace of
25576-536: The purely geometric trylon and periphery sculpture. It had many monuments to Art Deco, such as the Ford Pavilion in the Streamline Moderne style, but also included the new International Style that would replace Art Deco as the dominant style after the War. The Pavilions of Finland, by Alvar Aalto , of Sweden by Sven Markelius , and of Brazil by Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa , looked forward to
25760-421: The pyramids of the ancient Mayan civilization. He experimented for a time with modular mass-produced housing. He identified his architecture as "Usonian", a combination of USA, "utopian" and "organic social order". His business was severely affected by the beginning of the Great Depression that began in 1929; he had fewer wealthy clients who wanted to experiment. Between 1928 and 1935, he built only two buildings:
25944-463: The reinforced concrete building was in steps, with each floor set back from the floor below, creating a series of terraces. Between 1910 and 1913, Auguste Perret built the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées , a masterpiece of reinforced concrete construction, with Art Deco sculptural bas-reliefs on the façade by Antoine Bourdelle . Because of the concrete construction, no columns blocked the spectator's view of
26128-434: The rest of the decade, along with the subsidiary interior design and urban planning tasks, and the creation of factories and workshops. The definitive exterior design took its final shape by 1937. The number of stacked cylinders was reduced from five to four with progressively decreasing, rather than uniform, spacings between the pylons. The stainless steel moldings attached to the pylons widened progressively with height for
26312-473: The rise Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, most of the leaders of the German Bauhaus movement found a new home in the United States, and played an important part in the development of American modern architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright was eighty years old in 1947; he had been present at the beginning of American modernism, and though he refused to accept that he belonged to any movement, continued to play
26496-444: The rise of modern architecture. Large parts of major cities, from Berlin, Tokyo, and Dresden to Rotterdam and east London; all the port cities of France, particularly Le Havre , Brest, Marseille, Cherbourg had been destroyed by bombing. In the United States, little civilian construction had been done since the 1920s; housing was needed for millions of American soldiers returning from the war. The postwar housing shortages in Europe and
26680-472: The same Politburo evidence as substantial. Kuznetsov says mundane issues like deliveries of firewood mattered more than architectural follies. Apart from a few publicized meetings, there is no evidence that Stalin ever invited architects to the Kremlin. The only architect who had spoken to Stalin regularly was his personal contractor Miron Merzhanov , who remained modernist throughout the 1930s. Yet another hypothesis suggested by Sona Hoisington in 2003 views
26864-414: The scenes. According to Kuznetsov, Iofan initiated and managed the competitions for his own benefit, to harvest free ideas from his unsuspecting colleagues. He never agreed to be a temporary placeholder and did not intend to give up his lead to anyone. In March 1931, the Construction Council chose a compact site in the former Okhotny Ryad Street market, just a few hundred meters (yards) north-west from
27048-450: The spirit of Italian Rationalism of the 1920s continued, with the work of architect Giuseppe Terragni . His Casa del Fascio in Como, headquarters of the local Fascist party, was a perfectly modernist building, with geometric proportions (33.2 meters long by 16.6 meters high), a clean façade of marble, and a Renaissance-inspired interior courtyard. Opposed to Terragni was Marcello Piacitini,
27232-437: The stage. Otto Wagner , in Vienna, was another pioneer of the new style. In his book Moderne Architektur (1895) he had called for a more rationalist style of architecture, based on "modern life". He designed a stylized ornamental metro station at Karlsplatz in Vienna (1888–89), then an ornamental Art Nouveau residence, Majolika House (1898), before moving to a much more geometric and simplified style, without ornament, in
27416-410: The statue and the design by Sergey Merkurov remained controversial throughout the 1930s and were harshly criticized in public by Boris Korolyov , Nikolai Tomsky , Martiros Saryan and other involved artists. A salient function of the palace project was the transfer of modern technology to the backward Soviet industry. At the end of 1934, Iofan, Shchuko, Helfreikh and their associates departed on
27600-535: The structure, allowing glass curtain walls on the façade and open floor plans, independent of the structure. They were always white, and had no ornament or decoration on the outside or inside. The best-known of these houses was the Villa Savoye , built in 1928–1931 in the Paris suburb of Poissy . An elegant white box wrapped with a ribbon of glass windows around on the façade, with living space that opened upon an interior garden and countryside around, raised up by
27784-467: The style was often used for new airport terminals, train and bus stations, and for gas stations and diners built along the growing American highway system. In the 1930s the style was used not only in buildings, but in railroad locomotives, and even refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. It both borrowed from industrial design and influenced it. In the United States, the Great Depression led to
27968-415: The stylistic change as a direct and unintended consequence of the destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Demolition of the largest building in Moscow left a void in the city fabric that required, at the very least, an equally monumental replacement. The modernist drafts received in 1931 could not make up for the loss. They lacked "a center of gravity, a sense of hierarchy", and any connection to
28152-437: The summer of 1931, the already bloated project was renamed the "Palace of the Soviets". In February 1931, the government set up a three-tier project management structure. The Construction Council was a decorative political committee chaired by Kliment Voroshilov and later Vyacheslav Molotov ; it served as a proxy for announcing decisions made by Stalin and the Politburo . The subordinate Construction Directorate (USDS)
28336-490: The teachers of a generation of American postwar architects. In 1937 Mies van der Rohe also moved to the United States; he became one of the most famous designers of postwar American skyscrapers. Expressionism , which appeared in Germany between 1910 and 1925, was a counter-movement against the strictly functional architecture of the Bauhaus and Werkbund. Its advocates, including Bruno Taut , Hans Poelzig , Fritz Hoger and Erich Mendelsohn , wanted to create architecture that
28520-442: The title and role of chief architect. A recent repatriant from Italy and a long-time student of Italian architect Armando Brasini , Iofan was a maverick within the Soviet architectural community and had no obligations to any group. He was also a trusted insider of the party elite, with particularly strong ties to Alexei Rykov and Avel Yenukidze . His career with Soviet state clients began in 1922 in Rome and proceeded through
28704-520: The top of the grand hall. The increased height of the pedestal made the statue appear smaller, and the cycle repeated itself. According to the official narrative, experiments with scale models led to the conclusion that the appropriate height of the statue is exactly 100 metres (330 ft). Lenin's head alone had to be almost as large as the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions . The location of
28888-469: The umbrella of state-owned design companies and the Union of Soviet Architects [ ru ] . By the end of 1932, modernist architecture in general, and its constructivist, rationalist [ ru ] and formalist movements in particular, came to a halt, giving way to the emerging Stalinist architecture. Modernist projects laid down earlier were gradually completed and often "improved" to suit
29072-415: The use of glass , steel , and concrete ); the principle functionalism (i.e. that form should follow function ); an embrace of minimalism ; and a rejection of ornament . According to Le Corbusier , the roots of the movement were to be found in the works of Eugène Viollet le duc , while Mies van der Rohe was heavily inspired by Karl Friedrich Schinkel . The movement emerged in the first half of
29256-551: The wake of the First Five Year Plan – including colossal Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (1932) – and made an attempt to start the standardization of living blocks with Ginzburg's Narkomfin building . A number of architects from the pre-Soviet period also took up the constructivist style. The most famous example was Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow (1924), by Alexey Shchusev (1924) The main centers of constructivist architecture were Moscow and Leningrad; however, during
29440-413: The whole vertical height of the building, the palace's load-bearing columns had to wrap around the grand hall. Thus, the frame was split into three distinct segments. The lower segment, 60 metres (200 ft) tall, comprised 32 pairs of vertical columns placed around the grand hall and connected to the foundation slab via massive riveted "shoes". These "shoes" rested on massive steel plates implanted into
29624-572: Was a project to construct a political convention center in Moscow on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Saviour . The main function of the palace was to house sessions of the Supreme Soviet in its 130-metre (430 ft) wide and 100-metre (330 ft) tall grand hall seating over 20,000 people. If built, the 416-metre (1,365 ft) tall palace would have become the world's tallest structure, with an internal volume surpassing
29808-462: Was a prototype for the modernist office buildings that followed. (It was torn down in 1957, because it stood in the zone between East and West Berlin, where the Berlin Wall was constructed.) Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he moved to England (1933), then to the United States (1941). Fritz Höger was another notable Expressionist architect of the period. His Chilehaus was built as
29992-437: Was afterwards supported by Iofan's biographers Maria Kostyuk, Dmitrij Chmelnizki and Sergey Kuznetsov. As early as 6 February 1931, Iofan devised a three-step, nine-month consultation schedule with a predetermined outcome. The plan was soon implemented in a series of architectural competitions, where Iofan acted as primus inter pares (first among equals) in public and the éminence grise (powerful decision maker) behind
30176-484: Was almost always still, thus concrete degradation was not a significant concern. In the second half of 1934, the builders drilled hundreds of boreholes around the perimeter of the site and pumped hot bitumen into the ground. This formed a watertight vertical curtain extending from the surface to the load-bearing sill, which allowed safe excavation below the river level. Blasting and excavation commenced in January 1935, and continued for more than three years. To clear
30360-454: Was also a passionate advocate of a new urbanism, based on planned cities. In 1922 he presented a design of a city for three million people, whose inhabitants lived in identical sixty-story tall skyscrapers surrounded by open parkland. He designed modular houses, which would be mass-produced on the same plan and assembled into apartment blocks, neighborhoods, and cities. In 1923 he published "Toward an Architecture", with his famous slogan, "a house
30544-630: Was an example of what he called rationalist architecture ; it had a simple stucco rectangular façade with square windows and no ornament. The fame of the new movement, which became known as the Vienna Secession spread beyond Austria. Josef Hoffmann , a student of Wagner, constructed a landmark of early modernist architecture, the Stoclet Palace , in Brussels, in 1906–1911. This residence, built of brick covered with Norwegian marble,
30728-494: Was completed in January 1935 and opened five months later, on 15 May 1935. The station was named Dvorets Sovetov until 1957, when it was renamed in honour of Peter Kropotkin , a geographer, philosopher, and anarchist theoretician born in the vicinity. Since it was to serve as the gateway to the Palace of Soviets, great care was taken to make Kropotkinskaya suitably elegant and impressive. The station has flared columns faced with white marble which are said to have been inspired by
30912-485: Was composed of geometric blocks, wings, and a tower. A large pool in front of the house reflected its cubic forms. The interior was decorated with paintings by Gustav Klimt and other artists, and the architect even designed clothing for the family to match the architecture. In Germany, a modernist industrial movement, Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) had been created in Munich in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius ,
31096-529: Was conceived in 1933–1934 and took its final shape in 1937. The staggered stack of ribbed cylinders crowned with a 100-metre (330 ft) statue of Vladimir Lenin blended Art Deco and Neoclassical influences with contemporary American skyscraper technology . Work on the site commenced in 1933; the foundation was completed in January 1939. The German invasion in June 1941 ended the project. Engineers and workers were diverted to defense projects or pressed into
31280-523: Was held in March–July 1932. In addition to the nine prize-winners of the open competition, at Mikhailov's request the USDS also invited notable constructivists and rationalists. Two future co-authors of the palace, Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Helfreich were invited as a reward for their work on the Lenin Library . The USDS required all architects to abandon a sprawling, squat design in favor of
31464-441: Was intended to awe the spectators by its huge scale. Adolf Hitler intended to turn Berlin into the capital of Europe, grander than Rome or Paris. The Nazis closed the Bauhaus, and the most prominent modern architects soon departed for Britain or the United States. In Italy, Benito Mussolini wished to present himself as the heir to the glory and empire of ancient Rome. Mussolini's government was not as hostile to modernism as The Nazis;
31648-977: Was launched in the 1890s by Victor Horta in Belgium and Hector Guimard in France; it introduced new styles of decoration, based on vegetal and floral forms. In Barcelona, Antonio Gaudi conceived architecture as a form of sculpture; the façade of the Casa Batlló in Barcelona (1904–1907) had no straight lines; it was encrusted with colorful mosaics of stone and ceramic tiles. Architects also began to experiment with new materials and techniques, which gave them greater freedom to create new forms. In 1903–1904 in Paris Auguste Perret and Henri Sauvage began to use reinforced concrete , previously only used for industrial structures, to build apartment buildings. Reinforced concrete, which could be molded into any shape, and which could create enormous spaces without
31832-513: Was modern, but it was not modernist; it had many features of modernism, including the use of reinforced concrete, glass, steel, chrome, and it rejected traditional historical models, such as the Beaux-Arts style and Neo-classicism ; but, unlike the modernist styles of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, it made lavish use of decoration and color. It reveled in the symbols of modernity; lightning flashes, sunrises, and zig-zags. Art Deco had begun in France before World War I and spread through Europe; in
32016-554: Was pitched by Alexei Rykov . The "House of Congresses" was, chronologically, the first of the three megaprojects launched in Moscow in 1931, months before the Moscow Canal and the Moscow Metro . Its initial scope was modest; the architects and the politicians believed that building could be topped out in 1933. However, the unchecked ambitions of both groups soon caused a multifold increase in size, scope and cost. In
32200-530: Was poetic, expressive, and optimistic. Many expressionist architects had fought in World War I and their experiences, combined with the political turmoil and social upheaval that followed the German Revolution of 1919, resulted in a utopian outlook and a romantic socialist agenda. Economic conditions severely limited the number of built commissions between 1914 and the mid-1920s, As result, many of
32384-533: Was purely functional and new. The revolution in materials came first, with the use of cast iron , drywall , plate glass , and reinforced concrete, to build structures that were stronger, lighter, and taller. The cast plate glass process was invented in 1848, allowing the manufacture of very large windows. The Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was an early example of iron and plate glass construction, followed in 1864 by
32568-424: Was scheduled for Moscow in 1932, but was cancelled at the last minute. Instead, the delegates held their meeting on a cruise ship traveling between Marseille and Athens. On board, they together drafted a text on how modern cities should be organized. The text, called The Athens Charter , after considerable editing by Corbusier and others, was finally published in 1957 and became an influential text for city planners in
32752-468: Was subsequently reexamined in numerous drafts and proposals. Real construction practice often contradicted the plans: new buildings erected in the center of Moscow often blocked or narrowed the planned avenue. In 1940, the city approved a revised plan. All buildings between the palace and the Kremlin, including the Moscow Manege , had to be demolished. The Alexander Garden would be leveled into
32936-536: Was supposed to be built of reinforced concrete, but because of technical problems it was finally built of traditional materials covered with plaster. His sculptural form, very different from the austere rectangular forms of the Bauhaus, first won him commissions to build movie theaters and retail stores in Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Berlin. His Mossehaus in Berlin was an early model for the streamline moderne style. His Columbushaus on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1931)
33120-521: Was the Kaufmann Desert House in 1946, and he designed hundreds of further projects. The 1937 Paris International Exposition in Paris effectively marked the end of the Art Deco, and of pre-war architectural styles. Most of the pavilions were in a neoclassical Deco style, with colonnades and sculptural decoration. The pavilions of Nazi Germany, designed by Albert Speer , in a German neoclassical style topped by eagle and swastika, faced
33304-401: Was the actual project management team of Mikhail Kryukov [ ru ] (chair), Boris Iofan (chief architect), Hermann Krasin , Arthur Loleyt [ ru ] and Ivan Mashkov . The USDS appointed and supervised the Technical Council, that included dozens of experienced architects, artists and engineers. Boris Iofan, the second in command in the USDS, immediately assumed
33488-512: Was the tower proposed by painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin for the Moscow meeting of the Third Communist International in 1920: he proposed two interlaced towers of metal four hundred meters high, with four geometric volumes suspended from cables. The movement of Russian Constructivist architecture was launched in 1921 by a group of artists led by Aleksandr Rodchenko . Their manifesto proclaimed that their goal
33672-504: Was to find the "communist expression of material structures". Soviet architects began to construct workers' clubs, communal apartment houses, and communal kitchens for feeding whole neighborhoods. One of the first prominent constructivist architects to emerge in Moscow was Konstantin Melnikov , the number of working clubs – including Rusakov Workers' Club (1928) – and his own living house, Melnikov House (1929) near Arbat Street in Moscow. Melnikov traveled to Paris in 1925 where he built
33856-432: Was uninspiring but the most cohesive of the three. Hamilton, who had never been to Moscow, deliberately avoided any references to both modernist and historical styles. The symmetrical array of staggered rectangular shapes and semicylinders, facing the river, was adorned only with uniform rows of white vertical pylons . The "ribbed style" of Hamilton's drafts is strangely reminiscent of almost all Soviet public buildings of
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