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Moscow in winter
The city looks more natural, or maybe less un-natural in the winter light. Perhaps our gaze is more domesticated, more used to the everyday dimension of this megalopolis, but details at human scale show on the surface of our perception.
2011-12-20
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Artists vs. Residents
Artists have always inhabited the Narkomfin, and are among those who struggle for saving its architectural heritage. Nevertheless their role in the Narkomfin story is also ambiguous, as possible agents of gentrification and displacement. MIAN is allowing some artists to use the spaces of the building as studio, but the residents react against the artists, […]
2011-07-23
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Moisei Ginzburg
Moisei Ginzburg was one of the most active members of the constructivist movement, and a leading figure in many groups and institutions, from OSA which he founded together with Aleksander Vesnin to the Russian Academy of Arts and Sciences. The author of numerous theoretical texts, such as ‘Old and New’ and ‘Contemporary aesthetics’, he is often […]
2011-06-28
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Narkomfin by Rodchenko
After being expelled from the October group in 1932, Rodchenko was commissioned to take pictures of Moscow. Out of this series Varvara Stepanova, his wife and colleague, compiled a narrative sequence of eight-nine gelatin silver prints adding to it some photographs from the October period. The photos of street parades, housing projects, technical buildings, new […]
2011-06-11
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Kiev
2011-05-23
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Burning Moscow – El Lissitzky printing plant
An interview with Elena Olshanskaya (chairman of Zhurgaz condominium management)
2011-02-08
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El Lissitzky’s Autograph On the Map of Moscow
We receive and publish from Elena Olshanskaya translated by Michael Subotin “We live in cities born before us. They no longer suffice for the tempo and needs of our day. We cannot raze them overnight and rebuild them “correctly”. It is impossible to change their structure and type all at once. Moscow, with its plan, […]
2011-01-28
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Visions for the future city
At the end of the 1920s, the attention of constructivist architects, in particular those of OSA, increasingly shifted toward a radical critique of the city itself, focusing on visions designed to overcome urban concentration, and introducing concepts of diffuse urbanisation, linear and green cities, ultimately theorising the concept of disurbanism. This term was basically the […]
2010-12-01
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The Milyutins’ Penthouse interior
from Milyutin family archive With courtesy of Ekaterina Milyutina – NLO Publishers, Moscow
2010-11-15
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New Life
Byt is the Russian term for Everyday Life. The search for a new byt that could supplant the traditional bourgeois family structure was a fundamental issue to be addressed in the early Soviet era. Inspiration came from Lenin himself, who wrote in 1919 that “the real emancipation of women and real communism begins with the […]
2010-11-11