- Narkomfin narratives We are honoured to reblog here the essay by Vladimir Paperny originally published in the book O’NFM_6: Narkomfin, edited by Danilo Udovicki-Selb, published by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag Tübingen, 2015, given the kind permission of author, editor and publisher. Apart from being flattered by our film Dom Novogo Byta quoted in it as a source, the piece […]
- SA_1929 Standardisation has been one of the main themes of the architectural debate in the post revolutionary context on Soviet Russia, strongly influenced by the contemporary international debate. Constructivists, and in particular the OSA group and the Sovrmennaja Arkhitektura magazine, identified in the issue of creating modular standardised components which could be industrially produced a key […]
- 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, […]
- 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 […]
- 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 […]
- Constructivism Constructivism is one of the most exciting, important, productive, inventive avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th century. It developed in many cities of the Soviet Union and not only in Moscow. Developments took place in Leningrad, in Ukraina, even in the Caucasus, and were connected to a series of contemporary movements. The […]
- Dom Novogo Byta_Videoinstallation Videoinstallation presented at the Moskonsctruct exhibition, Garage Contemporary Art Center, Moscow, October 2009
- SA n.5, 1930 SA, Sovrimanja Architektura, the magazine of the constructivists, published before this design was developed, a Russian translation of Le Corbusier’s celebrated 5 points of the new architecture, in which Le Corbusier based the new discourse on the use of concrete, and insisted on the meaning pilotis, ribbon windows, the free plan, the free façade and […]
- SA n.5, 1929 The building commissioned by Nikolai Milyutin, who was the people’s commissar for finance of the Russian federation, to Moisei Ginzburg and Ignati Milinis is an exceptional building, it is a prototype of a new kind of architecture , an architecture in which daily life, in which residential life would be re-articulated on a collective base. […]
- Le Corbusier vs. Narkomfin Le Corbusier is considered to be an important influence on Ginzburg’s work, but the Narcomfin in turn is also recognized as an influence for Le Corbusier’s later unitè d’habitation in Marseille. In the early 30s the french architect visited the building. Its consideration of the project is controversial. In his notebook he reports critical opinions […]