- Jean-Louis Cohen / Modernism and periphery November 2010, working on a spot for Moskonstruct we shortly interviewed via Skype the architecture historian Jean Louis Cohen, one of the major experts of modernism and the curator of the recent exhibition of Le Corbusier at MOMA. Few questions about Narkomfin are published in the incoming Dom Novogo Byta DVD. We plan an extensive interview […]
- Sotsgorod Sotsgorod, Problems of Building Socialist Cities is Nikolai Milyutin‘s most well known theoretical contribution. Milyutin was a convinced supporter of the radical reform of everyday life and the refusal of bourgeois values, which in his mind still gave form to the majority of post-revolutionary architecture. He advocated the collectivisation and industrialisation of human settlement, with an eye on […]
- Disurbanism 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 result […]
- 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 […]
- Narkomfin inspired The Narkomfin building was acknowledged by Le Corbusier as an influence on his Unité d’Habitation . the layout of its duplex apartments have been copied by Moshe Safdie in his Expo 67 flats, as well as by Denys Lasdun in his luxury flats at St James’, London.
- 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 […]
- 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 […]
- July I5th, I972 Charles Jencks dates the symbolic end of modernist architecture and the passage to the post-modem as 3:32 p. m. on July I5th, I972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing development (a version of Le Corbusier’s “machine for modem living”) was dynamited as an unlivable environment for the low-income people it housed. Shortly thereafter, President Nixon officially declared […]
- Marseille Here we want to underline the contrast between the prototype of an universally recognized architectural model, Le Corbusier’s Unitè d’Habitation, which today has become a high standard middle class residence, and the degeneration of such a model as expressed in the French banlieu, representing today the most dystopic, conflicted, defeating product of this ideology. Segregation, […]