- 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 […]
- 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 […]
- Dom Novogo Byta / trailer Dom Novogo Byta is a new step into the investigation led by Ogino:knauss on how Twentieth century’s modernist principles shaped the everyday life of urban dwellers, and what is their heritage in a global urbanisation perspective. In 2009 we were invited to produce a video installation for the art exhibition “Moskonstruct”, part of a campaign […]
- 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 […]
- Architecture at Vkhutemas The VKhUTEMAS, or Higher State Artistic-Technical Workshop, was an important centre of experimentation and technical innovation in art education in Moscow during the 1920s. Its importance in developing experimental design and pedagogical innovations rivals that of the Bauhaus in Weimar, although the VKhUTEMAS is far less well known. Inspired by the work of artists such […]
- Design for Childrens Games
- Threatened El Lissitsky’s printing plant We have been visiting our friends at the Zhurgaz house, to see how is going their struggle to preserve their home and the close El Lissitzky’s typography. The planned new high rise building has been built up, although in recent times the construction has been stopped. The destitution of mayor Luzkhov left in disgrace his […]
- 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 […]
- 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 […]
- The Milyutins’ Penthouse interior from Milyutin family archive With courtesy of Ekaterina Milyutina – NLO Publishers, Moscow