Architecture Review | ‘Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed’

Soviet Architects and Their Edifice Complex
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

New York Times
May 16, 2007

The nonprofit Storefront for Art and Architecture has been around for a
quarter-century now. A tiny wedge-shaped space on a noisy street at the edge
of Chinatown, it built its reputation on managing to work its many
limitations to its advantage. Its best shows, typically thrown together on a
shoestring budget, had a raw immediacy that the bigger art institutions can
rarely match.

Yet in the last several years Storefront seemed to have lost its edge. Apart
from one or two exceptional shows, it seemed to cater more and more to
architectural insiders.

Now the energy is back. After last winter’s sparkling and insightful show on
architectural magazines from the 1960s and ’70s, we have `CCCP: Cosmic
Communist Constructions Photographed,’ an exhibition on Soviet architecture
from the ’70s and ’80s. It should be an eye-opening experience for those who
assumed that Soviet architecture died with the rise of Stalin.

Covering a period that has largely been ignored by academics and mainstream
architects, the show is packed with obscure architectural gems. Its subject
feels particularly timely given that young architects are now beginning to
re-examine the work of the Soviets’ cold war counterparts in Western cities
like Rotterdam and São Paulo.

Organized by Storefront’s new director, Joseph Grima, the show relies almost
exclusively on the photographs of Frédéric Chaubin, a Paris-based magazine
editor who spent five years traveling across the former Soviet Union,
uncovering forgotten architectural works in cities like Tbilisi, Yalta and
Yerevan. The results are a revelation.

Among the outright gems is Georgy Chakhava’s 1975 Roads Ministry building, a
monumental grid of interlocking concrete forms rising on a steep wooded site
in Tbilisi, Georgia. The project’s genesis might prompt most architects, so
often at the mercy of clients’ fantasies, to swoon with envy. Mr. Chakhava
was not only an architect but also the minister of highway construction. As
such, he was not just his own client; he could also hand-pick the project’s
site.

Yet the ministry building’s design also debunks many of the standard clichés
we hold about late Soviet architecture. Rising on an incline between two
highways, the building’s heavy cantilevered forms reflect the Soviet-era
penchant for heroic scale. Yet they also relate sensitively to their
context, celebrating the natural landscape that flows directly underneath
the building.

The composition of interlocking forms, conceived as a series of bridges,
brings to mind the work of the Japanese Metabolists of the late ’60s and
early ’70s, proof that Soviet architects weren’t working in an intellectual
vacuum.

Similarly, the Druzhba (Friendship) Sanitarium in Yalta, Ukraine, designed
by Igor Vasilevsky and completed in 1986, is an object lesson in bold
architectural strokes. The resort building’s cylindrical form stands on a
hill overlooking a beach in what was then an exclusive resort town. To
enter, visitors cross a bridge encased in a glass tube and then descend into
the complex, which is supported on massive legs housing the elevators and
stairs. Conceived as a `social condenser,’ the building’s core is occupied
by a cinema, dance hall, swimming pool and cafe. Circling this core are the
guest rooms, arrayed in a dazzling saw-tooth facade orienting each room
toward the water and sunlight, while giving the structure an eerie
science-fiction quality. (Think Stanley Kubrick’s `2001: A Space Odyssey.’)

But what’s refreshing about this exhibition is its lack of an ideological
agenda: it is open to all sorts of possibilities. The Gaudiesque romanticism
of a sanitarium in Druskininkai, Lithuania, for example, spins the aesthetic
off in yet another direction. Built as a series of interlocking cylinders,
its forms are lifted slightly off the ground to create the illusion of
lightness. Decorative concrete ribbons spill out over the facade; columns
for draining rainwater splay open at the bottom. The building looks as
though it’s unraveling, a blend of creativity and madness spilling out into
full view.

In another project, a sports complex and opera house in the Armenian
capital, Yerevan, an open-air terrace steps down into the earth, flanked by
a pair of immense concrete walls and narrow staircases that evoke the
excavation of some forgotten futurist city – not a bad metaphor for the
entire show.

Mr. Grima situates these projects in a historical context with a timeline
that extends from one end of the gallery to the other. 1969: Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe and Walter Gropius die. 1972: Nixon visits China. 1974: Peter
Eisenman’s House VI completed. 1988: McDonald’s opens in Moscow. The
interplay between major political events and more obscure architectural ones
is a simple and effective gesture, suggesting how cultural invention takes
its rightful place alongside political action in shaping who we are.

Like most Storefront shows, this one is supported by a free newsprint
catalog that offers a more detailed analysis of the designs – plans,
sections and historical photos – as well as a peek into the mentality of
Soviet architects of that era. It can be as revealing as the exhibition
itself.

One would have wished for more detailed drawings of some of the projects and
more biographical detail on the architects themselves. Who are these people?
We don’t really know. Nonetheless, the show opens our eyes to unknown
territory. Compelling and easy to digest, it piques our interest in ways
that some larger institutions, ever more averse to risk, often fail to do.
And that’s good enough.

`CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed’ continues through June
16 at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, 97 Kenmare Street, Little
Italy; (212) 431-5795, storefrontnews.org.

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