Life

Beyond Form and Function

The hyperrationalization, utilitarianism, and technocratic aspirations of European interwar modernism are commonly described as functionalism. This much-used concept, which often appears as synonymous with European interwar modernism, is, however, misleading. To the architectural historian and theorist Stanford Anderson, it seemed “weak” and “inadequate for the characterization or analysis of . . . architecture.”1 “The fiction of function,” Anderson argued, was fabricated on American soil in 1932, when Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, grappling with how to describe their project of the International Style for the seminal MoMA exhibition, distinguished between architecture that exhibited style, or form, and architecture that did not—that was instead built for some functional purpose.2 The roots of the opposition of form and function, in fact, go even deeper, and so does the history of its criticism.3 As a rhetorical device, this opposition was borrowed from morphology, a subfield of evolutionary theory that deals with the formal structure of organisms.4 In Form and Function (1916), the Scottish evolutionist Edward Stuart Russell presented the history of morphology as that of rivalry between two methodological approaches: formalism, which focused on the structure and form of animals, and functionalism, which explored the role of function in shaping form. Russell considered the dichotomy to be false, explaining it as a difference in focus.5 Similarly, the present book suggests not only that function and form were equally important for modernist architecture, but that inspired by contemporary science, it often juxtaposed form and function only to deliberately reject this opposition, turning, instead, to more organic and monistic models. It focuses on Russia, a country that in the aftermath of the revolution of 1917 became the focus of international progressivists’ attention. Playing an outstanding role in the formation of international modernism (here considered not as a style but as an attempt at formulating a radically new theory of art and architecture), Russia became a site of the development of principles and ideas that acquired international significance later in the twentieth century. These principles, as the book will detail, were premised on life sciences, above all on the sciences of the human.

During the interwar period, biology, including the work of Jacob von Uexküll, Ernst Haeckel, Raoul Francé, and D’Arcy Thompson (to name just a few most influential authors), captivated the imagination of artists and architects.6 In the 1920s, the German architectural critic Adolf Behne could contend in The Modern Functional Building (Der moderne Zweckbau) that modern architecture is dominated by two rival approaches, functionalism and rationalism. Influenced by von Uexküll, who was a prominent critic of mechanicism, Behne described the polemics as an organicist dialectics of the whole and its part. By beginning with the part (an organ within the body, which Behne likened to a room in a building), the functionalists, such as Hans Scharoun, neglected the whole. Represented by Le Corbusier, rationalism, on the other hand, began with the whole (the organism): preoccupied with a general idea, it was at risk of congealing into formalism.7 Just as the whole and the part were inseparable in nature, so form and function too, Behne believed, were to be harmonized in modern architecture. In 1925, before Behne’s book came out in its original German edition, his friend El Lissitzky, the Soviet architect, artist, and graphic designer, had already embarked on the Russian translation of the manuscript, convinced of the importance of the work for the Russian architectural scene.8 Some important deviations notwithstanding, Behne’s scheme, indeed, described the architectural dynamics of postrevolutionary Russia, where the two major modernist architectural groups, the Association of New Architects (Assotsiatsiia novykh arkhitektorov, ASNOVA) and the Organization of Contemporary Architecture (Ob’edinenie sovremennykh arkhitektorov, OSA), were known respectively as the rationalists (whom their opponents also labeled as the formalists) and the functionalists (or the constructivists). Led by Nikolay Ladovsky and counting Lissitzky and Nikolay Dokuchaev among its members, ASNOVA prioritized the exterior and the form of the building, whereas OSA, headed by Moisei Ginzburg and Alexander Vesnin, focused its attention on the building’s plan and the distribution of functions. Although the history of Soviet postrevolutionary architecture is often seen as a polemical confrontation between these two factions, Behne’s argument elucidates their similarity, which enabled figures such as Lissitzky to navigate comfortably within both. In this light, the architectural debate between ASNOVA and OSA can be seen as that between two versions of organicism: a preeminently psychological one, focused on form, and a biological one, focused on process.

Soviet architecture indeed relied not on a binary but rather on a unifying epistemological model. This model, popular among scientific-minded philosophers, was commonly known as monism. Originally, the term referred to a synthetic philosophy that aimed to overcome the body-mind dichotomy. Rooted in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, monism postulated that the opposites of the modern dualistic worldview—form and function, the mind and the body, idealism and materialism, freedom and necessity—were integrated within the natural world, whose ultimate epistemological subject was life itself. In its expanded sense, monism was used as an umbrella term for a host of heterogeneous methodological, philosophic, and scientific approaches associated with life sciences. By the end of the nineteenth century, members of the social-democratic movement in different parts of the world had embraced monism enthusiastically, seeing it not only as a philosophical movement but as the worldview based on life sciences and thus as the universal ideology of scientific modernization. Its rising role was marked by the founding of one of America’s most influential philosophic journals, The Monist, in 1890. Publishing articles by both physiologists and positivist philosophers including John Dewey, Gottlob Frege, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Mach, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Bertrand Russell, the journal was conceived as a platform for forging a modern notion of subjectivity.

This book presents Soviet architectural modernism as a part of this monistic tradition. It views architectural formalism and functionalism as two sides of the same coin—a vision of architecture, society, and the human inspired by burgeoning human sciences, which were employed to define the subject of architecture and, consequently, to postulate its goals and principles. Psychophysics, physiology, scientific management, psychotechnics, psychoanalysis, ergography, eugenics, and personality theory were just a few among the approaches explored by Soviet interwar architects, who translated them into a system of architectural concepts, analytical strategies, and theoretical postulates. While assessing the engagement of Soviet interwar architecture with human sciences, this book approaches it from the perspective of intellectual history. It is less interested in tracing the mechanisms and networks of borrowing particular concepts than in reconstructing the discourse that enabled the rhetorical and actual engagement of Soviet architects with modern biological and psychological thought. Indeed, although the formal and material legacy of Soviet interwar architecture and its institutional dynamics have been relatively well studied, the theories and ideas behind this legacy are less known. The chapters that follow thus focus not on buildings but on projects and schemes, theories and debates, pedagogical strategies, architectural research, and experimental work conducted at such pedagogical institutions as the Moscow Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie, VKhUTEMAS) and at such architectural “think tanks” as the Construction Commission (Stroykom), the State Trust for Wall-Painting Works (Malyarstroy), and the Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Moscow. What the chapters examine is how the discursive preeminence of human sciences affected the methods and principles of architecture, the understanding of its economic role and social mission, and the construction of human subjectivity by architectural means.

Tragedies and Challenges of Soviet Modernization

As an approach that was seen as progressive and “Western,” the monistic worldview was firmly inscribed in the quest for economic modernization that guided the social and economic changes in Soviet Russia, unfolding at a breathtaking pace between the revolution of 1917 and the beginning of the Second World War. Announcing a turn to industrialization, the centralization of economy, and eventually toward the rise of Stalin’s terror, the system of five-year economic plans (which would persist in the Soviet Union until its demise) replaced the earlier liberal New Economic Policy, which had allowed for elements of market economy and private economic initiative. The First Five-Year Plan of Economic Development, scheduled to span 1928/29 to 1933 and completed ahead of schedule at the end of 1932, was intended to be a crucial step in turning Russia into a modern industrial state.9 It focused on the creation of heavy industry—the means of production—with the help of Western engineers and technologies. The forced industrialization came at a hefty price. The GULAG (Main Directorate of Camps) was established in 1930 and grew exponentially throughout the decade, supplying construction sites with incarcerated labor: even according to conservative estimates, the brutal living and working conditions led to the death of 1.6 million prisoners. Moreover, the First Five-Year Plan relied on the “collectivization” of agriculture, a ban on individual farming and the creation of collective farms. This program aimed at appropriating agricultural products from peasants and selling them on the international market to procure foreign currency necessary for the needs of industrialization. Collectivization caused the devastating famine in 1932–33, particularly in the agricultural regions of Ukraine, southern Russia, and the Volga River. At a somewhat more moderate tempo, the Second Five-Year Plan, which followed from 1933 to 1937, continued to focus on the development of heavy industry, hardly valuing the life and needs of an individual and doing little to alleviate material scarcity. The purges, intensifying during this time to culminate in 1937, further contributed to devaluing individual life and creating the atmosphere of fear. Among many others, they claimed the lives of several prominent figures in the world of architecture, including architect Solomon Lisagor, sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich, and nearly the entire leadership of the Soviet Academy of Architecture.10

How ethical is it then, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno’s famous saying that writing poetry after Auschwitz is “barbaric,” to write an intellectual history of Soviet interwar architecture? Betty Glan, who had played an important role (which will be examined in chapter 6) in shaping Soviet culture until subjected to repression in 1937 (she was to spend eighteen years in the GULAG system while her husband, Yugoslav communist Milan Gorkić, was executed), had an opinion. When in the wake of glasnost in the late 1980s, a journalist asked her about her GULAG experience, she declined to respond, explaining: “One cannot reduce life, and not only ours but the life of the entire generation, to one, even if deeply tragic, year. As if we were interesting only insofar that we survived 1937, only in how we lived precisely after the arrest.” “It is clear today that bright and strong people were destroyed. Write about what made them such, about our youth, happy and joyful,” she instead asked—“Otherwise . . . otherwise it appears that my life . . . and the big and difficult work of Milan was not the most important in our lives.”11 As if echoing the then-nascent subaltern studies, Glan argued that the conditions of subjectivity and objectification are necessarily intertwined, and that by focusing on repression alone, presenting those who went through repression solely as passive objects of torture, historians deprive them of agency, reenacting, as it were, the act of violence on the epistemic level.

Indeed, even during the darkest years of Stalinism, Soviet intellectual and architectural life did not fully stop. Until the early 1930s, Soviet orthodox dialectical materialism was still in the process of formation, and Russia was open to a wide variety of ideas that would soon be considered unorthodox.12 In architecture, the principles of “socialist realism” took even longer to formulate. In fact, as Danilo Udovički-Selb painstakingly documents, it was not until 1936 that the party for the first time directly prescribed a course of action to Soviet architecture, while modernism did not fully disappear in the Soviet Union until the beginning of the Second World War.13 As Udovički-Selb explains, the purges were primarily directed against the members of the Communist Party, which none of the major Soviet avant-garde architects had joined.14 The former leaders of the architectural avant-garde thus retained prominent positions: in the 1930s, Nikolay Ladovsky, Moisei Ginzburg, the Vesnin brothers, Konstantin Melnikov, and Ilya Golosov each headed one of the twelve architecture and planning workshops of the city of Moscow, while Viktor Vesnin became the head of the Union of Soviet Architects. Throughout the decade, these architects were able to retain at least some opportunities for creative thinking, in particular, in what concerned the ways of modernization.

Aiming to address this complexity of Soviet interwar architectural and intellectual life, the present book thus questions not only the opposition of form and function as a framework for the analysis of modernism, but also a host of other binary categories that have been traditionally applied to Soviet history and culture: left and right, oppression and freedom, the official and the underground, the avant-garde and totalitarianism, to name just a few.15 By doing so, it aims to disrupt the two mutually supporting received historiographic narratives: the first, based on the notion of utopia and focusing on the early 1920s avant-garde, is condescending even if sympathetic to the revolution (a utopia is, after all, essentially naïve and unrealistic); the second, which deals with the totalitarianism of the 1930s, reduces culture to a function of the repressive apparatus.16 Both of these narratives treat the existence of the Soviet Union as an aberration of history, disregarding connections between Russian and international intellectual culture. Rather than romanticizing the Russian revolution as a radical overturn of social hierarchies or enumerating the crimes committed by the Soviet state (which should not be taken as a denial of these crimes), this book thus surveys the entire interwar period, paying a special attention to the mid- to late 1920s, a period equally distant from the two benchmarks of Soviet political history, the revolution of 1917 and the peak of the purges in 1937. It scrutinizes the dialog between Soviet and foreign architectural and intellectual traditions, viewing Soviet architectural culture as an integral, even if radical, part of modernity, not merely informed by Western ideals but actively participating in their formation. By examining theoretical and creative production that often led to undeniably dehumanizing results, it identifies well-intended—in fact, proclaimed humanist—aspirations behind Soviet cultural production, which delineated a zone in which modern ethical categories were conflated but not canceled.17 Like its international counterparts, the ideology of Soviet architectural modernization relied on a set of closely knit concepts: neo-Lamarckian evolutionism and energeticism as its scientific methodology; unconscious perception as its preferred epistemological mechanism; imperial domination over nature as its moral and political program; and efficiency, organization, and planning as its economic priorities. Employed by architects as well as by artists, philosophers, and sociologists, such bioeconomic perspective merged a managerial objectification of the human with holistic romanticism, leading to the ethical and political paradoxes that permeated Soviet interwar architecture.

This constellation of ideas was related to the set of international cultural and ideological transformations unleashed by the second industrial revolution. According to James Kloppenberg, beginning in the 1870s, a transatlantic and transdisciplinary community of social democrats and progressive philosophers discarded “accepted distinctions between idealism and empiricism in epistemology, between intuitionism and utilitarianism in ethics, and between revolutionary socialism and laissez-faire liberalism in politics,” seeking instead a via media between these extremes. Their sources included socialism, Christian social criticism, as well as German and English economic theory, classical liberalism, positivism, and Darwinism.18 Another historian, Cathy Gere, argued that the intellectual crisis generated by the second industrial revolution resulted in a general “rejection of the liberal tradition that privileged the rational, autonomous subject as the main unit of political and moral reasoning—modernism setting its face against modernity, so to speak.”19 The two viewpoints are not contradictory, as liberal values were gradually sidelined alongside the polarization of society during the late nineteenth century, and monistic ideology was shifting toward political authoritarianism as the only path toward a true liberalism. In Russia, such monistic, antiliberal concept of subjectivity became most influential before and during the First Five-Year Plan, providing the philosophical platform for industrialization.

In his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Giorgio Agamben distinguished between zoē, or biological life, and bios, “which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group,” which thus included political life. “The entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such,” according to Agamben, constituted “the decisive event of modernity.”20 Agamben described the new modern subjectivity through the figure of homo sacer, an outcast person of Roman law: devoid of bios, his life could be described as pure zoē. Biopolitics and politics were thus not opposed but intricately interrelated, and accordingly, democracy and totalitarianism—the ultimate manifestation of biopolitics—were linked by a regime of “inner solidarity.”21 The emergence of this model of governmentality was indistinguishable from the rise and proliferation of human sciences. As this book will delineate, turning to the latter, Soviet interwar architectural theory sought to not only employ this biological model of subjectivity, but to understand and overcome its ethical and political limitations.

Life

“What are the aims before humanism?” wondered Julian Huxley, a well-known supporter of both the Soviet Union and modernist architecture (and soon the first director-general of UNESCO), British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist, in 1943.22 He concluded, “One phrase, to my mind, really contains them all: to have life and to have it more abundantly.”23 His use of “life” integrated such predicates as vitality and dynamism with a Darwinist vision of the struggle for survival, in which the disappearance of the weak was a fundamental natural law. The category of life was elaborated in the course of the polemics between vitalists, whose defenders counted philosophers and psychologists including Wilhelm Wundt and later Henri Bergson, and mechanicists, mostly represented by zoologists and evolutionary biologists.24 Peaking around 1930, the polemics mirrored the architectural debate between formalism and functionalism. It resulted in a synthesis that asserted life as a unifying principle of nature at all levels, from inorganic rocks to plants, animals, and, ultimately, humans, and at all scales, from molecules to planetary systems (Plate 1). In the words of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the dualism that had dominated Western philosophy since the seventeenth century was now subverted by “the concepts of life, organism, function, instantaneous reality, interaction, order of nature.”25

As a scientific alternative to the metaphysical notion of being, the concept of life proved to be central for the monistic discourse. Nineteenth-century monism originated in Germany, where zoologist Ernst Haeckel (whose scientific work was as popular in Russia as elsewhere) developed it as a worldview and even a religion. Haeckel’s monism was propagated through his widely read book The Riddle of the Universe (Die Welträtsel), first published in 1899 (its Russian translation appeared in 1920 and was reprinted until 1937), and the formation of the German Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund) in 1906.26 According to Haeckel, “the riddle” was solved by the recognition of the fact that the unity of knowledge paralleled the unity of mind and matter: evolutionism was the method shared by both natural and social sciences. Haeckel drew upon the “synthetic philosophy” of Herbert Spencer, which aspired to synthesize biology, economics, sociology, and political theory.27 Spencer’s Principles of Biology (1864, Russian translation 1870) enriched Darwinism with a Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of adaptational transformations, suggesting the vitality of the species as its ultimate ethical value—and, consequently, laid the ground for postulating eugenics as the ultimate ethical system. Spencer, furthermore, applied evolutionary theory to society, interpreting culture as a form of adaptation developed by Homo sapiens. Spencerianism permeated late nineteenth-century culture, inspiring, among numerous other concepts, the formula of architectural modernism (often misleadingly simplified to “form follows function”), which was originally articulated by Louis Sullivan in 1896: “Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change.”28

In the Spencerian worldview, the transformation of the environment—a complex notion that involved the natural, social, and human-made milieus—necessitated changes in the morphology of a species, and consequently one could engineer a species by manipulating its environment. “On the one hand there is the Environment in its action upon the organism; and on the other the Organism in its reaction to and action upon the environment; the dynamic relation, in its twofold aspect, is called Function,” had explained Huxley’s student, biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes and his coauthor Arthur Thomson.29 Even though, due to its racist implications, Mendelian eugenics (the design of a species through controlled breeding) never acquired the same prominence in Soviet Russia as it did elsewhere, as the design of the species through the control of the environment, neo-Lamarckian evolutionism became an important part of Russian progressive culture.30

After the initial injection of Haeckel’s evolutionism, the Monist League was reoriented toward “energeticism” by Wilhelm Ostwald, who assumed its presidency in 1911.31 By the end of the nineteenth century, the concept of energy had come to be viewed as an alternative to mechanicism. As a broader worldview based on the primacy of energy over matter, energeticism at the turn of the century was supported by prominent scientists, philosophers, and sociologists, including Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, Henri Poincaré, and Pierre Duhem. Accordingly, monistic ethics now shifted away from the ideal of a species’ health and toward Ostwald’s “energetic imperative”: “Do not squander energy—utilize it!” Ostwald’s other related concern was organizational theory, which he promoted through Die Brücke (The Bridge), an “institute” that aimed “to organize intellectual work” by activities such as cataloging information and standardizing paper formats; good organization, he believed, allowed economizing productive and perceptual energy.32

Although neither Haeckel nor Ostwald considered themselves Marxists, monism and Marxism were not incompatible. While later critics, such as Hannah Arendt, saw Marxism’s compatibility with life sciences as a flaw leading to the bestialization of the human, many welcomed the possibility of the synthesis.33 For Karl Marx, labor was “first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” As such, labor was none other than the worker’s “life-activity, the manifestation of his own life.”34 According to German social democrat Heinrich Pëus, “social democracy strives for a specific form of life, monism for a specific method of thinking and living. Both, however, will always remain friends.”35 In 1913, the Monist League officially entered into cooperation with social democracy. To Marxists, monistic Spencerianism offered a promise of directing social evolution by the willful organization of the environment. In turn, enriched by Marxism, monism gained practical orientation and fascination with dialectics.

Human Ecology

In 1913, German biologist Hermann Reinheimer could claim that “the central problem of Life, and, a fortiori, of Organic Evolution, is production—production of the necessaries and utilities of life first, and the requirements of progress after.”36 The synthesis of biological and economic contexts that informed the notion of life became the subject of a modern new discipline, ecology. Sharing its Greek root, oikos (household or living place), with economics, the term ecology had been coined in 1866 by Haeckel, who defined it as “the science of economy, of ways of life, of exterior life-relationships of organisms with each other.”37 In the words of the environmental historian Donald Worster, the term referred specifically to “an economy of nature,” a science of rational management and care of resources that developed alongside industrial capitalism.38 The colonial dimension of this productivist ecological discourse should not be overlooked. As early as 1761, Count de Buffon wrote in his Natural History that

the first mark of man’s civilization is the empire he assumes over the animals; and this first mark of his intelligence becomes afterwards the greatest evidence of his power over Nature: For it is only after he subjugates and tames animals, that he is enabled, by their assistance, to change the face of the earth, to convert deserts into fertile ground, and heath into corn.39

Nature was seen as the repository of natural resources, whereas mining these resources, which would otherwise lie idle in the earth’s depths, became a moral rather a merely economic imperative: as Huxley’s collaborator, writer H. G. Wells, would put it during the interwar period, “the conquest of substances,” or “the subjugation of matter to human needs,” was synonymous with civilization.40 Employing such terms as “energy,” “resource,” “expansion,” “frontier,” “colonization,” “rationalization,” and “efficiency,” colonial administrations claimed the development of colonized territories as their priority.

Although Russia did not possess overseas colonies, its vast territories, some of which had been acquired fairly recently, were described and governed in similar ways.41 Even Russia’s core, Slavic-populated territory, one could argue, was conceived as both a colony and the metropole: with its agricultural export-based economy and a population that had remained in serfdom until 1861 and was still largely illiterate by the time of the revolution, it was economically dependent on Europe, whose culture and even language were embraced by Russian elites. As elsewhere in the colonial world, development was seen as the key to modernization, and the revolution aimed at liberating Russia by assuming the control of development. This rhetoric intensified during the industrialization, when the exploration and economic exploitation of northern and Siberian resources, presented as “the conquest of the North,” became a trope in Soviet media. Architecture, which now focused on the creation of factories and new cities in these areas, became an important instrument of colonization. Although at first sight the theories discussed in this book might seem unrelated to it, based on the ethos of development, they provided the theoretical context for colonization.

In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, a new ecological model emerged. It was based on interdependence and cooperation, which replaced the nineteenth-century ideal of free enterprise on the one hand, and efficiency and productivity on the other.42 As Michael Osman recently argued when tracing the architectural history of this model in the United States, the term “regulation” came to inform thinking about nature, domesticity, and production.43 This confluence determined the rise of planning during the first decades of the twentieth century, influencing the activity of organizations such as Huxley and Wells’s Political and Economic Planning (PEP) organization, a socialist think-tank whose aim was to stop “laissez-faire individualism, for that is not organic.”44 Because of Wells’s pro-Soviet politics, PEP was often critical of bourgeois democracy: while Wells advocated for “a regime of authoritarian enlightenment,” Huxley’s political manifesto, unequivocally titled If I Were a Dictator, delineated a vision of “scientific humanism”—a technocratic society governed by scientists who use rational planning to bring order to social chaos.45

A key natural resource that according to the logic of development, had to be regulated was the human. This vision formed the core of human ecology, an eclectic multidisciplinary intellectual endeavor, which attracted sociologists, anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, and public intellectuals from Wells and Geddes, to Whitehead and Kurt Lewin.46 As Wells, his son the zoologist G. P. Wells, and Huxley argued in their best-seller The Science of Life (1927):

The science of economics—at first it was called Political Economy—is a whole century older than ecology. It was and is the science of social subsistence, of needs and their satisfactions, of work and wealth. It tries to elucidate the relations of producer, dealer, and consumer in the human community and show how the whole system carries on. Ecology broadens out this inquiry into a general study of the give and take, the effort, accumulation and consumption in every province of life. Economics, therefore, is merely Human Ecology, it is the narrow and special study of the ecology of the very extraordinary community in which we live.47

The economic focus of human ecology linked monism with the imperial managerial approach, giving rise to a discourse that was simultaneously organicist and productivist.

In Russia, this ethos of scientific management of territorial and human resources was elaborated within the framework of “the scientific organization of labor”—nauchnaia organizatsiia truda, abbreviated as NOT. Its concerns encompassed labor management, psychotechnics, standardization, engineering, rationalization, advertisement, economic planning, psychology, pedagogy, statistics, and typography, among other fields. NOT was explored by such organizations as the Central Institute of Labor (1921–40), headed by the revolutionary poet Alexey Gastev, and the Time League (1923–25), a powerful organization with branches in many Soviet cites. Among the latter’s members were politicians, scientists, and cultural figures, such as Leon Trotsky, constructivist artist Gustav Klutsis, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, reflexologist Vladimir Bekhterev, psychoanalyst Aron Zalkind, psychotechnician Isaak Spielrein, pedologist Pavel Blonsky, economist Stanislav Strumilin, and Vladimir Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.48 NOT theorists inscribed labor into a network of practical organizational sciences, and some of them (such as Strumilin) later participated in the development of the system of five-year economic plans, the economic basis of Soviet industrialization. With its practical orientation, the NOT movement came to be viewed as the applied science of modernity, whose subfield architecture was to become.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Huxley and Wells developed their interest in architecture and their social ties with architects and designers, particularly left-leaning emigrants from Nazi-controlled Germany, including László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Herbert Bayer. The other members of their circle included the Irish communist and biologist John Bernal, architects Serge Chermayeff, Aladar Olgyay, and Victor Olgyay, and architectural engineer Ove Arup.49 As the secretary of the London Zoological Society, Huxley secured for the Russian émigré Berthold Lubetkin the commission to design the now-famous penguin pavilion in the London Zoo in 1934. Both Huxley and Wells visited Soviet Russia and, although there is no evidence of their immediate contacts with Soviet architects, would be instrumental in transmitting the Russian experience, including ideas about architecture, to their British fellow-thinkers. The ideas elaborated by Soviet “monistic” architects were thus not forgotten—exported from the Soviet Union by the socialist biologists, they informed the development of modernism under the British welfare state and its later retransplantation on American soil.

Monism, the Ideology of the Russian Revolution

With its strong intellectual traditions of Spinozism and radical scientism, Russia became particularly receptive to the politicization of monism, which appeared as the revolutionary ideology of modernity.50 In 1895, the recognized “father” of Russian Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov, published The Development of the Monist View of History (K voprosu o razvitii monisticheskogo vzgliada na istoriiu), which, as Lenin acknowledged, was a book “on which an entire generation of Russian Marxists was educated.”51 Furthermore, Lenin endorsed Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, claiming that his dialectical materialism was none other than “real” monism.52 The most celebrated of revolutionary writers, Maxim Gorky, likewise confessed, “For me, the value of Bolshevism resides in its being the creation of monists.”53

In 1895, Gorky’s future long-term friend and collaborator Anatoly Lunacharsky, then a radically minded Kyiv gymnasium student preoccupied with an attempt “to create an emulsion of Spencer and Marx,” moved to Zurich to study with Avenarius, the author of the energeticist theory of “the least measure of force” and a leader of the subjectivist philosophy of empiriocriticism.54 Lunacharsky’s self-designed program of study included seminars with biologists—anatomy with Rudolf Martin, physiology with Justus Gaule, and physiology of perception with Rudolf Wlassak—and economists and political theorists—political economy with Fritz Platten and Marxism with Russian Menshevik emigrant Pavel Akselrod. But for Lunacharsky, “all this faded into the background . . . compared to the work with Avenarius.”55 Adapting Avenarius’s program to his own aesthetic interests and his revolutionary activity, Lunacharsky merged it with Nietzschean vitalism: beauty was, for him, the “mighty and free life” itself.56 This life was manifested as “activity, courage, the joy of combat.”57 The biological category of life, for Lunacharsky, dialectically sublated the opposition of collectivity and individuality:

The growth of species self-consciousness is a great process of a return of reason to biological subconscious truth. Of course, here we are dealing not with a self-rejection of individuality, not with its return to the slavery of species instincts, but with a harmonic union, with high vitalist aesthetics, which will teach individuality to appreciate the development of might, beauty and happiness of species as a whole above all else, and which will at the same time teach the truth that precisely this mighty, beautiful and happy species, which develops in constant struggle for a new might, is expressed in its most beautiful individuals.58

Lunacharsky’s brother-in-law and collaborator, Alexander Bogdanov, created his own idiosyncratic blend of Spencerian monism, empiriocriticism, Ludwig Noiré’s energeticist “monistic epistemology,” experimental psychology, and Marxism, which he called empiriomonism: “Instead of this [Avenarius’s] theory I presented another one, the origins of which I trace to Spinoza, and the main material for which was provided, in my opinion, by the views of Meynert and, partially, by the James-Lange theory of emotion,” he explained.59 In 1904, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gorky, alongside several other social-democratic thinkers, published a programmatic volume The Foundations of Realist Worldview (Osnovy realisticheskogo mirovozzreniia). Opening the volume, Sergey Suvorov’s article “The Foundations of the Philosophy of Life” called for an ontological and epistemological unity (nature, it argued, is the connection of events in time and space, life is a phenomenon of nature, and psyche is a phenomenon of life) and for psychophysical parallelism as the foundational principle of the philosophy of life.60

Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Gorky, all influential within the radical Bolshevik faction (to which Lenin also belonged) of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, rivaled Lenin’s leadership from a radically left standpoint. They enjoyed a reputation as Bolshevik intellectuals, and in response, Lenin, in his only philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Notes on One Reactionary Philosophy (Materializm i empiriokrititsizm: Kriticheskie zametki ob odnoi reaktsionnoi filosofii, 1908), attempted to annihilate “the Bogdanovites” on their own—philosophical—territory to break the radical intelligentsia’s fascination with empiriocriticism. In 1909, Bogdanov was expelled from the Bolshevik faction. After the revolution, however, he and Lenin reconciled, and the former Bogdanovites assumed the leadership of a nascent Soviet culture, in which Lenin, preoccupied with political concerns, demonstrated little interest.61 During the early 1920s, Bogdanov headed the powerful Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) movement, which was instrumental in promoting NOT; Gorky was celebrated as the most distinguished revolutionary writer; and Lunacharsky, who became the head of the Narkompros (the Soviet Ministry of Culture and Education, or, literally, the Ministry of “Enlightenment”) in 1919, remained in this position until 1929.62 His programmatic Foundations of Positive Aesthetics (Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki) of 1903, reprinted without revision in 1923, contributed to the further dissemination of monistic aesthetics and became a frequent point of reference for artists and architects.63 The leading roles played by Gorky, Bogdanov, and especially Lunacharsky and the respect and influence that they enjoyed among writers, artists, and architects made their empiriocriticist version of monism the aesthetic foundation of Soviet modernism.

During the 1920s and early 1930s the monistic worldview in the Soviet Union was sustained due to the connections of the Soviet regime with Western scientists and progressivists, which was institutionalized through a network of international and internationalist movements.64 The founding members of the German Society of Friends of New Russia included Behne, Bruno Taut, theater director Erwin Piscator, writers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, neuroscientist Oskar Vogt, as well as Albert Einstein.65 Other Friends of New Russia societies in the UK and the United States attracted liberals, academics, and social reformers, among them Wells, Huxley, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, Jack London, J. B. S. Haldane, and John Maynard Keynes.66 Meanwhile, in the sphere of art, internationalism was exemplified by the Berlin-based “international constructivist” movement, which historian Oliver Botar termed “biocentric avant-gardism.” It included Behne, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter, Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Theo Van Doesburg, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Walter Benjamin. This movement developed monistic ideas about life, nature, and the human, which Botar identifies at an intersection of neovitalism, monism, neo-Lamarckism, holism, biologism, the German reform movement, anarchism, and Lebensphilosophie.67

The popularity of monism in the Soviet Union peaked around 1925, the year when The Monism of the Universe (Monizm vselennoi), by philosopher and space engineer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and “Psychoanalysis as Monistic Psychology,” by psychologist Alexander Luria, were published, and when constructivist theoretician Boris Arvatov formulated the theory of “the monism of things.” Three years later, Bogdanov died following a blood transfusion experiment that he conducted on his own body—based on a neo-Lamarckian assumption that blood transmitted an organism’s acquired characteristics and inspired by the desire to increase vitality through “physiological collectivism,” this experiment was his final monistic project.68 It ended his life but not the influence of his ideas: supported by Stalin, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko continued to develop the now-notorious Lamarckian theory of environmentally acquired inheritance throughout the 1930s.69

The importance of monism for Soviet aesthetic thought was documented by Soviet artist Alexander Toporkov, whose book The Technical Everyday and Contemporary Art (1928) delineated an aesthetic theory that identified art with life:

We should acknowledge that the beautiful and art are manifestations of life. But life itself should be understood not only in terms of simple description and analysis, but first of all dialectically. Using certain categories, we can talk about the necessity and freedom of life. The man lives and acts under certain conditions, which determine him, and to which he, in this or another way, has to adapt. At the same time he, through his energy, can “teach his teacher,” i.e., modify his environment. The man participates in creating the conditions under which he lives, which mostly becomes the most important subject of technical activity. A passive subordination to the surroundings, a simple experience of the given cannot form the basis of art and does not lead to the creation of the beautiful.

The realm of pure necessity does not know art, beauty, or culture in general. The activity of man interprets the surrounding conditions and through an immediate praxis leads to the creation of new reality. In this positive activity lies freedom, which is closely connected to necessity because purposeful praxis is possible only on the basis of understanding the environment. Our practical activity puts in front of us certain tasks, whose achievement changes the conditions of our existence.70

Although hardly an original theoretician (and hence little-known today), Toporkov was a brilliant synthesizer, whose theory integrated the ideas of thinkers such as Lissitzky and Lunacharsky, a codifier, as it were, of the state of Soviet aesthetic theory at the end of the 1920s. For Toporkov, art was an active and conscious transformation of the environment based on the understanding of natural necessity. The theory of Soviet interwar architecture was grounded in this very belief: Soviet architects aspired to design not merely buildings but the spatial environments that facilitated humanity’s survival and directed its evolutionary progress. To put it differently, by designing its environment, Soviet architects aspired to redesign Homo sapiens.

Soviet Monistic Modernism and Its Echoes

In the chapters that follow, I examine how Soviet modernist architecture was motivated by human sciences and their monistic notion of the human as the agent of life. I analyze the architectural production of both ASNOVA and OSA, focusing on the work of their major theorists (Ladovsky, Lissitzky, and Ginzburg) as well as the work that was created outside of these groups. Different architectural groups and individual architects foregrounded different parts of the monistic discourse, such as psychophysiological, organizational, economic, managerial, or evolutionary theories. Offering different responses to the same set of problems and guided by shared values, these diverse approaches were—their polemical confrontations notwithstanding—fundamentally reconcilable, complementing rather than contradicting each other.

Each of the book’s six chapters pairs a key principle of the monistic discourse with one of the disciplinary concerns of interwar modernist architecture (form-making, urbanism, pedagogy, standardization, interior design, and landscape architecture), examining how the former was mobilized for responding to the latter. The chapters are arranged in a roughly chronological way, moving from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s. This structure highlights major transformations in the way of thinking about architecture, from the early interest in the perception of form to a managerial concern with use of this perception for increasing productivity and, ultimately, to the exploration of how architecture could direct social evolution. Yet, the book does not have an ambition to construct a neat chronological narrative or to make causal connections between these case studies. Rather, it aims to unpack a heterogeneous discourse, which was represented by distinct actors who often disagreed with each other.

The first chapter, “Space,” addresses an attempt to devise a methodological foundation for architectural theory in the early 1920s. It focuses on Ladovsky’s “psychoanalytical method,” which desexualized Freud’s psychoanalysis and merged it with empiriocriticism, redefining architecture as an activation of unconscious perceptual mechanisms. The views of Lissitzky on urbanism, formulated in the mid-1920s, form the subject of chapter 2, “Orientation”: fascinated with perceptual transformations generated by urban modernity, Lissitzky argued for an architecture that could organize and order metropolitan chaos without succumbing to anthropocentrism. Chapter 3, “Fitness,” addresses the status of architecture as a profession. It focuses on the activity of the Psychotechnical Laboratory, opened by Ladovsky in 1927 to test the physiological and psychological abilities of architecture students; with the aim of optimizing the division of labor in architecture, the laboratory construed the architect as a perceiving machine. Chapter 4, “Process,” examines the first Soviet programs of standardization: architect Alexander Rozenberg’s theory of normalization and Lissitzky’s and Ginzburg’s typification efforts around 1929; both programs, it argues, departed from a naturalistic understanding of function as process. Continuing the discussion of Ginzburg’s theory, chapter 5, “Energy,” examines the architect’s collaboration with the Bauhaus designer Hinnerk Scheper between 1929 and 1931. With wall-painting, which the two developed as an emerging modern subfield of architecture, they aspired to use unconscious perception to transform everyday processes into a meaningful activity by improving the energetic functionality of the subject. Finally, chapter 6, “Personality,” is focused on landscape architecture, scrutinizing the program of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure (commonly known as Gorky Park) in Moscow, the model Soviet urban public space developed under the influence of Lunacharsky between 1928 and 1934. It defines the park as a humanist (and yet productivist) heterotopia intended to remedy the detrimental effects of divided factory labor.

These stories not only record encounters between architecture and the human sciences in the interwar Soviet Union but also contribute to an understanding of the transnational monistic culture—a culture that produced social democracy and the welfare state, but also inadvertently sustained twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Indeed, Spinozian ethics sublated the opposition of freedom and necessity—the projection of the form/function dichotomy on the ethical plane—by postulating necessity not as the opposite but as the very foundation of freedom. Nature, says Spinoza, was governed by purposefulness and logic and could not be described in the categories of good and evil.71 In his neo-Spinozian article “The Freedom of Necessity” (1942), Bernal likewise argued that although freedom is usually juxtaposed to cooperation, and individuality to the state, these oppositions are false: “The answer lies not in trying to decide the issue between anarchy and order, but in revising our organization of the state and our education of the individual.”72 Once introduced to the political discussion, the ecological concept of life transformed its agent from a passive and powerless homo sacer to Homo sapiens, who acted through the knowledge of natural necessity.

By animalizing the human, monism laid the ground for exploitation and extermination as well as for socialization, collectivity, and personal development. Although the atrocities of the Second World War made obvious the evilness of monism’s eugenic aspirations and the naivety of its heroic humanism, elements of its doctrine of humanness have persisted until this day. Agamben, in his own words, threw “a sinister light on the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare life (even if it has been transformed and rendered apparently more human) that defined the biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.”73 Yet, the legacy of monism encompasses not only the minimalist logic of modernist public housing (the immediate target of Agamben’s criticism), but also the movements that resisted it, such as the postwar turn of architecture and planning toward image and perception, the epistemological privileging of the unconscious that underlined architectural phenomenology, and, more recently, neuroaesthetics and the studies of sensorium and affect. Contemporary concerns about climate change and the role of humanity in shaping our planetary environment as well as the emerging interest in the intersection of biology, computation, and architectural design likewise evoke the logic of monism. As humans cannot avoid their bodies, architecture is unable to evade zoē. Prompted by the climate crisis, contemporary architecture theorists again turn to life sciences in search for models of designing architecture not only for particular clients—or even, as the modernists did, for particular social ends—but for the planet. Although architects no longer approach nature as a resource, the similarities between contemporary and modernist organic approaches to architecture are evident. For contemporary architecture, then, the story of Soviet interwar modernism appears as more than an episode from a distant historical and political context. It is, rather, a material for reflection—simultaneously a precedent and a warning.