“Color Plates” in “Architecture of Life”

A drawing of a microscope loaded with a slide on a table beside a stack of books and viles of a red liquid. In the background skeletons stand in cases.

Plate 1. The cover of The Science of Life by H. G. Wells, G. P. Wells, and Julian Huxley (1929–30) illustrates the evolutionist notions of life and the human.

Pencil drawing of a seven by seven grid of rectangles, each divided and colored in different porportions.

Plate 2. Ladovsky’s former students developed an elaborate theory of composition, which was based on an analysis of rows. This unfinished scheme by Viktor Balikhin illustrates “The Application of the Rows of Properties to the Organization of Frontal Plane (Dynamics, Unity, and the Limitations of the Vertical).” The top row illustrates “Types of Relationships” (left to right: equality; the predominance of horizontality; the predominance of verticality; neutral divisions [the next three diagrams]; a two-partite division). The second row illustrates “Types of Regular Divisions” and metric rhythm created by number, size, and color. The third row illustrates metric rhythm created by color and size. In the fourth row, rhythm is created by modifications of intervals and size. The fifth row uses proportion and geometry for the creation of rhythm and introduces elements of dynamic. The sixth row creates rhythm with size, color, and the speed of transformation. The last colored row relies on chiaroscuro and relief. Pencil drawing. Courtesy of the Museum of the Moscow Institute of Architecture.

A collage showing a man standing on a bench holding a measuring stick with a compass illustrating his field of vision. Sketches and mathematical equations appear before him.

Plate 3. El Lissitzky’s Tatlin at Work on the Monument to the Third International (1922) can be read as a symbolic self-portrait that illustrates Lissitzky’s views about the relationship between art and mathematics as well as about monocular perspective. The collage was used as an illustration to Ilya Ehrenburg’s Six Stories with Easy Endings (Il’ia Erenburg, Shest’ povestei o legkikh kontsakh) (Moscow: Gelikon, 1922). Courtesy of the Grosvenor Gallery, London.

A board with a handful of photos showing lighting, automobiles, propeller planes, a comet, and an illuminated waterfront.

Plate 4. The first of the sixteen analytical illustrated tables (posters) that supplemented Georgy Krutikov’s VKhUTEIN diploma project “The City of the Future” (1929) explored “The Visual Deformation of a Dynamic Form,” showing how movement produced what Lissitzky called imaginary space. Courtesy of the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (PIa 11200/1).

An illuminated cone dappled with windows and ridges whose apex is downward oriented toward a series of cloudlike concetric circles.

Plate 5. Georgy Krutikov, “General View,” part of “The City of the Future,” VKhUTEIN diploma project (1929). This rendering of the city of the future seen from space explores Lissitzky’s concept of imaginary space and Krutikov’s experimental and analytical research of the visual effects of movement and light. Courtesy of the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow (PIa 11201/4).

A rough pencil sketch of three pillars topped with large horizontal platforms, stripped in blue or red.

Plate 6. Lissitzky’s color sketch depicting one of the horizontal skyscrapers (to be located at the Nikitsky Gates Square) illustrates his proposition that “the introduction of color for differentiation of each individual skyscraper will enhance its orientational potential” (Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 [1926]: 3). Courtesy of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (RS-1923).

A computer rendering of a mechanical device affixed to a table with two vertical arms, two angled cross-beams, with a viewfinder on one end and two screens at center.

Plate 7. Digital model by Pierluigi D’Acunto and Juan José Castellón González illustrates the mechanics of the space-meter’s work. Courtesy of the authors.

A four by five grid of watercolors depicting blocky structures.

Plate 8. Visually resembling Klein’s diagrammatic multitudes, Finite Format 04, a series of watercolors by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen for Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017, similarly erases form while replacing it not by type but by format. Courtesy pezo von ellrichshausen.

A two by three grid of colored circles against differently colored background swaths.

Plate 9. Maria Ender’s table (Table VI. “The change of color spot and color background in time, within the eyes closed”) illustrates her teacher Mikhail Matyushin’s theory of the linking color. Courtesy of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg (80449/12-osn).

An image of color swatches, with each swatch containing two thick bands and one thin band of color.

Plate 10. In his hand-colored set of tables, The Handbook of Color: A Pattern of the Convertibility of Color Combinations (Spravochnik po tsvetu: Zakonomernost’ izmeniaemosti tsvetovykh sochetanii [Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv, 1932]), Mikhail Matyushin suggested applying his theory of linking color to interior design. Photograph by the author.

A pyramid of color, with the base ont the left, broken into eight segments, each labelled with a different letter.

Plate 11. Translated into Russian in 1926, Wilhelm Ostwald’s Farbkunde (1923) became the standard textbook of color theory at both VKhUTEMAS and Malyarstroy. Pictured here is Ostwald’s one-tone triangle from the Russian edition of Farbkunde. This color plate was produced at VKhUTEMAS, while the dyes and the printing technique were developed by VKhUTEMAS professor and chemist N. V. Turkin.

A colored pencil drawing made up of seven rows, each featuring a view of a conveyor with different elements shaded in green, red, blue, or yellow.

Plate 12. Hinnerk Scheper and Malyarstroy’s color scheme for the Narkomfin building circulation areas utilizes the Bauhaus experience of the use of color for orientation (most important, Scheper’s color scheme for the Bauhaus building in Dessau). The scheme was published in Maliarnoe delo (color supplement to no. 3–4, 1930); original in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Courtesy of the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

Abstract cover image featuring leaves, pipes, wavy columns, and geometric shapes in shades of blue, red, and yellow

Plate 13. The special issue of the constructivist journal Sovremennaya arkhitektura on architectural polychromy (1929) was richly illustrated with the works of Fernand Léger (the only artist whose work was represented in the issue). Ginzburg, the journal’s editor, explained that he saw Léger’s work not as easel painting but as an analytical exercise in exploring how form can be expressed by color. From Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929): 59.

Two colored pencil perspective drawings of room interiors with feature walls in yellow or blue.

Plate 14. Moisei Ginzburg’s early interior color schemes employed a Léger-like palette of contrasting primary colors and black. This project of interior coloration for an office in Ginzburg’s Government Building in Alma-Ata (contemporary Almaty, Kazakhstan; together with Ignaty Milinis) demonstrates a black ceiling and a black external wall facing a bright yellow wall, while the two remaining walls are painted blue. Project published in Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929): 69.

Perspective drawing of three rooms, cross-sectioned to show how elements populate the space.

Plate 15. Hinnerk Scheper and Malyarstroy’s cold scheme was to be used in apartments of type K: three-room apartments for families with children. The scheme was published in Maliarnoe delo (color supplement to no. 3–4, 1930); original in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Courtesy of the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

Painting of a dining room with table and chandelier at center. Ceiling and walls are in different shades of blue.

Plate 16. A 1979 watercolor drawing by Elena Ovsyannikova shows the dining room in the “penthouse” Narkomfin apartment, which belonged to Ginzburg’s patron, the minister of finance Nikolay Milyutin. Courtesy of Elena Ovsyannikova.

Persepctive drawing of two rooms. Each includes a staircse, with walls painted in a warm orange and the floors a hunter green.

Plate 17. The warm scheme was to be applied in the apartments of type F. Scheper presented it with two more traditional central perspectival drawings. The scheme was published in Maliarnoe delo (color supplement to no. 3–4, 1930); original in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Courtesy of the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

Two squares situated side by side, labelled a and b respectively. Each include a smaller quare within, with lines connecting the corners from the large to the small to give the shapes a sense of depth.

Plate 18. This quasi-perspectival diagrammatic construction was often cited in nineteenth-century psychological literature as an example of a figure that could be read as both pyramidal form and receding space. According to Wilhelm von Bezold, if the smaller square was orange, the figure was perceived as a pyramid, while a blue smaller square turned it into a receding space. Scheper employed the same compositional structure in his drawing for the warm scheme to support the spatial effect of the white outer wall (white was considered by psychologists an equivalent of blue in its potential to expand space). Diagram reproduced in Wilhelm von Bezold, Die Farbenlehre im Hinblick auf Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1874), Tafel VI.

A open sketchbook with text and a graph on the left page and text and a color pyramid on the right.

Plate 19. At VKhUTEIN, the notion of fatigue redefined the artistic discourse about color. A “Practicum of Color Theory” student sketchbook by Alexander Lyushin (VKhUTEIN, 1928–30) contains exercises on observing the effects of color fatigue (left) and Ostwald’s color triangle (right). Author’s photograph. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (950052).

A brightly colored drawing of a park beside a waterway. Small towers, a ferrish wheel, tents, and steamships populate the space alongside groups of people moving through the space.

Plate 20. An illustrated children’s book by artists Valery Alfeevsky and Tatyana Lebedeva (Mavrina) presents an idealized vision of the park as a space of personal activation. This overview shows a variety of activities performed in the park. Park kultury i otdykha: Risunki Alfeevskogo i Lebedevoi (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1930).