“Process” in “Architecture of Life”
Four
Process
Organicist Aesthetics of Soviet Standardization
In The Technical Everyday and Contemporary Art (1928), designer and theorist Alexander Toporkov gave an excited description of Doryphoros, a celebrated sculpture of a young athlete by Polykleitos, whose lost original dated back to the fifth century BC. The appearance of Doryphoros in a work of modernist theory might seem surprising—but no less unusual was Toporkov’s reading of it, for he was little interested in the particulars of the classical canon. Rather, in Toporkov’s eyes, Doryphoros appeared as an early example of standardization:
Greek sculpture sought the canon, it strove to develop a norm and a standard. . . . Especially telling is the canon of Polykleitos. His Young Athlete truly presents an image of the standardized human. He is normal in this special sense that we today to some extent know from management. The Young Athlete of Polykleitos is well-organized and purposeful, he is practical [delovit], he will not fail at a difficult moment. He will complete his mission. He has a purposeful setup. He resembles an object more than a human, at least in the Kantian sense of the word; at least his purpose lies not in himself but rather the opposite: this purpose, to which he is oriented and to which he is suited like a key to the lock, is outside [of himself]. He is full and complete and at the same time presupposes an environment.1
Like the ideal human, Toporkov further argued, architecture had to become typical—responding, through its “purposeful setup,” to its age and society just as Polykleitos responded to his. Creating such architecture was to become the task of Soviet standardization, a project that preoccupied architectural functionalists in the late 1920s.
Figure 4.1. Alexander Toporkov considered Doryphoros by Polykleitos (lost original fifth century BC) to be an example of standardization. This image, used by Toporkov as an illustration to his book, is of the bronze cast (made after marble original from Pompeii) of Doryphoros in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. Reproduced in Aleksandr Toporkov, Tekhnicheskii byt i sovremennoe iskusstvo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928), 135.
Presenting the human as the ultimate subject of standardization, Toporkov’s reading of Doryphoros anchors this modernist discussion in such publications as Johannes Bochenek’s nineteenth-century treatise on the geometrical normalization of the body (see Figure 1.5).2 The standardization of architecture, furthermore, mirrored the efforts of modern physiologists at standardizing laboratory animals.3 “Technical standards also serve a normalizing function. Conventions that govern the dimensions of bricks also shape understandings of the bodily politics,” argues Nader Vossoughian, examining the work of Ernst Neufert, the German champion of standardization.4 What remained a hidden agenda in Germany became an overt mission in the USSR. Soviet architecture required a development of a set of normalizing instruments and necessitated a reflection about their formative effect on architecture and the human. Unpacking the constellation of notions that were mobilized for this goal—organization, type, process, function, and setup, among others—this chapter highlights their roots in life sciences in order to examine the bilateral process of simultaneous naturalization (and thus purported humanization) of architecture and the objectification of nature and the human. Unlike the geometric beauty of Bochenek’s normalized human, the functionalist, evolutionist beauty of Toporkov’s Doryphoros changed in response to environmental conditions, thereby endowing architecture with the agency of shaping it.
From Organization to Standardization
On May 30, 1910, St. Petersburg celebrated the birthday of the city’s founder, Tsar Peter the Great, by opening a new, state-of-the-art hospital, which, accommodating two thousand patients, became the largest in the city. Although the hospital buildings were designed in romanticized neo-Dutch style associated with the figure and times of Tsar Peter, their arrangement, developed by architects in consultation with medical experts, embodied modern principles of efficiency and hygiene. The plan of the hospital campus was carefully zoned and calculated to segregate the three types of its inhabitants (patients, employees, and corpses) from the rest of the city and from each other. Administration services faced the entrance, welcoming legitimate visitors and guarding off the undesired ones; the gynecological ward was nearby to facilitate emergency admission for women in labor; wards for people with nervous and contagious diseases were isolated from the rest of the hospital to enable quarantining and peace. Inside the pavilions, the depth and width of the rooms were carefully calibrated, their diagonals oriented along a north–south axis to guarantee an even and long-lasting exposure to the sun, and all rooms were equipped with water closets, separated by vestibules for better ventilation. Taking the human organism as both the object and the model, this project asserts the hospital, rather than the factory or the grain elevator, as the Ur-type of functionalist architecture, placing its architects, Alexander Klein, Alexander Rozenberg, and Lev Ilyin, at its origins.5 Whereas Ilyin was responsible primarily for the hospital’s decoration, Klein—soon to obtain fame in Germany (where he would immigrate in 1921) as the author of functional diagrams exploring the effects of the depth–width proportion of spaces—oversaw the project and prepared its masterplan, while Rozenberg focused on the plans of individual pavilions. In both the hospital and their later work, the latter two pioneered an organizational—and organicist—approach to architecture.
Figure 4.2. In their early and at first sight traditional project, Hospital of Peter the Great (1910) in St. Petersburg, architects Alexander Klein, Alexander Rozenberg, and Lev Ilyin tested the principles of nascent functionalism. Stemming from the requirements of the hospital as a type of architecture that deals with body and life, organicism remained a vital, if concealed, part of later functionalism. This general view of the hospital (most likely by Ilyin) was reproduced in L. Il’in, A. Klein, and A. Rozenberg, Proekt gorodskoi bol’nitsy imeni imperatora Petra Velikago v S.-Peterburge na 1000 krovatei (St. Petersburg: Zhurn. “Stroitel’,” 1908), 3–4.
Today it is often forgotten that two commonly used terms, organism and organization, are etymologically and semantically related. The ultimate split between them occurred only during the second half of the twentieth century, when the rise of the computing machine disembodied the idea of knowledge, confining the meaning of “organism” to the world of biology and of “organization” to the domain of management and information science. Instead, Immanuel Kant used the term “organized being” to refer to plants and animals, while German physiologist Johannes Müller in 1837 defined organism as “a governing unity of the whole, which emerges from the coordination of different elements”—“the enduring activity of living organic matter,” Müller added, “is also present in the laws of rational purposeful planning.”6 In 1858, Müller’s student Rudolf Virchow formulated his influential doctrine of the “cell-state” (der Zellenstaat), which was based on an analogy between the biological and the social organism: every animal, according to Virchow, “presents itself as a sum of vital unities, every one of which manifests all the characteristics of life.”7 The cell-state theory remained a part of mainstream biology well into the twentieth century, while Virchow’s progressive political activism contributed to its popularity among the revolutionized intelligentsia, particularly in Russia.
In 1866, Virchow’s student Ernst Haeckel had suggested another term for his own program of an evolutionist science of organization: “tectology.”8 Every organism, according to Haeckel, was an aggregate of natural bodies of a different hierarchical order: a cell, an organ, an antimere (such as a half), a metamere (such as a segment), a person, or a corm (animal colony). Embracing Haeckel’s monism, Alexander Bogdanov applied this method to the entire universe: all natural, cultural, and social phenomena could be viewed, he argued, as organisms. The common ground, which allowed Bogdanov to compare elements of such different nature, was form—the anatomy of an animal, the morphology of a word, or a social structure.9 In the spirit of Herbert Spencer, Bogdanov considered forms transient and unstable, constantly modifying themselves in response to environmental challenges. This modification activity was none other than organization. Bogdanov’s major philosophical work, Tectology: A Universal Organizational Science (Tektologiia: Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka, 1913–17), was a metatheory that identified general laws and principles of organic, inorganic, and social worlds—it was, as he called it, “a systematization of organized experience,” a universal theory of organization.10
Bogdanov conceived of tectology not as a philosophy but as a practical tool for organizing labor.11 He believed that the entire complex world of culture (language, ideas, and, ultimately, ideology) belonged to a set of tectological instruments, or adaptational mechanisms in the struggle of humans with nature. As an art of creating new usable forms, architecture became for Bogdanov a model of tectological activity:
[If] it is necessary to build a house—this is achievable only because the necessary elements (i.e., wood, stone, lime, glass, axes, saws, hammers, and other tools, the work force of carpenters, stone-masons, etc.) are present, and is achievable only in such a way that elements are united and separated, brought into novel combinations, and the final result—a building—is characterized by such a link and such a correspondence of its elements that it presents something greater than they originally contained, namely an increase in harmony between people and their natural environment, and consequently presents, from a human point of view, an “organized” system.12
The most diligent reader of Bogdanov among architects, Rozenberg conceived his own treatise, Philosophy of Architecture (Filosofiia arkhitektury, 1923), as a metatheory of the discipline—a taxonomy of categories and a set of universal tectological principles applied to architecture.13 Like Bogdanov, he saw the taxonomy of form as a reflection of the hierarchy of organizational activity. Comparing “the art of architecture” with the “art of medicine,” he divided the kingdom of “architectural structures” into classes, genera, species, subspecies, and types.14 Class was a category of scale, and the four classes (rooms, buildings, complexes, and settlements) were arranged in a hierarchy of size and complexity. The twelve genera were defined by function. They were subdivided into two groups of six: industrial (mining, processing, retail, storage, transportation, and communication) and civil (residential, hygienic, medical, educational, public, and administrative). Each genus consisted of several species, which were identified according to “the character of the process.” The species were further subdivided based on how the process was performed (for example, hygienic buildings were divided into bathhouses, showers, and pools). Finally, type, a category that would soon become important for the theory of standardization, described the relationship between an architectural subspecies and its form.15
“Enticing title and . . . complete disappointment,” bemoaned the soon-to-be leader of constructivism Moisei Ginzburg (who at that time was under the sway of Le Corbusier’s proselytizing of architecture expressive of l’esprit nouveau), reviewing Rozenberg’s book in 1923: “On fifty-three little pages [one finds] an endless recapitulation of various schemes and classifications, which give nothing, which explain nothing, and which the author calls ‘philosophy’ for no apparent reason.”16 As industrialization gained its momentum in the Soviet Union, Ginzburg was to reconsider his opinions. By 1926, he also viewed organism as a model of architectural work:
Freed from any clichés of the past, from prejudices and superstitions, the new architect analyses all sides of the task, its specificity, he divides it into elements, groups according to functions, and organizes his solution according to these premises. The result is a spatial solution that is similar to any conscious organism, divided into separate organs, receiving this or that development depending on the functions that it performs.17
If in the early 1920s Rozenberg could explore organization on a purely theoretical level, toward the end of the decade organizational questions became integrated into a new set of practical and industry-related concerns. The First Five-Year Plan aspired to meet its ambitious economic goals through a centralization of all aspects of economic activity. Standardization, a technique that emerged as both a product and a driver of industrialization, enabled the necessary coordination and centralization of production. Although, in architecture, standardization was not limited to modern construction materials and aesthetics, the new technique quickly captivated the imagination of modernist architects.18 Detailing a simultaneously Corbusean and evolutionist vision of the house as a “tool for living,” El Lissitzky argued that such a tool “requires an elaboration of types and norms, which could be sent to mass factory production and then ordered from a catalog.”19 By 1929, Soviet theoretician of the scientific organization of labor Osip Ermansky could contend that the unavoidable arrival of standardization paved “the ground for mass production, calculation, [and] regulation, informing, thus, the horizontal and vertical growth of rationalization.”20 In Soviet Russia, this standardization remained imbued with the same organicism as Rozenberg’s early architectural and theoretical works.
Indeed, while in the second half of the century the notion of standardization became inseparable from the industrial production of building elements, in the 1920s its definition was less precise. Arguing against the French and American authors who equated standardization with rationalization, Ermansky attempted to clarify the term by comparing the nuances of its use in German and Russian languages. Derived from the English word standard, the expanded sense of the Russian word standardizatsiia (equivalent to the German Vereinheitlichung) referred to the unification of production. This broad concept, according to Ermansky’s classification, was subdivided into standardization in the narrow sense (German Normung)—in turn consisting of two parts, the development of types (typification) and the unification of the sizes of details (German Normalisierung; in the Russian-language classification this notion occupied the same hierachical level as standardization in the narrow sense)—and the distribution of these details’ production between factories (specialization). Meanwhile, a related term, norming (the analog of German Normierung), which Ermansky used but considered separate from standardization, addressed the expenditure of material resources and the productivity of labor.21 Since standardization in its narrow sense required well-developed industrial production and was thus only achieved in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, during the interwar period, Soviet standardization remained focused on organizational rather than on industrial aspects: not on regulating the factory production of building elements but on controlling a variety of processes connected to architecture as an object of design, construction, and use—in other words, on typification and norming.22
In fact, typification and norming had entered the sphere of concern of Russian architecture long before the Soviet revolution. Typification (Russian tipizatsiia) relied on the category of type, which was used across biological taxonomy, nascent sociology, and the modern theory of architecture and the arts. What type inevitably demonstrated regardless of the context in which this term was used was the relationship between form and function. Nineteenth-century biologists defined type as a specimen that embodied characteristic features of the species, while realist literature (a tradition that was particularly strong in Russia) relied on type as a character that exemplified its social group. In classicist architecture type was understood as a formal order that expressed the function of the building.23 By the eighteenth century, when the notion reached Russia, it was redefined as a model design solution appropriate for a particular purpose: sets of state-approved model facades were regularly published from the rule of Peter the Great until the revolution. The Russian imperial Construction Codex (Stroitel’nyi ustav, 1832) also prescribed the types for state, ecclesiastical, and civil buildings. This codex, furthermore, was supplemented with the Work Regulation (Urochnoe polozhenie), which focused on construction. Addressing construction managers, Work Regulation assisted them with norming—compiling budgets and organizing the work of employees.24 Closely related, both typification and norming were thus introduced as mechanisms of normalizing architectural work: whereas the former addressed the process of design, the second targeted the process of construction.
Figure 4.3. These diagrams illustrate the differences in the understanding of the term “standardization” in German (above) and Russian (below). Originally published in Russian in Osip Ermanskii, Teoriia i praktika ratsionalizatsii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 269–70. Redrawn and translated into English by the author.
World Process and the Process of Construction
In the second half of the 1920s, Rozenberg headed work on The Set of Industrial Construction Norms (Svod proizvodstvennykh stroitel’nykh norm, 1927–30), a multivolume compendium aimed at replacing the Work Regulation.25 This work gave him an opportunity to continue developing his earlier theory of normalization, which aspired to devise a single methodological foundation for architecture, from its most abstract, organizational principles down to the practical particularities of construction. The term “normalization,” for Rozenberg, referred not to industrial details but to processes. To normalize a process was, according to him, to subject it to the energy-economic principle: “to organize it in such a way that it would give the maximum production with the minimal expense of resources and energy.”26 Rozenberg received this approach from Bogdanov as well as from Russian imperial military architect Viktor Sokolsky, whose “economic principle” appears its most immediate source.27 Whereas nature, Rozenberg stipulated, possessed absolute normalization—the evolution of form in response to the changes in the environment—the normalization of human society was relative as culture diverted the normalizing economic course. In its continuous progress toward more complex organization and fuller normalization, human society was thus simultaneously returning to nature.28
Evoking Eduard von Hartmann’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophies of history, Rozenberg described the world as “the world process,” which encompassed all other processes, including “the all-human process.”29 Every human process, he explained, required three elements: setting (obstanovka), which he identified as “the sum of all objects necessary for a normal functioning of the process”; mass, “the sum of all objects and people participating in the process”; and the sequence of the process, “a certain order of the duration of the process.”30 Design, in this picture, emerged as the evolution of the building’s shape out of many possibilities as the one most economically responding to its conditions. Such a concept was vividly illustrated by Klein’s diagrams examining the relationship between the depth and the width of the room. Publicized and studied in the Soviet Union, they demonstrated the process of finding the balance between hygiene (relatively wide external wall and relatively shallow depth for better insolation) and economy.31
Figure 4.4. Reproduced by the constructivist journal Sovremennaya arkhitektura shortly after the original publication in German, Alexander Klein’s diagrams demonstrated the process of finding the balance between hygiene and economy. Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1929): 29.
Rather than developing several fixed types, Rozenberg proposed creating a single form-generating algorithm, which would regulate, simplify, and demystify the process of design. Beginning with an analysis of the process that takes place inside a room, he proceeded, relying on modern hygienic and economic standards, to calculate the ceiling’s height, the room’s volume and shape, and the size and location of windows, subsequently uniting rooms in buildings, adding circulation areas, stacking up floors, combining buildings into complexes, complexes into settlements, and settlements into settlement nodes, which could proliferate, forming organic ties with each other. “To normalize a space,” Rozenberg elucidated in his General Theory of Design of Architectural Structures (Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia arkhitekturnykh sooruzhenii, 1930), means to establish numerical values for each type of space, according to its “varied character [velichina], for all its characteristic coefficients.” Rozenberg formalized this operation of translation with a series of rules and guidelines, which he developed based on Sokolsky’s publications. By entering architectural coefficients (volume, perimeter, building surface, width of walls, among others) into numerical relationships, the architect could determine the building’s economic indexes: the norm of main areas a (indicating the rationality of the main areas’ plan), the coefficient of the breadth (rationality) of solution k (the rationality of the plan of service areas), the coefficient of projectiveness l (the rationality of circulation), the coefficient of constructiveness m (the rationality of the size of the building’s footprint). The ultimate parameter—the spatial rationality of the building—was calculated based on the comparison of its volume v and median ceiling height h with the norm a and the coefficients k, l, and m.32
Since form would continuously change following the change of parameters, Rozenberg’s organic architecture was inherently unstable: the size of a bedroom, for instance, could grow alongside the family, subsequently leading to its split into several bedrooms. Moreover, economic purposefulness, Rozenberg mused, leads “to the necessity of giving the structure only such a robustness” that would guarantee that its “functional (moral) death” would occur simultaneously with its “physical death.”33 Thus expanding the definition of architecture to include not only erection but also maintenance and demolition of buildings, he redefined it as “construction process.”34
Figure 4.5. Alexander Rozenberg’s diagrams illustrate the process of growth of urban nodes. Reproduced in Aleksandr Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia arkhitekturnykh sooruzhenii (Moscow: Plankhozgiz, 1930), 185.
Dedicated to norming, The Set of Norms aspired to became a periodic table of elements for this process. Borrowing the system of periodization from Work Regulation, its fourteen volumes divided the discipline according to the leading working material and technique: transportation works, earth works, masonry works, ferro-concrete works, wood works, roofs, hearths, plaster works, wall-painting works, metal works, sanitation works, external networks, highway and road works, and hydrotechnical works. Each volume was further organized as a set of normalizing instructions for processes of different hierarchical order: elementary operations, simple works, complex works for parts of buildings, and, finally, norms for complete buildings. If the old Work Regulation, Rozenberg explained, had focused on calculations of expenses, his Set of Norms offered an active, organic approach to the construction process.35 Alongside norms for work, it provided norms for rest and included the so-called orgdobavki (organizational additions), or time “cushions” for possible organizational delays for each type of works.36 But most important, in addition to providing norms it offered detailed, step-by-step descriptions of each work operation; in other words, it not only normed but also normalized the work of construction. Whereas Rozenberg’s earlier philosophical schemes inscribed architecture into a universal taxonomy by linking it to categories of different ontological order, his scientific normalization of construction turned architecture into a mediating mechanism that allowed reconciling the unattainable ideals of modernization and the crude reality of unskilled, technologically backward labor in the interwar Soviet Union, including the latter in the discussion alongside building materials and construction techniques.
Figure 4.6. The forms for “cards of the documentation of factors” were issued by the State Planning Committee of the Soviet Union as instruments of registering the working environment. Such a form was filled out by Rozenberg to document the process of flooring. (a) verso; (b) recto. Published in Aleksandr Rozenberg, Teoriia normirovaniia stroitel’nykh protsessov (Moscow: Aktsionernoe izdatel’skoe obshchestvo, 1928), 40–41.
Like a Taylorist efficiency engineer, Rozenberg’s organizer of architectural work was equipped with a chronometer and a camera for documenting the processes of construction and measuring its outcome. Yet, the difference between Rozenberg’s approach and Taylorism was significant: whereas the latter focused on physical movement alone, Rozenberg’s normalization aspired to provide a comprehensive account of varied factors that provided the context for labor activity. Illustrating his managerial method of “the documentation of factors” (fiksazh faktorov) in another publication, Rozenberg described flooring work as performed on a particular day by two ethnic Russian workers, forty-five and forty-seven years of age and in satisfactory health, both literate and trained as carpenters, one with fifteen years of experience and the other with twenty, one right-handed and the other left-handed. This work, we further find out, took place on a summer Saturday, during the morning and early afternoon hours, when it was hot (30 degrees C) and dry; although the wind was insignificant, the building had drafts. Their tools were the usual: the hammer weighed 1.22 kg and the axe 2.04 kg; the bow saw was 0.7 meter long. The rest of the tools and materials were described just as meticulously, the methods and outcomes of the work documented by drawings.37 The resulting observations would allow modifying the basic work norm for flooring (as provided in The Set of Norms) in accordance with these specific factors. This meticulousness notwithstanding, Rozenberg’s “documentation of factors” avoids considering any personal circumstances: where the workers came from, who their friends and families were, what they ate, or what their emotional disposition was that day. The depersonified subjects of the evolutionary process, they existed inasmuch as they reconfigured the environment in accordance with objective environmental factors. This objectification permitted making their normalized work an element in the great world process, which Rozenberg described as the “normalization of life in general.”38
Functionalism
Meanwhile, in Moscow, Ginzburg was developing similar ideas. The functional (funktsional’nyi) method of architecture, which he developed in 1926–28, can be seen as an attempt at exploring the mechanics of making architecture a tool for the normalization of life. Contrary to the received mechanicist understanding of functionalism, Ginzburg’s method was deeply organic. Function, for him (as it also was for Rozenberg), was inseparable from the environment: by paying attention to function, he aspired to achieve a full integration of architecture with life. The term “functionalism” arrived from Germany, where function was identified with the process of everyday life: in 1928, Hannes Meyer (who would soon move to the USSR) famously defined building as an organization of “the processes of life,” including personal hygiene, sleep, sex, pets, and car maintenance, and Neufert, in his Bauentwrufslehre (1936), would supplement typified plans with drawings of human figures engaged in various activities.39 Related to Taylorism, which divided work into a series of elemental operations, in the Soviet Union this approach departed from such sociological methods as the time-budget studies of Soviet workers that economist Stanislav Strumilin, a mastermind of the Soviet planning system, had conducted in the early 1920s (and which H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley’s PEP repeated during the following decade).40 “Everyday-life processes, of course, have to be examined with the same scrutiny and attention as industrial,” Ginzburg explained, adding that everyday life was to be divided into such functions as sleep, eating, and children’s play in the same way that scientific management divided labor into separate physical and intellectual tasks. Opposing the artificial separation of industrial and domestic spheres, Ginzburg proposed, instead, to use a more holistic notion of the “combined industrial-everyday process.”41
As a method of architectural design, “the functional method,” for Ginzburg, was synonymous with evolution as the creative method of nature: “The method of functional creativity . . . leads to a unified, organic creative process, in which one task follows from another with all the logic of natural development. No element, no part of the concept of the architect is arbitrary. Everything finds its explanation and functional justification in its purposefulness.”42 In its strive for organic unity, Ginzburg’s method approached psychological functionalism, an antistructuralist program that represented an attempt, on the part of American psychologists such as William James and John Dewey, to reconstitute psychology according to the principles of evolutionary theory. Just as evolutionary theory explored the morphology of the organism as shaped by the functions of its organs, so psychological functionalism examined the functions of thoughts, sensations, and feelings.43 These and other psychological notions are in reality “distinctions of flexible function only, not of fixed existence,” argued Dewey underscoring the transitory and flexible character of function.44 Dewey’s work on pedagogy was influential in Russia due to his support of the Soviet revolution and his much-publicized visit, following an invitation by Anatoly Lunacharsky, in 1928.45
The implications of functionalism for aesthetics included the rehabilitation of the aesthetic value of purposefulness, which Kant had previously deemed antiaesthetic. The beautiful, for Kant, was associated with “purposiveness without purpose” (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck), which (unlike the purposeless sublime) demonstrated clear organization that did not have a useful end. Instead, the functionalist aesthetics identified beauty with purpose. Function, according to Lissitzky, “in the language of mathematics means dependence. When working on his project a functionalist architect therefore must consider dependences.”46 Bretagne fishermen’s houses, his follower Toporkov likewise explained, evolved in the course of their inhabitants’ adaptation to climate and available tools and materials—they appeared not accidentally, but as a result of necessity, embodying “only the general, the typical, the transindividual.”47 His Doryphoros, “an object more than a human,” embodied this transindividuality. Ginzburg, however, objected to any mechanicism and reductivism in functionalist aesthetics. Taking a chair as an example, he warned against its simplistic understanding as an object for sitting on; rather, “only a careful study of all circumstances secondary to this function—an examination of which work the chair is designed for, [for] which space and conditions, from which material [it is made], etc.,” he professed, “can give the ultimate and exhaustive material for the design of the chair.”48
Developing from process to form—“from skeleton to skin” and “from inside out”—functional architecture, Ginzburg argued, created a “material formal environment [oformlenie] determined by new life conditions.” The skeleton, to Ginzburg, was “spatial organization”—unique parameters and their mutual relationships.49 Any architectural project thus had to start as two diagrams: those of movement and of equipment.50 Contemporaneous with the movement diagrams of Klein, the diagrams of Ginzburg (who publicized Klein’s work in Sovremennaya arkhitektura) betray similar intention. As Christoph Lueder demonstrated arguing against the stereotypes associated with Klein’s work, his intent was not to contain functions but to create a psychologically therapeutic effect through the economy of movement within the small apartment and the improved spatial experience.51 The apartment, for Klein, was a “living organism, which needs to reflect the forms of our lives.”52 Likewise, Ginzburg defined the goal of the functional method in organicist and economic terms—as “the economy of space and life energy” and “the hygiene of perception.”53
A key notion in his functionalist theory, Ginzburg’s “purposeful setup” (tselevaia ustanovka) developed his earlier notion of purpose orientation (tselevoe ustremlenie), which, he believed, enabled the organic coordination of design processes (such as plan, construction, and decoration).54 Already in his early Style and Epoch (Stil’ i epokha, 1924), Ginzburg relied on the work of the head of the Central Institute of Labor Alexey Gastev, who (in turn, rephrasing G. E. Lessing) declared that “what was important was not to possess a machine but to strive toward it.”55 Ginzburg too saw the machine not merely as an exemplification of Zeitgeist but as an ideal to which humanity should aspire, and a metaphor of directed movement: “the essence of any motion in a machine is not a self-contained motion in and of itself, but a motion generating work in the direction of an axis located beyond that motion and representing an ideal, unrealizable objective.”56
Figure 4.7. Stroykom schemes of proportion and movement, which accompanied each of their apartment types (in this example type A-2), illustrate Ginzburg’s definition of the functional method as “the economy of space and life energy” and “the hygiene of perception.” Published in Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1929): 10.
Gastev’s scientific organization of labor relied on a psychological concept, ustanovka (German Einstellung), which, depending on the context, is translated to English as attitude, setup, disposition, or mental set, and is related to such philosophical ideas as Schopenhauer’s principle of will as the world’s unconscious driving force. First introduced in the late 1880s by psychophysiologists who studied the impact of prior experience on reaction time, it was later developed by the members of the revisionist Wundtian Würzburg school, such as Karl Marbe and Henry Watt, who believed that human actions were determined by unconscious tendencies.57 Highlighting the power of the Einstellung to control the unconscious, Hugo Münsterberg later argued that Einstellungen could be formed by hypnotic suggestion, and the Russian term ustanovka was indeed often used as suggestion’s synonym.58 Similarly, appearing with an introduction by Ernst Mach, the influential Theory of Creative Work (Teoriia tvorchestva, 1910) by Russian empiriocriticist Peter Engelmeyer analyzed every invention, technological as well as artistic, as a three-part action (Dreiakt, in the book’s German edition) that consisted of unconscious intuition (will, which is comparable to Einstellung), conscious knowledge and analysis (reason), and constructive reification (skill).59 During the interwar period, in the Soviet Union the theory of ustanovka was developed by Wundt’s student Dmitry Uznadze at the University of Tbilisi (Georgia), who saw ustanovka as unconscious preparation of the organism for conscious activity.60 From psychology, the term entered theories of scientific management and planning, most consequentially, Münsterberg’s psychotechnics and Gastev’s scientific organization of labor, in which it described both the mental and the physical setup necessary for the successful performance of work.
Despite its association with the unconscious, in translating tselevaia ustanovka to German, Ginzburg chose the expression Zielbewusste Einstellung: “a setup that is conscious of its goal.”61 According to Ginzburg, his functional method was in need of clearly articulated, practical goals, which he saw aligned with the goals of economic planning.62 In similar terms, Rozenberg had earlier argued that as a part of material culture architecture can endow unconscious evolution with a conscious goal.
Creating objects of culture, . . . humanity brought a certain element of consciousness into its biological development. Externalizing its organizational creativity, endowing it with an element of consciousness, humanity accelerated its biological development and, most importantly, widened the scope of foreseeing its future achievements. But this does not mean that inside our organism further organizational changes have stopped: they continue, although outside of our consciousness, but they are set in the closest connection with the material culture.63
Entangled within a network of social meanings, architecture, considered as the process of design, required an external setup, while, considered as the material product of design, it created the setup for its users. To put it differently, functionalist architecture was conceived as an instrument of controlling the social unconscious and therefore of regulating social evolution. This ambition remained at the core of the Soviet program of typification.
Type
Headed by Ginzburg, the Section of Typification within the Construction Commission (Stroykom) of the Economic Council of the Russian Republic was founded in 1928, responsible for the development of constructions and standards, experimental construction, and the education of technical specialists.64 This ambitious mission notwithstanding, it employed only four specialists (the architects Mikhail Barshch, Vladimir Vladimirov, Alexander Pasternak, and Grigory Sum-Shik) and focused only on residential buildings.65 Its most prominent realized project was the apartment block for the Soviet Ministry of Finance (Narkomfin), designed by Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis on Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow in 1928 under the patronage of the commissar (minister) of finance, Nikolay Milyutin.66 The project provided opportunities for discussing the theoretical and practical problems of typification and for collaborating with other designers, most importantly, with Lissitzky (who was also employed by Stroykom, working within the Department of Construction Control) on the standardization of furniture, and with the Bauhaus designer Hinnerk Scheper on standardized interior color schemes.67
The Narkomfin belonged to a series of Existenzminimum (minimal habitation) projects devised by CIAM, to which Ginzburg was a delegate, in the late 1920s as an application of the economic principle—an attempt to determine the universal formula of the minimal living standard for workers’ housing as a balance between its affordability for the masses and the quality of the living environment for the individual occupant.68 The endeavor seemed vital in the situation of material scarcity faced by the Soviet Union in the 1920s, caused by rapid urbanization and industrialization, which consumed all resources at the expense of the workers’ quality of life. Thus, although the official Soviet per capita living standard remained a meager nine square meters, in reality the average was only 5.9 square meters (and even less, 5.2, in Moscow)—in comparison Le Corbusier’s minimal individual “biological unit” (“the cell”) of fourteen square meters seemed luxurious. The vast majority of the Soviet urban population resided in “communal apartments”—old bourgeois flats shared by several families. There was little hope, architects agreed, that individual two- and three-room apartments would become available to families in any foreseeable future: for many of them, even a one-room individual apartment appeared wishful thinking.69 Responding to this challenge, Stroykom employed a building plan, based on a wide, naturally lit side corridor, which had initially been elaborated for military barracks and was praised by Sokolsky, who saw it as an exemplification of his economic principle.70 Stroykom modified the plan, replacing the barracks’ rooms with typified individual apartments, which made the critics point out that, despite being designed for families, the apartments would in reality be occupied as communal. Yet, was precisely this seeming oversight that was at the core of Stroykom’s program of typification.
Figure 4.8. Designed by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis in 1928, the apartment block for the Soviet Ministry of Finance (Narkomfin) on Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow was the most prominent realized project of Stroykom’s Section of Typification. These photographs by an unknown photographer document the building shortly after its construction. Reproduced in Moisei Ginzburg, Zhilishche: Opyt piatiletnei raboty nad problemoi zhilishcha (Moscow: Gosstroiizdat, 1934), 87.
Like other Russian theorists of rationalization, Stroykom architects considered typification—associated with evolutionary adaptability—preferable to mechanical standardization. For Sokolsky, typification had been an important instrument of rationalization: type, he argued, was the general design idea, which could be modified depending on local conditions.71 Even for such an enthusiast of Taylorism as Gastev, the standard was antagonistic to the idea of evolution, appearing as “a congelation, as it were, of technical progress at a certain stage,” which mummified a transient version of adaptation of form to fluctuating environmental conditions.72 Similarly, Rozenberg warned against “the ossification of norms,” contending that building types responded to the infinite variety of processes, whose organization constantly changes in response to the evolution of life.73 Therefore, Rozenberg argued, each building was unique, and determining precise standards was impossible:
From the normalization point of view, it would even be uneconomical to determine precise standards for architectural structures. Because a structure in any case will always remain an object that is assembled (montaged) from many separate elements, its standardization should be mostly directed toward the standardization of its parts. In regard to the structure in general, standardization will only fix general characteristic features of the structure, that is, it will typify it, while the actual standardization will be achieved only for the simplest structures.74
Refraining from typifying buildings, which would have limited the flexibility of architecture, Ginzburg’s team suggested typifying apartments, offering several one-, one-and-a-half-, two-, and three-room versions that could be recombined depending on a particular situation.75 Two- and three-room ones could initially be “communal,” to be converted to individual in the future, while one-room apartments, initially housing families, would later become available to singles and childless couples.
Figure 4.9. The type-F apartment was the minimal, and the base, unit among Stroykom typified plans. This axonometric section by Stroykom was reproduced in V. I. Vel’man, ed., Tipovye proekty i konstruktsii zhilishchnogo stroitel’stva rekomenduemye na 1930 god (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe tekhnicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 60.
More than simply flexible and growing with the economy, society, and the family, Stroykom’s architecture had to lead their growth. Ginzburg’s base model—type F, the one-bedroom double-level “residential cell” (iacheika) that could be between twenty and thirty square meters in size depending on the building’s budget—offered the same minimum amenities as larger apartments, using the free space (primarily the well-lit common corridor, “gained” by lowering the ceilings of bedrooms) for social activities. Its purpose was to inspire residents to move from traditional to socialized living. Type F was simultaneously a conventional minimal apartment and the housing of the future. Its corridors were to function as the spaces of study and recreation, prompting the use of other shared areas, such as the communal kitchen and the dining hall. A complex of type-F apartments, Ginzburg professed, will in the future develop into “a higher form of living”: the communal house.76 Although the architectural details of this house were yet to be discovered along the path toward socialism, Ginzburg was convinced that this new type would result from the dissolution of the bourgeois family and the collectivization of domestic chores, childrearing, culture, and sports. As more everyday activities came to be socialized, he suggested, the dwelling organism would evolve in the direction of socialization, rather than individualization, of space. Famously defining the task of architecture as the creation of “social condensers” (spaces that transform the personality of its user the way a mechanical condenser transforms vapor into water), Ginzburg designed the Narkomfin as a prototype building “of a transitional type,” which inconspicuously stimulated residents accustomed to old, family-based lifestyles to transition to collective modes of living.77 Rather than forcing people to change their lives, architecture would tacitly provide them with an evolutionary path. As a later proposal specified, assuming a Spencerian tone, “the material-objective environment,” which is itself a product of human labor and economic conditions, and as such, is endowed with purpose, “reversely impacts the development of these processes and thus affects the formation of social-everyday skills and the ideology of the human.”78
The Commissariat of Everyday Life
As a part of an intra-Stroykom collaboration, Lissitzky, who between 1925 and 1930 was the professor of Furniture and Artistic Interior Design at VKhUTEIN, embarked on a project of elaborating principles of standardized furniture, including that for the Narkomfin building.79 Soviet society, Lissitzky believed, provided unique opportunities for typification because, in contrast to capitalist countries with their “complete anarchy of needs,” it unified the needs of its members.80 Deindividualization opened the door for reconfiguring design according to the economic principle: the normalization of life necessitated the rationalization of architecture, and as a result, the “contemporary apartment must be developed like the best contemporary travel suitcase, considering everything necessary that it must contain and using every square centimeter.”81
In 1925, Lissitzky had distinguished between the purely economic and technical “American” architectural principles of rationalization, functionality, and hygiene, and “European” social aspirations, manifested through reimagining everyday life.82 While the changes in the urban sphere were driven by technological invention and were thus guided by the first set of principles, the progress of the domestic sphere was tightly connected with the social and psychological evolution of the human. Yet the two spheres were interconnected. The theoretician of constructivism Boris Arvatov explained in his essay “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Object,” published the same year, that a new, modern relationship between the human and the object first emerged in the industrial city alongside the technological principles of standardization and normalization, subsequently penetrating everyday life. This relationship, which Arvatov classified as monistic, sublated the opposition of naïve materialism and idealism from an evolutionary standpoint: the modern urban environment, built of glass, steel, and concrete, was honest about its material and function, thereby encouraging people to think functionally. This, in turn, changed the relationship between humans and the objects of their everyday use, announcing “a new stage in the evolution of material culture” exemplified by “collapsible furniture, moving sidewalks, revolving doors, escalators, automat restaurants, reversible outfits.”83 Such objects, which purportedly infused the act of use with productivist ethics, attracted the attention of Lissitzky-the-furniture-designer, who was acquainted with Arvatov through the constructivist network. He found examples of such objects in Gerrit Rietveld’s Schoeder house in Utrecht, which he had visited in 1926: fascinated with furniture and sliding partitions, he sketched them to use as a teaching material.84
Lissitzky’s ensuing projects for transformable furniture aspired to engage the user in an active, dynamic relationship with the object. At the 1929 Hygiene exhibition in Dresden, he presented a visionary project for an “individual living cell” in a communal house as a full-scale model of a space that could convert from a bedroom to a living room: in the middle was a movable screen-cabinet, one end of which was attached to a wall and the other end rotating to a 90-degree angle; both sides of the cabinet had shelves and foldable elements, including a bed.85 Lissitzky’s other project—modular, or combinable (kombinatnaia) furniture—typified not objects but their elements in the same way as Stroykom typified apartments rather than buildings. Its primary unit was a box-case for storing belongings, which, developed into five standardized elements—a nightstand (which could be converted to a rack by adding lower shelves), a cabinet (transformed to a chest when placed horizontally), a wardrobe, a drawer, and a standardized furniture leg—could be turned and recombined to achieve a variety of forms and functions. This uniformity and compatibility, Lissitzky argued, guaranteed aesthetic unity, while at the same time encouraging users’ active participation and enabling variety and individual expression as they would be free to recombine the elements.86
Although constructivist theory saw physical interaction with furniture as a tool of personal transformation, by the end of the 1920s designers became skeptical of overtly complicated mechanisms, which, they feared, could enslave their user.87 In a 1928 lecture, “The Artistic Preconditions of the Standardization of Civic Individual Furniture,” Lissitzky argued against mechanicism and technofetishism in furniture design. Transformable furniture, for him, was interesting not because of its mechanical solutions, but because it possessed a potential for expressing the Zeitgeist. In what at first sight seems a surprising reversal of his earlier maxim, “Man is the measure of all tailors—Measure architecture with architecture” (which was discussed in chapter 2), Lissitzky now called for a return to Protagoras: “The man is the measure of all things. This relation, this scale [masshtab] has to be clearly expressed in the shape of furniture.”88 Rather than a rejection of his earlier principles, however, this statement can be read as a warning against their simplistic mechanicist understanding: what mattered for Lissitzky in both cases was the relationship between an organism and its environment. In his work for Stroykom, no less than in the early 1920s, Lissitzky was preoccupied with the designed environment’s evolutionary effect upon the human.
Figure 4.10. El Lissitzky’s project for the Hygiene exhibition in Dresden (1929) featured a project of a transformable apartment in a communal house. The screen-cabinet with a foldable bed could rotate to a 90-degree angle, transforming the space from a bedroom into the living room. Period photograph by unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (950076).
Figure 4.11. El Lissitzky’s drawing (1930) demonstrates the mechanics of the transformable apartment. Courtesy of Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts, fond 2361, op.1, d. 19, l. 16.
Figure 4.12. El Lissitzky’s modular, or combinable (kombinatnaia), furniture typified not objects but their elements in the same way as Stroykom typified apartments rather than buildings. This illustration by Lissitzky shows the five elements of combinable furniture at the bottom, while the upper images provide examples of their possible combinations. The top combination consists of the nightstand placed on top of the cabinet and the wardrobe and drawer tilted horizontally (all elements using a set of legs); the desk underneath is assembled of one small set of shelves, two small cabinets, and one horizontal board. Published in V. I. Vel’man, ed., Tipovye proekty i konstruktsii zhilishchnogo stroitel’stva rekomenduemye na 1930 god (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe tekhnicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 33.
“The word ‘art’ has to be deleted from the lexicon,” Lissitzky explained. “If Lenin was alive today, he would have founded the ‘Commissariat of Everyday Life.’”89 In his design for the interior of the Stroykom type-F apartment, like Ginzburg, Lissitzky attempted to create a normed and normalizing environment that would both respond to the current condition of scarcity and gradually transform this condition—and the apartment’s inhabitant as well. This evolution had to be incremental: as a social condenser, furniture was to transform gently and creatively, addressing the immediate needs of the human in the first place. In the words of Arvatov, “Understanding the developing tendencies of material byt [everyday life] means being able to direct them, to transform them systematically, i.e. to turn byt from a conservative force into a progressive one.”90 The space was divided into three functional zones: work, dining (which could become an additional sleeping place at night), and sleeping (which could turn into office space during the day). Built-in standardized furniture would free the worker from the sense of possession, while the round dining table ensured gender and age equality within the family.91 Meanwhile, the individual kitchen was reduced to a “kitchen-element” (kitchenette), which Lissitzky designed in collaboration with his wife Sophie Küppers.92 Also combinable, the element consisted of four elements and could be installed fully or partially depending on the availability of space (in its most minimal version occupying only 0.7 square meters of floor space). Intended to breed not bourgeois domesticity but collectivism, it would shrink, rather than grow, with time and eventually be removed altogether.
Figure 4.13. El Lissitzky believed that the standardized furniture he designed for the Narkomfin would transform the personalities of its residents. This 1929 photograph (possibly taken by Lissitzky) shows Lissitzky’s model of the furnished apartment type F. Courtesy of the State Tretyakov Gallery.
Figure 4.14. The “kitchen-element” designed for the Narkomfin house by El Lissitzky and his wife Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers also relied on the principles of minimalism and combinatorics. It taught the household members to appreciate collective rather than family meals and would be gradually disassembled and eventually removed altogether. Lissitzky-Küppers’s coauthorship is acknowledged by Lissitzky in “From a Questionnaire on Furniture” (“Aus einem Fragebogen über Möbel,” in Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky [Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977], 197). The image was published in Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1929): 24.
The regulation of life, understood as humanity’s evolutionary process, was the goal of Soviet interwar standardization, which, prioritizing typification, relied not on industrial but on organicist models. For Rozenberg, Ginzburg, and Lissitzky, architecture was a process of devising adaptational mechanisms—of transforming the environment in accordance with the purported evolutionary goals of the human. Moreover, no less than architecture and furniture, the human itself became an object of design. In Rozenberg’s theory of normalization, the taxonomy of scale ensured the connection between the process of construction and the world process. Similarly, Ginzburg attempted to subordinate architecture to the goals of social evolution (as exemplified in his concept of purposeful setup), by developing the notion of type as a flexible adaptational instrument. The same goal guided Lissitzky’s furniture design projects, which saw everyday life as a field of the formation of consciousness. As process, or rather, as a multiplicity of adaptational processes such as those of design, construction, and habitation, their architecture was to be both fluid and regulated.
Taking standardization as an opportunity to make architecture more processual and organic (and thus, to rehumanize it, as expressed explicitly by Lissitzky), Soviet architecture could not help but standardize and deindividualize the human—a problem with modernism that did not go unnoticed by later critics. Kenneth Frampton pointed to this loss of individuality to condemn both suburbanization and postmodernist fascination with infrastructure, which he classified as an architecture of process. Unlike it, the “architecture of object” was guided by “more traditional criteria of worldliness and use.”93 Frampton’s argument departed from Hannah Arendt’s seminal distinction, in The Human Condition (1956), between dull, repetitive labor, necessary for the maintenance of biological life, and creative and fruitful work, whose products were long-lasting and culturally significant. Unlike the Soviet functionalists, for whom process endowed the work of design, construction, and use with goal and, thus, with humanity, both Arendt and Frampton (as well as Giorgio Agamben later) considered natural necessity the opposite of freedom.94
The arrival of the informational age resulted in another reevaluation of the opposition of the process and the object. While modernism treated multiplicity as a natural condition, feeling an urge to organize it by typification, the architecture of the informational age, exemplifying the shift from the economy of production to the one of consumption, replaced the organic concept of type with the informational concept of customization. Visually resembling Klein’s diagrammatic multitudes, Finite Format 04, a series of 729 watercolors by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen (2017), proposes to replace “form by format” and to erase “an ideal object,” highlighting, instead, “hereditary metamorphosis within the same family” (Plate 8).95 In the words of Pier Vittorio Aurelli, who detected a transition from the early modernist notion of organic process to a new concept of the immaterial process of artificial intelligence in the British architect Cedrik Price’s method of “life-conditioning,” what is at stake today is no longer the autonomy of architecture from life but the autonomy of life from capitalism.96
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