Orientation

The Eye of an Architect

Lissitzky’s iconic 1924 photomontage, the self-portrait known as The Constructor among scholars, could provide a point of entry to this discussion. The graph-paper background, the geometrical axes that delineate the space of the image, and a compass held by a hand that seems to emerge directly from the artist’s eye, all suggest a reading of The Constructor as a celebration of engineering and technology. Indeed, for a long time scholars had interpreted it this way.6 More recently, historians have begun to doubt this interpretation, pointing to intentional disruptions of clarity, such as areas of darkness and the slight tilt of the axes, which, they suggest, could refer to irrationality.7 Lissitzky, after all, worked on the portrait from a sanatorium near the Swiss Locarno, where he underwent a surgical treatment of tuberculosis while simultaneously collaborating with Zurich Dadaists. As Leah Dickerman convincingly demonstrated, the self-portrait expressed an embodied, binocular model of vision.8 Employed to criticize perspectival representation, this model related the self-portrait to his earlier Proun paintings (or, as he called them, “interchange station[s] between painting and architecture”).9 But what is more, as this chapter argues, the self-portrait can be read as a statement about the goals, methods, and principles of modern architecture—a self-portrait of an architect. Trained as an architect-engineer at Riga and Darmstadt polytechnic institutes, Lissitzky did indeed consider architecture his main profession, to which he returned in Locarno as he assumed the work on the Wolkenbügels while simultaneously exploring photography.10

Why is the constructor-architect’s eye eclipsed by his (transparent) hand, holding a compass? And what does the triangular relationship between eye, hand, and compass reveal about architecture? In the early twentieth century, the compass, a counterpart of the T-square, often appeared as the symbol of architecture: in 1919, it was considered, for example, as the emblem of Moscow Architectural Artel, of which Ladovsky was a member.11 The roots of this symbolism go back to the Renaissance. Discussing Raphael’s School of Athens, Giorgio Vasari identified the bending figure holding a pair of compasses with the architect Donato Bramante. Furthermore, Vasari reported that Michelangelo believed that “it [was] necessary to have a good eye for measurement rather than a steady hand, because the hands work while the eyes make judgments: he also held to this same method in architecture.”12 Lissitzky insisted that measurement is not merely formal but productive work: “Construction is an intention to create an independent and concrete object. Unlike composition, which merely discusses various formal possibilities, construction asserts. Compass is the chisel of construction—the brush is an instrument of composition,” he responded to the INKhUK debate about the relationship between construction and composition.13 His own description of the portrait, in a letter to his wife Sophie Küppers, as “my monkey-hand” evokes Friedrich Engels’s well-known account of the role of labor in “transition from ape to man”: the hand, according to Engels, was the first organ shaped by labor (or purposeful work performed with the help of a tool), stimulating the evolution of the rest of the organism, including higher nervous functions.14 Ernst Kapp, whose “evolutionary history” of culture appeared nearly simultaneously with Engels’s study, similarly saw the hand as the first human tool—“the tool of tools,” contained, in an embryonic form, in all instruments that were or would be subsequently developed by humanity, including optical devices, language, and the state.15 Making a statement about architecture’s productive role, the hand holding the compass appears on the Lissitzky-designed cover of the booklet Architecture VKhUTEMAS (1927), which publicized the work of the Architecture Department. Insisting that the school prepared students for the practical tasks of socialist construction, the image was deployed to defend the reputation of VKhUTEMAS against accusations of utopianism that followed the notorious thesis defense of Georgy Krutikov (to be discussed later in this chapter).16

And yet, as The Constructor testifies, the eye was an equally important tool of the architect. Its presence in the photomontage alongside coordinate axes dematerialized architectural labor, presenting it as the work of seeing. “Seeing, of course, is also an A.,” stated Lissitzky’s epigraph to his 1925 article “A. and Pangeometry” (“K. und Pangeometrie”).17 Here, Lissitzky famously replaced the word “art” with its first letter, reducing it to a geometrical notation—a measuring point in the coordinate system. His technologized eye consisted of “lenses and eye-pieces, precision instruments and reflex cameras, cinematographs which magnify or hold split seconds, Roentgen and X, Y, Z rays,” which “have all combined to place in my forehead 20, 2,000, 200,000 very sharp, polished searching eyes.”18 Appearing on the photomontage, the letters X, Y, Z refer to both geometric notations and technologized seeing—to new geometries that modernity brought. Later, reviewing Erich Mendelsohn’s popular photo album America: The Album of an Architect (Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten), Lissitzky praised the unusual perspectives that technology opened for architecture: “The modern architect equips himself with the most modern instrument—a small photo camera. He only has to observe well. To be able to see—that is his whole art.”19

Lissitzky’s later lecture on furniture design brought the eye, the hand, and the compass together.20 It associated the hand with industrial production, arguing that aesthetically good objects “are designed by the hand of the human with the help of the processing part of a modern machine.” The eye referred to the precision of seeing: “The eye takes it [a piece of furniture], in its entirety, as true, without wandering around in confusion and getting stuck in it.” Finally, the compass represented geometrical regularity: “Its form as a whole and in its details can be constructed with a ruler and a compass.”21 The Constructor too could be read as a statement that brings together production, geometry, and perception: new tools of building and seeing resulted in new, disorienting geometries, and modern architecture was tasked with helping the user adapt to them. In what follows, I will unpack this constellation to highlight its effects for Lissitzky’s concept of urbanism.

Return to Nature

Although asserting seeing as the crucial work of an architect, Lissitzky was quick to distance himself from Renaissance humanism. By the 1920s, the idea that the Renaissance was the defining period in the history of modern culture as articulated by historian Jacob Burckhardt had been subjected to criticism, most prominently by Burckhardt’s younger colleague at Basel University, Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that the human is not “a sure measure of all things” (an everlasting, unchangeable being) but a constantly evolving Hegelian becoming. The philosopher saw his task as “translating man back into nature” by stripping humanity of the deceptive layer of culture.22 For Burckhardt, Renaissance humanism was a secular worldview that elevated the human to an unprecedented role of master of the universe. This worldview brought to life a set of new orientational mechanisms—artistic techniques of representing and analyzing reality. The most important of those, linear perspective, invented by Filippo Brunelleschi in the fifteenth century, was a mode of pictorial representation that positioned the beholder in the center of the constructed world. It was supported by explorations of the “Vitruvian man”—studies of an idealized human body as the standard of proportionality.23 Finally, the human body–derived measurement system, which existed since times immemorial, was inscribed into the Renaissance anthropocentric mode of orientation. Declaring that man is the measure of all tailors, Lissitzky assumed a Nietzschean perspective to oppose this anthropocentrism, which was for him associated with bourgeois, rationalist philosophy of the subject, made obsolete by modern science and technology.24 After all, in Russia, bodily standards of measurement were replaced with the metric system, based on the size of the globe, in 1918, while the burgeoning Gestalt psychology exposed perspective as a visual illusion: according to Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria, this illusion was pertinent to abstract, theoretical culture and was allegedly unknown to practical “primitive” peoples, such as Uzbek peasants.25 “This is the perspective representation of a pyramid. Where does the tip lie? In depth, or in front?” questioned Lissitzky, exposing, in the manner of psychological illustration, the illusionistic quality of perspective.26

Lissitzky’s other photographic self-portrait, created simultaneously with The Constructor, eloquently illustrates this antianthropocentrism. An ironic postcard, the so-called Self-Portrait with Wrapped Head and Compass depicts the artist’s head, covered with a hospital patient’s cap, in the measurable distance between the compass’s legs. Produced as a photogram, the image inverts the appearance of an X-ray, presenting the compass as negative, in the same way that Roentgen technology (which was used in Lissitzky’s own medical case management) represents internal organs. Meanwhile, similarly reproduced letters that say, in Russian, “eto vam” (“this is for you”), appear within a rectangular field at the bottom, reminiscent of the way information is stamped on medical X-rays. In dramatic contrast to The Constructor, The Self-Portrait with Wrapped Head and Compass presents its creator not as an active explorer of reality but as an object of medical investigation and practice—not as the measurer but as the measured object, not as the divine creator but as a sick, imperfect, and weak body.

In his essay “The Measure of All Things,” Lissitzky’s collaborator, the Dadaist Jean Arp, accused humankind of attempting to order the universe according to its own standards, which resulted in chaos and madness:

Man behaves as if he had created the world and could play with it. Pretty much at the beginning of his glorious development he coined the saying that man was the measure of all things. Then he quickly went to work and turned as much of the world as he could upside down. The Venus de Milo lies shattered on the ground. Man has measured with the measure of all things, himself, measured and presumed. . . . Confusion, unrest, nonsense, insanity and frenzy dominate the world.27

Far from simply rejecting reason, Arp went on, Dada called for a better rationality than the limited anthropocentrism fabricated by the Renaissance, which, according to Arp, signified the mind’s assault on nature and life. Rather than reducing the world to his own measure, man had to let “all things and man . . . be like nature, measureless.”28

Quoting the Brokhaus encyclopedia in an editorial for the issue of Dadaist journal Merz that he coauthored with Kurt Schwitters, Lissitzky identified such measureless nature with becoming and evolution, as “everything that develops, forms, and moves in and of itself, through its own energy.”29 This processualism was indebted to biologist Raoul Francé, according to whom plants were perfect constructions and as such could provide models for technology.30 The issue compared Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s curvilinear “glass skyscraper” project (1922) not with a plant, but with a section of the upper end of the human femur. This bone had earlier attracted the attention of scholars and aesthetic thinkers, who observed that its arrangement follows the laws of graphical statics. Zurich mathematician Karl Culmann demonstrated that a mechanical crane given a similar shape exhibited the same tensile and compressive lines as the femur.31 In other words, adapting to its environment, a good work of architecture led to the same result as the work of nature.

In slightly different terms, the transition from rational anthropomorphic to natural system of measuring was described by Kapp as that from metric (German Maßstab) to measure (German Maß): “Measure is at work in the sphere of the organic; metric is inserted ready-made into the mechanism. Measure is the reflection of a relation among orders of magnitude, while metric is the expression of a number. In measure, life processes are in motion, while metric is enforced from without.”32 Whereas mechanical objects were numerically measurable, an organism was assessed as ratios between its structural elements. Inasmuch as these ratios were often inexpressible in rational numbers, modern artists became interested in the mathematical concept of irrationality.

Among others, Lissitzky embarked on an exploration of such mathematical concepts as Carl Friedrich Gauss’s imaginary numbers and Georg Cantor’s irrational numbers and uncountable sets.33 The title “A. and Pangeometry” betrays his fascination with the 1855 book Pangeometry by mathematician Nikolay Lobachevsky, which offered an early theoretical account of a non-Euclidian geometry. For the modernists, who associated Euclidian geometry with perspectival representation, the emergence of new geometries testified to the urgent need of transcending perspective. Urbanism, according to Lissitzky, had already transitioned from the centralized Renaissance city to the geometric regularity of the modern American grid: scrutinizing the plan of Manhattan, he had earlier noted that whereas the planning of earlier European cities was subordinated to local topography, the grid remained uninterrupted by it, becoming, as it were, a model of non-Euclidian geometry on a curved surface.34

In “A. and Pangeometry” (which was first conceived as a chapter in a book titled 1 = 1, an equation discussed by Francé as describing a perfect state of natural harmony), Lissitzky delineated an evolutionist vision, according to which every epoch in the history of science generated its own concept of space and its way of representing space. His classification, as Peter Nisbet suggested, relied on Oswald Spengler’s popular The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes, first volume published in 1918).35 Spengler’s “reactionary modernist,” “morphological” approach saw all human artefacts, including architecture, as externalizations of “life” (sometimes equated with Gestalt, design), which was juxtaposed to abstract law played out in technology and epitomized by the modern city.36 Whereas the organic epistemology of life was based on the notion of fact, lifeless science was looking for abstract “truths.” However, Spengler was far from simply denouncing technology and the city. Technology, he believed, possessed a spirit (Geist) of its own that was expressed in the Faustian struggle against nature and understood by the engineer, “the erudite priest of the machine.”37 This animation of technology allowed Spengler to claim that he avoided the reductive opposition of idealism (which had simply dismissed technology) and materialism (which had remained blind to technology’s cultural significance).

Departing from Spengler’s approach, Lissitzky paired mathematical systems of different civilizations with their artistic achievements. A product of calculus, planimetric space, “A. and Pangeometry” argued, had informed ancient Near Eastern art. The invention of Euclidian geometry led to its replacement by three-dimensional perspectival space, which was subsequently destroyed by Lobachevsky, Gauss, and Riemann. These mathematical discoveries were developed by artistic movements: impressionism, cubism, and, ultimately, suprematism. Having rejected the Renaissance anthropocentric order, twentieth-century art and architecture arrived at an Einsteinian fragmentation of the world. Lissitzky’s epistemological program challenged the status of bourgeois, rational culture with its anthropocentric system of orientation based on perspective, the golden section, and the anthropometric standard. To measure architecture with architecture, the modern architect had to reject this obsolete rationalism with its claims of truthfulness and completeness and, as will be discussed below, to partake instead in the unrationalizable urban and technological environment, in order to understand its Geist and to establish a new system of orientation in it.

The Riemann Space

Lissitzky had first used the motif of the eye and the compass in 1922, when his collage Tatlin at Work on the Monument to the Third International presented the eye as the compass measuring a universe of suprematist and Proun-like geometrical figures and planes (Plate 3).38 Tatlin at Work can also be read as Lissitzky’s symbolic self-portrait: Vladimir Tatlin, after all, had little to do with suprematism, and his famous Monument to the Third International does not appear on the image. Lissitzky, moreover, had related his Prouns to the mathematical discussions of infinity and irrationality, which are referenced by the formulas on the collage. Finally, the horizontally tilted female face, whose mouth and half of an eye are sealed with suprematist rectangles, and—tellingly—whose only visible eyeball is encircled with a line in pencil, provides a further clue: perspective, the collage affirmed, was a product of the Renaissance, monocular model of vision.

Indeed, perspective presumed the existence of an immobile, abstract outside viewer. In the words of Lissitzky’s friend Adolf Behne, perspective was a “naturalistic construction of spatial or temporal kind, a construction that presupposed for the artist a fixed, static position outside of the body and the story.”39 As demonstrated by Jonathan Crary, the dissolution of perspective arrived with the rejection of monocularity: this rejection led to the disorientation and fragmentation of the worldview inasmuch as it eliminated the presumption of truthfulness (the visual image was a psychological effect fabricated in the brain of the beholder).40 If the static monocular space was the space of painting, the binocular space was that of sculptural relief. Relief (and thus depth) was perceived, according to common psychological knowledge, in the process of the kinetic movement of the eyeballs. “The relief is given by the play of the optic axes in uniting, in rapid succession, similar points of the two pictures,” explained the inventor of lenticular stereoscope David Brewster in 1856.41 Some forty years later, Adolf von Hildebrand distinguished between two types of vision: seeing (schauen) and scanning (abtasten).42 Seeing occurred when an object was observed from a distance, visible in its entirety; it resulted in a two-dimensional image (Gesichtsvorstellung). Scanning, meanwhile, occurred when the distance between the subject and the object was minimal: proximity necessitated movements of eyeballs and resulted in obtaining several fragmented “kinesthetic images” (Bewegungsvorstellungen), which allowed an evaluation of depth. Whereas sculpture, according to Hildebrand, operated with kinesthetic ideas and painting expressed a visual idea on a plane, two other arts—relief and architecture—engaged both.43

Discussing the consequences of the planar (relief-like) organization of space, Crary observed that this model entailed a fundamental ambiguity about the distance between planes and thus expressed a worldview marked by a lack of order.44 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called this model the “Riemann space,” observing that “each vicinity in a Riemann space is like a shred of Euclidian space but the linkage between one vicinity and the next is not defined.”45 This model referred to topology—a modern field of mathematics that disregards the geometric form of the figure and instead analyzes connections between its different parts. Topology and architecture have been historically connected: the earliest formulation of a topological problem is said to be a 1741 article by Leonhard Euler in the journal of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which proved that it was mathematically impossible to pass through all the seven bridges of Königsberg without going through the same bridge twice.46 In the nineteenth century, topology was developed, among others, by Bernhard Riemann as “qualitative geometry,” distinct from traditional geometry, which focuses on quantitative relations. This model was explored in the early 1920s within the Berlin international constructivist movement, in which Lissitzky participated, in particular, by Theo van Doesburg and Mies van der Rohe, who defined space as a series of planes the distances between which remained indistinct.47 Speaking of suprematist painting, Lissitzky likewise explained that the distances between depicted figures “are measured only by the intensity and the position of the strictly defined color-areas. These distances cannot be measured by any finite measure.”48

Infinity, Lissitzky believed, was best expressed by axonometry, a mode of architectural representation that he had employed in the Prouns. Pioneered in the late nineteenth century by architectural historian Auguste Choisy and enthusiastically used at the Bauhaus, axonometry presented three-dimensional objects without perspectival foreshortening: parallel lines remained parallel, which allowed for a consistency of scale.49 Lissitzky likened the objective, nonillusionistic character of axonometry to mathematical representations of four-dimensional and other physically impossible spaces. Advancing “the ultimate tip of the visual pyramid . . . into infinity,” axonometry, he claimed, created “the ultimate illusion of irrational space, with its infinite extensibility into the background and foreground.”50

The importance of mathematical and esoteric theories of irrational (mathematically conceivable but physically impossible) spaces for modernist art has been well documented.51 The founder of suprematism Kazimir Malevich, Lissitzky’s senior colleague and interlocutor since 1919, opposed “logic, natural order, and philistine meaning and prejudice” from the standpoint of the esoteric thought of P. D. Ouspensky. A “different form of reason,” Malevich argued, arose within him, making him reject traditional forms of rationality, replacing them with the “transrational”—not an absence of order, but a new order that “has its own law and construction and also meaning.”52 As early as 1880, British mathematician and science fiction writer Charles Howard Hinton suggested that three-dimensional figures might be imagined as cross-sections of four-dimensional forms passing through a three-dimensional plane; later scholars compared architect and theosophist Claude Bragdon’s 1913 visualizations of Hinton’s ideas to suprematist art.

Emphasizing the role of spatial localization (rotation) of figures, Bragdon’s illustrations evoke the Prouns of Lissitzky, according to whom, “Rotating, we screw into space.”53 A similar spatial concept was later employed by Georgy Krutikov in the psychotechnical tests on spatial combination that he developed at VKhUTEIN under Ladovsky’s and possibly Lissitzky’s supervision.54 Such tests, which asked students to arrange flat and volumetric forms in space, were commonly used by psychologists.55 However, Krutikov’s approach differed in its reliance on the methods of mathematical combinatorics, a subfield of set theory that studied combinations within sets. Combinatorics had been a field of special interest for Wilhelm Ostwald, whose Atlas of Forms (1922–23) began with three basic forms—the triangle, the square, and the hexagon—that were subjected to three basic operations: translation, rotation, and reflection.56 Having turned to combinatorics at Ladovsky’s suggestion, Krutikov soon realized that he had to supplement it with additional formulas, which, in the spirit of Bragdon, considered the spatial localization of objects. He established correlations between the number of possible spatial combinations, the quantity and shape of figures, and the number of axes along which they were rotated. A circle, a square, and a rectangle rotated along four axes, for instance, would produce 192 possible combinations. Against Ladovsky’s initial expectation that the number of possible combinations would be finite—and that they could thus be rationalized—Krutikov concluded that the number was infinite.57 Spatial disorientation was a law of modern mathematics.

In the modern city, the effect of disorientation resulted from the change of viewpoint. In the 1870s, architect Hermann Maertens had determined that a building was best observed from a position that formed an angle of 27 degrees between the eye and the highest point of the cornice because a broader (45 degree) angle made the eye dissolve the details, whereas a narrower (18 degree) angle caused the image to dissipate within the environment.58 Distant seeing disappeared in the modern city, where the angle of viewing, as Lissitzky noted, approached 90 degrees. Reviewing Mendelsohn’s America, Lissitzky pointed out that it offered not photographs but “a dramatic film”: “Quite unusual scenes unfold in front of our eyes. One must lift the book above the head and rotate it to understand some of the photographs. The architect shows us America not from a distance, but from inside, leading us through the street canyons.”59 The modern (photo) eye of the architect was a doppelganger of Dziga Vertov’s cine-eye, which equally dispensed with the immobility of the monocular beholder, affirming, instead, constant motion and defamiliarizing viewpoints.60 The modern architect had to notice and appreciate this change: “Learn to see that which is in front of your eyes. Directions for use: Throw [your] head back, lift the paper, and then you will see.” Resulting from this approach would be an architecture that “is not only viewed from a distance, by the eye (painting), and not only touched by the hand (sculpture) but is that in which one lives and moves—an architecture of space and time.”61

Lissitzky’s Izvestia ASNOVA collage compared the Shelton Hotel in New York, by Arthur Loomis Harmon (1922), with the statue of the Russian emperor Alexander III (the image was removed from the published version), and a port crane with a fossil skeleton. The effect of distance, the comparisons confirmed, deformed even the most modern buildings, casting them as regressive relics of old historic and even paleontological epochs. Close-up views from below, on the other hand, distorted and defamiliarized the city. Seen abruptly from above, a dirigible mast appeared to curve.62 Meanwhile, the building masses and profile of the 1923 Equity Trust Building in New York, when captured directly from below, “narrowed . . . toward the top (a new law of perception).”63 The kinetic, binocular city lost its painterly qualities, perceived solely as relief—a series of Bewegungsvorstellungen. Without the perspectival viewpoint, the humans could no longer compare buildings with their bodies—in the modern world, only commercial sewing patterns, an instrument of the standardization of clothing that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, were measured according to the size of the body.64

For Lissitzky, disorientation was not only an artistic technique intended, like Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement, to destabilize the habitual viewpoint and thus bring attention to what otherwise remains unregistered by consciousness: it was the everyday predicament of modernity. In his Hannover and Dresden “demonstration spaces” that he designed for art exhibitions in 1926–28, Lissitzky not only represented but intentionally provoked this condition.65 Yet, it was the disorientating character of modernity that provided new opportunities for orientation. As he had declared as early as 1920, “emptiness, chaos, the unnatural, become space, that is: order, certainty, plastic form.”66

From Pangeometry to Panarchitecture

Irrational space was superseded, Lissitzky maintained, by imaginary space, which not only represented movement but was generated by it, such as when rotation transformed rods into disks and planes into cylinders. “Time now becomes a factor of prime consideration as a new constituent of plastic F[orm],” he explained, identifying the illusion of space caused by our perception of motion:

Our visual faculty is limited when it comes to the conception of movement and indeed of the whole state of the object: ex., disconnected movements separated by periods shorter than 1/30 of a second create the impression of a continuous movement. . . . It generates an entirely new object, that is to say, a new expression of space, which is there for as long as the movement lasts and is therefore imaginary.67

“Space is a reality of sensory experience,” Lissitzky’s fellow constructivist László Moholy-Nagy likewise declared.68 Evoking Moholy-Nagy’s attempts at dematerializing reality through photography and kinetic and light sculpture, Lissitzky claimed that he “arrived at an a-material materiality.” He strove for a similar effect in his demonstration spaces: in both of them, a forest of vertical laths, white on one side and black on the other, transformed a wall, making the room seem white, grey, or black depending on the position of the spectator. According to Sigfried Giedion, who reviewed Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinet (the demonstration space in Hannover), the effect of the strips was to “throw vertical clefts of shadow and dematerialize the wall to the point where it seems to dissolve completely.”69

In 1925–26, Lissitzky explored the dematerializing effect of movement in his photo collage Record (possibly a maquette for a photographic mural intended to decorate ASNOVA’s Red Stadium in Moscow70), which reused one of the photographs published in Mendelsohn’s America—Broadway at Night by the Danish architect and photographer Knud Lönberg-Holm. “Uncanny,” wrote Mendelsohn about the effect produced by the nocturnal metropolis: “The contours of houses are wiped out. But in the mind they nevertheless rise, run into each other, collide with each other.” The modern city, which Mendelsohn classified as grotesque, was “unordered in its excessiveness,” yet “still full of fantastic beauty.”71 Overlaying Lönberg-Holm’s photograph with an image of a jumping hurdler, Lissitzky’s photo collage introduces the concept of motion to the visual account of the modern city: the distorting photographic effect of motion produced by long exposure was similar, it confirmed, to the effect received when sources of light were photographed at nighttime.

The concept of imaginary space as a product of movement informed the diploma project that Krutikov defended in 1929.72 Scandalizing critics with its “utopianism,” the diploma drew from the experience of Krutikov’s earlier collaborations with Lissitzky on the “architectural design of [Konstantin] Tsiolkovsky’s dirigible” within the ASNOVA Section of Transportation Architecture (1926), on the design of the All-Union Printing Trades Exhibition in Moscow (1927), where Lissitzky’s Record appeared among the exhibits, and on the Soviet pavilion in the Pressa exhibition in Cologne (1928), whose centerpiece, a giant red star, was decorated with neon lights.73 Modernity, Krutikov declared, led to a dramatic expansion of the very notion of architecture: “That which is today understood as architecture, in fact, is only a case of architecture in general, or, as I call it, panarchitecture.” “Panarchitecture is a system of spatial relationships in a four-dimensional continuum. The conditions of space, time, and gravitation determine architectural systems, which, combined, comprise panarchitecture.”74 To explore the laws of this four-dimensional architecture, which was to be brought to life by technologies of movement, Krutikov conducted research at the Psychotechnical Laboratory, inventing machines that measured the perception of moving form. The purpose of one, a moving band attached to a “dynamic element” that ran in front of a fixed scale with two “static elements” of the same size, was to evaluate the perceived change of size caused by movement; another, a rotating wheel, demonstrated changes in the perceived distance between an element and the center, which depended on the speed of the wheel’s rotation.

An outcome of this research, Krutikov’s diploma consisted of two parts, the theoretical and the visual. The theoretical part included sixteen illustrated tables that paired the formal evolution of human dwellings with the evolution of transportation. The first three of them, “The Visual Deformation of a Dynamic Form,” “The Composition of Dynamic Structures,” and “The Form-Making of Dynamic Element,” articulated the main theoretical problems posed by the introduction of a temporal dimension for architecture (Plate 4).75 The remaining thirteen tables delineated the evolution of architecture from the cave to “the house in the air” as a consequence of the conquest of “new spaces and novel viewpoints”—an idea that had earlier been espoused by Lissitzky in the essay “Wheel, Propeller, and What Follows” (“Rad, Propeller und das Folgende,” 1923), which postulated that the evolution of architectural form followed the development of transportation from foot (architecturally reflected in the pyramid) to wheel (reflected by trains, ocean liners, and cars) to propeller (reflected by airplanes).

These theoretical discoveries assumed a visual shape as “The City of the Future,” a project that responded to such contemporaneous international projects as the suspended houses of Heinz and Bodo Rasch (1927–28) and Buckminster Fuller’s Lightful Towers from the same period. While the Rasch brothers acquired a reputation among modernist architects due to their work at the Weißenhofsiedlung and publications, Fuller’s work would have been accessible to Lissitzky through Lönberg-Holm, who moved to the United States, where he became the American representative of ASNOVA, shortly after meeting him in 1922.76 Radicalizing these projects, Krutikov’s city consisted of two parts. The vertical, which served as housing, was suspended in the air, appearing as a paraboloid formed by hovering individual residential complexes located in tiers one above the other. The horizontal part, devoted to production, was located beneath the vertical, sprawled over the surface of the earth. The connection between the two was provided by a universal “individual moving cell” (similarly to Fuller’s 4D Transport, it functioned on land, on water, and in air)—both a vehicle and a minimal dwelling unit. However, unlike Fuller, who identified the fourth dimension with longevity and duration, Lissitzky and Krutikov saw it as a phenomenon of perception. In Krutikov’s drawing, whose stylistic effects evoke night photography, the rings of hovering residential complexes became a gleaming thimble, which appeared as if perceived from an individual moving cell taking off from the earth to its harbor in the residential section. The architecturalization of imaginary space, illusionary and fluctuating panarchitecture was as “grotesque” as the modern city (Plate 5). What it first needed was an orientational system. Designed slightly earlier, Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügels intended to provide just that.

Scale

Mendelsohn’s America spoke to a circulating set of beliefs about Americanism, as if illustrating the urban environment that Georg Simmel in 1903 famously diagnosed as provoking the loss of mental energy.77 Fast movement, the flickering of neon lights, the noise of traffic, the unprecedented and sometimes illogical scale of buildings (“an isolated building growing without restraint, almost like tropical vegetation”), all disoriented and confused the urban dweller, requiring new modes of reasoning.78 The disorientation was further augmented by the absence of the compositional center in the modern grid. Architectural historian Michael K. Hays interpreted Dadaism and the early work of Mies van der Rohe as such attempts at demonstrating “the futility of conventional modes of reasoning in the face of the chaotic city.” Both the Merz column by Schwitters and the “glass skyscraper” by Mies, according to Hays, “attest to the fact that the humanist conceptions of formal rationality and self-creating subjectivity cannot cope with the irrationality of actual experience. In the modern city such constructs of rationality fail to function, and the mind, the subject, is consequently unable to perceive a pattern in the chaos.”79 Instead, Schwitters and Mies, Hays argues, suggested reflecting upon the causes of crisis and resisting it by asserting radically different, subversive objects within the critically perceived environment. The position of Lissitzky, who in the early 1920s was close to both, simultaneously supports and complicates this assessment.

“The conditions out of which old cities developed have long since disappeared, but we continue to live in their petrified shells,” Lissitzky pronounced. In the modern city, “Traffic has become a major problem. It is increasingly becoming a question of time rather than space.” Modern urbanism, according to Lissitzky, faced the choice between “geometry” and “the organic”: whereas the capitalist city opted for geometry (the grid) as a system of order and control, in a socialist city, “a community organizes itself into a living organism, with each individual playing his inseparable part, incapable of separate existence.”80 The city, in other words, was the field of an ongoing battle between the receding irrational and the emerging imaginary space.

Looking for an organic way of making the city “as clear and logical as a beehive,” Lissitzky turned to the scale of buildings.81 This very cause of disorientation in the capitalist city, he had realized early on, could became a new orientational mechanism:

There is one element to which special importance attaches—scale. Scale gives life to relationships in space. It is that which determines whether every organism remains whole or is destroyed—it holds all the parts together. The index for the growth of modern man is the ability to see and appreciate the relative scales of everything that has been made.82

At the beginning of the century, scale was discovered as a tool for ordering the city by articulating its hierarchy and structure, in particular, in the work of Hildebrand and art historian Albert Erich Brinckmann.83 Relying on their work, Soviet rationalists differentiated between the two varieties of scale, actual and perceived: if the former was accurately conveyed by axonometry and technical drawing, the latter became the task of architecture. Nikolay Dokuchaev suggested aligning the size of a building’s segments with human height to give a building the measure with which its height can be evaluated by the human.84 With a renewed importance, the question of the size of the module was posed by standardization: Le Corbusier and Ernst Neufert would later reintroduce their versions of the Vitruvian man as the module of standardized architecture. The editors of Izvestia ASNOVA, however, argued against any possibility of reviving anthropomorphism. Asserting scale as the central architectural problem of skyscraper construction, Ladovsky’s article in the newspaper called for a compromise between excessively emotional German (expressionist) and too mechanicist American (technological) approaches, while for Lissitzky, any anthropocentric scale appeared as a deep anachronism predicated upon a perspectival model of seeing: a 90-degree angle of view, after all, makes any scale unrecognizable.85 In the modern world, the photomontage confirmed, repeating the statement made by the Self-Portrait with Wrapped Head and Compass, the human body was measured and standardized, becoming a model for ready-made sewing patterns.

Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügels were conceived as orientational devices that mobilized scale without anthropomorphizing it. Acupuncturally marking strategic positions on the confluence of a city’s major circle and radial thoroughfares, they articulated its structure, giving the city “a new scale, which responds to the situation when man measures not with his elbow but with hundreds of meters.”86 Each painted in contrasting colors, they would be easy to distinguish and visible from afar, providing convenient orientation points.87 A model for such architecture Lissitzky discovered in another project by Mies—a rectangular, bulky, and massive concrete-skeleton office block, whose character was dramatically different from the elegant zoomorphic transparency of the glass skyscraper. “Enough weaving intricate compositional ornaments—contemporary man, travelling by tram, automobile, train, does not notice details. What is needed are clear, unequivocal, big masses, like semaphores for orientation in the space of the city,” he explained examining the office block in “Americanism in European Architecture” (1925).88 His disciple Alexander Toporkov elaborated the psychological rationale behind such architecture: “To ensure his safety, in the surrounding chaos the man creates a secure zone, which could be correlated with what the man is and with what is the subject of his thought. The man needs markers that lead his way, as well as fortified spaces inside which he feels secure.”89

With one of their three pylons extending underground to the subway, and two others sheltering ground-level tramway stops, the Wolkenbügels opened not to the street but to public transit, to be observed and experienced by passengers rather than by pedestrians. “The man, speeding in the miles-devouring automobile, is immobile and most comfortably reclines in a deep and soft seat,” Toporkov explained the cinema-hall effect of fast movement, during which the driver “sits all tense, attentive, almost turned into a statue, watchfully looking ahead.”90 Addressing this immobile and yet rapidly moving subject, the long and low identical office blocks of the Wolkenbügels evoked Mies’s project in their accentuated horizontality. Freed from their load-carrying function, the walls of Mies’s building turned into horizontal strips, which Lissitzky saw as “unbroken stretches of filing cabinets on the inside, alternating with unbroken stretches of windows above.”91 However, unlike Mies’s office block with its giant footprint, his Wolkenbügels hover above the urban fabric, visually framing without physically intervening: the pilotis of Mies’s project are here turned into massive concrete pylons housing elevator shafts. The buildings were to grow organically at the busiest intersections without slowing the movement of traffic, without necessitating demolitions, and (inasmuch as they could be erected without scaffolding) without closing the square for traffic during the construction period.92

As reference points, the Wolkenbügels allowed for economizing the energy of perception, automatizing navigation through the city in the same way as the Proun Room, which Lissitzky had designed in 1923, was “so organized that of itself it provides an inducement to walk around in it.”93 Already Eduard von Hartmann viewed the unconscious as the mechanism allowing organisms to orientate themselves in the environment. Yet, it was precisely the unconscious character of orientation that allowed activating the humans, awakening them from the state of passivity in which they were plunged by the overstimulating medley of the metropolis. In the demonstration spaces, Lissitzky elucidated, this activation was achieved by the perceived change of color from white to black.94 Maria Gough defined the character of this activation as the interruption of “the cacophonous simultaneity” of the overstimulating metropolis.95 Similarly interrupting the city, Lissitzky’s skyscrapers activated the modern human by encouraging new ways of experiencing it. He carefully considered how the location of the beholder determined the perceived shape of Wolkenbügels. Some of his sketches employ a surprising mode of representation—perspective, which allowed for relating the psychological experience of the beholder. A view from the west presents both the front and the bottom sides of the skyscraper at Nikitsky Gates Square, implying rapid movement toward and under it.96 Destroying “the one axis of the picture which stood at right angles to the horizontal,” the Wolkenbügels completed the movement from painting to architecture announced by the Prouns, which, in the words of Lissitzky, had ceased to be a picture and turned, instead, “into a structure round which we must circle, looking at it from all sides, peering down from above, investigating from below.”97 For Lissitzky, the conscious and the automatic did not contradict but rather supported each other. Rationalizing the expenditure of attention and mental energy, the Wolkenbügels redirected them away from orientation toward the more rewarding and thus humane epistemological task of understanding the environment.

Lissitzky’s organicist urbanist theory critiqued bourgeois anthropocentrism by arguing that monocular perspective, which exemplified it, was an obsolete adaptational mechanism, incapable of helping the human to orientate within the modern metropolis. New mechanisms of analyzing and ordering the environment were thus needed. Lissitzky searched for these mechanisms in the mathematical studies of non-Euclidian geometry and in the experimental psychological investigations of the perception of moving form. In a paradoxical, dialectical manner, his theory asserted visual illusion and disorientation as the conditions for the emergence of new orientational systems. The parallel evolution of geometric and urban space was none other than the process of returning to the organic: the very dizzying speed and superhuman scale of the modern metropolitan environment were to provide opportunities for new adaptational—orientational—solutions, which his Wolkenbügels were intended to offer.

The 1930 competition for the complex of the newspaper Pravda—a program that was seen as the Soviet response to the Chicago Tribune competition—gave Lissitzky an opportunity for a more pragmatic application of his vision. With its complex spatial arrangement, hanging and projecting volumes and bridges, accentuated horizontality, and more-than-human length, Lissitzky’s project was intended to be observed from an automobile, evoking the bulky aesthetics of Mies’s office block. It comes closest to what Hays described as the aesthetics and ideology of posthumanism—a response “to the dissolution of the psychological autonomy and individualism” that he detected in the work of Ludwig Hilberseimer (also a member of the Berlin international constructivist circle) and Hannes Meyer.98 Today mostly known through the work of N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway, the concept of posthumanism describes the dissolution of the liberal notion of the human in contemporary society. Although the term “post-Human” was first used by the esotericist Helena Blavatsky in 1888, the historian Bryan Moore traced the roots of posthumanism to Spinoza, who urged humans to understand their biological relationship with nature. This tradition, Moore demonstrated, was developed by Nietzsche and approached from the evolutionary perspective by H. G. Wells, who remained its most widely read proponent.99 Whereas for Hays posthumanism was a predecessor of postmodernism (which similarly negated the autonomous subject), Moore sees it as a precursor of contemporary “green” theory, which replaces anthropocentrism with ecocentrism. In contrast to the interpretations of Haraway, Hayles, and Hays, Lissitzky’s vision preserved the integrity and the agency of the human subject while introducing technology into the naturalistic Spinozian model. To achieve this, Lissitzky redefined the anthropos as a biotechnological complex, an amalgamation of the body and its means of transportation. Lissitzky’s antihumanism did not negate or demote the human vis-à-vis other species; rather, having rejected Cartesian rationalism as an ineffective adaptational strategy, the modern human was to draw a new system of coordinates that would enable building a new environment. As Lissitzky had declared as early as 1920, “The artist builds a new sign. This sign is not a form of knowledge about something already finished, already built, [about something] that already exists in the world—it is a sign of the new world, which is to be built further and which exists through the human.”100