Space

Proletarian Formalism

Ladovsky’s appearance at SGKhM was a result of recent political upheavals. Although immediately after the revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik Commissariat of Culture and Education (Narkompros) hoped to gain the support of university professors by endowing universities with the autonomy for which they had fought during tsarist times, the commissar (minister) Anatoly Lunacharsky soon realized that the professoriate nevertheless remained disloyal to the new political power.3 In response, he reoriented Narkompros toward radical-left, proletarian students. Casting himself as the representative of the latter, Ladovsky used the moment to obtain a faculty position at SGKhM. The manifesto of Ladovsky’s Collective Studio was posted on the walls of SGKhM by three working-class students (Viktor Balikhin, Sergey Mochalov, and Nikolay Krasilnikov), who called for a shift of power from professors to students. It was illustrated with a suprematism-styled hierarchical organizational scheme, which presented the studio as an assembly of three main groups and the laboratory of technology and art. Under the motto “Down with Individualism, Long Live Individuality!” which evoked Lunacharsky and Alexander Bogdanov’s collectivist philosophy, the studio promised “ample opportunities for developing independent initiative and building a solid comradely discipline.” The role of the professor was redefined as that of “the collective’s elder.”4 Ladovsky’s signature method of design using clay models was another outcome of this proletarian identity: his students were easily recognizable in their dirty working smocks, contrasting with the clean “bourgeois” attire of others.5 Aligned with the Narkompros politics and relying on Lunacharsky’s collectivist philosophy and his empiriocriticism, Ladovsky’s architectural pedagogy aimed to intertwine politics, aesthetics, and science.

Ladovsky’s theory had been elaborated within the expressionist group Zhivskulptarkh ([Synthesis of] Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture), in which he and his associates Vladimir Krinsky, Nikolay Dokuchaev, and Georgy Mapu participated in 1919 and 1920, along with artist Alexander Rodchenko and cubist sculptor Boris Korolev, among others.6 The discussions were continued within the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (Institut khudozestvennoi kul’tury, INKhUK), under the umbrella of the Narkompros. The head of INKhUK, Wassily Kandinsky, created a program that aspired to define the “foundational elements” of arts from a psychological standpoint. Kandinsky’s psychological approach was criticized by Rodchenko, who was instrumental in creating the autonomous Working Group of Objective Analysis within the institute. For Rodchenko and his contemporaries, the term “analysis” (as, for example, in Picasso’s “analytical cubism”) was associated with a modern and scientific approach to art.7 Although critical of Kandinsky’s subjectivism, the group, among whose members were Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir and Georgy Stenberg, and Lyubov Popova, as well as Ladovsky and Krinsky, nevertheless inherited his formalist aesthetic program.

As an outcome of the struggle with liberal professorship, in the fall of 1920, the Narkompros abolished university autonomy, and “independent studios” (SGKhM) were reorganized as “higher art and technical studios” (VKhUTEMAS). Ladovsky, Krinsky, and Dokuchaev each became the head of a studio in the newly reorganized institution. The three studios immediately formed Obmas (Ob’edinennye levye masterskie, United Left Studios), which, having gained autonomy within VKhUTEMAS, effectively became a new center of architectural education, successfully counterbalancing academic studios. Although Obmas was in turn disbanded in 1923, Ladovsky and his circle continued using its pedagogical methods well into the 1930s. Their most important pedagogical endeavor, the course “Space,” served as a general introduction to architecture. Its program was based on “a discrete and consecutive (according to complexity) study of formal regularities of artistic forms, their elements and qualities on the basis of the physiology of perception.”8 “Space” was one among several “analytical” (so-called propaedeutic, or introductory) courses offered, like the Bauhaus Vorkurs, to incoming students of all specializations.9 Unlike traditional, or “synthetic,” courses, these courses segregated art into formal elements: space, color, volume, and line. Most of them were taught by the members of the Group of Objective Analysis: in addition to “Space,” the cycle included “Color” (an introduction to painting), with Popova and Alexander Vesnin; “Volume” (an introduction to sculpture), with Korolev; and “Drawing” (an introduction to graphic design), with Rodchenko.10

In 1921, the Working Group of Objective Analysis organized a four-month-long theoretical debate about the definitions and the mutual relationship between the notions of construction and composition.11 The disagreements that emerged during the debate divided the group along the disciplinary axis: artists versus architects. These two factions would later identify as the constructivists and the rationalists. Whereas most artists dismissed composition as arbitrary formal arrangement, the architects defended it, evoking the approach of literary formalism (which, according to Mikhail Bakhtin’s sarcastic remark, replaced the question of architectonics with the compositional “question of laying bricks”).12 For the architects, construction and composition possessed equal value but represented two different organizational approaches. Ladovsky defined construction as the absence of superfluous materials and elements, illustrating his vision with a cube whose proportions were made apprehensible by the articulation of surfaces. Composition was characterized as the hierarchy and subordination of elements. Ladovsky depicted it as a cube, in whose sides he inscribed squares accentuating a small dark opening at the bottom of one side (“the door”) as the center to which the entire arrangement was subordinated “according to the principle of similarity and movement.”13 Whereas construction, he believed, illustrated the principle of technical rationality, composition exemplified architectural rationality. Both, however, were indispensable for architecture: while construction was essential for building, composition guided the process of design. In both, the goal was a balance between expended resources and obtained result, the principle known as energy-economic.

In March 1921, in response to the debate, Ladovsky and Krinsky founded the Working Group of Architects within INKhUK. The group continued meeting for a year, elaborating an epistemological foundation for architectural theory. Ladovsky hoped to publish their findings as an illustrated dictionary of architecture, which would codify “the terminology and definitions of architecture as a form of art, architecture’s separate properties, qualities, and so forth, and the relationships between architecture and other arts.”14 For him, architecture was a science, whose universalized objects were subordinated to a set of objective laws. With his knowledge of Yiddish, a language closely related to German, which was used by eastern and central European Jews (he was born into a Jewish family in Volyn, in the west of Ukraine), Ladovsky would have had easy access to German-language philosophy of science and aesthetic theory.15 The Working Group of Architects discussed the writings of Wilhelm Worringer, Hermann Muthesius, and Heinrich Wölfflin, along with those of Ernst Mach and the British mathematician and eugenicist Karl Pearson (whose books had been translated into Russian by biologist Kliment Timiryazev and “Bogdanovite” economist Vladimir Bazarov).16 The program of study followed by the working group was later solidified and disseminated through the Association of New Architects (Assotsiatsiia novykh arkhitektorov, ASNOVA), founded in 1923, whose members Ladovsky recruited among his VKhUTEMAS students.17

Ladovsky’s efforts to align architectural theory with the politics of the Narkompros legitimized his claims to representing proletarian architecture. Although Lunacharsky’s influence exposed him to the philosophy of empiriocriticism and related scientific perspectives on the world and the human, unlike his rationalist followers, Ladovsky remained unsusceptible to Lunacharsky’s vitalism, clinging to the scientific ethos of “the analytical method” as pioneered at INKhUK. The conflict between Ladovsky’s more formalist interpretation of energy and his colleagues’ more vitalist one would later plague rationalist theory, eventually leading to a split between Ladovsky and the first generation of his followers.

(Psycho)Analysis and the Economy of Energy

Ladovsky’s pedagogical method was known as analytical or, in the second half of the 1920s, as psychoanalytical. Although the first term referred to the method of objective analysis, the use of the Freudian term “psychoanalysis” might seem surprising. Yet it was more than a coincidence. Sigmund Freud’s name and ideas would have been well known to Soviet architects. “In our country the interest in Freud has developed into a real psychosis. . . . Freudianism and Freudianism, again and again, for or against Freudianism, and with each new day . . . we have fewer and fewer healthy Marxists,” critic Vladimir Friche bemoaned in 1925.18 Psychoanalysis was particularly influential among literary and art critics, who eagerly applied it to biographical studies. In the 1920s, a number of authors—most notably the psychologist Alexander Luria—attempted to reconcile Freud and Karl Marx by downplaying the sexual component of psychoanalysis and identifying it, instead, as a scientific study of the unconscious.19 Introduced by Johann Friedrich Herbart in the 1820s, the notion of the unconscious was elevated to a major philosophical principle by Eduard von Hartmann, whose Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869) linked the unconscious to animal instinct. Translated in the early 1870s, Hartmann’s treatise remained popular in Russia well into the 1920s. In 1923, young philosopher Bernard Bykhovsky, initiating the Soviet discussion of psychoanalysis, suggested that the value of the notion of the unconscious lay in its inherent antisubjectivism:

Psychoanalysis [is] a study of the unconscious, of something that happens beyond the subjective “I.” The unconscious has an actual effect on human reactions, frequently orchestrating them. The unconscious cannot be studied through cognition, subjectively. This is why Freud studies objective manifestations of the unconscious (symptom, mistake, etc.), seeking for the conditions of minimal participation of reason (dream, childhood).20

In the article “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monist Psychology” (1925), Luria echoed Bykhovsky, arguing that psychoanalysis not only dispenses with idealism and metaphysics but lays, alongside reflexology, “a solid foundation for a psychology of materialist monism.”21

The notion of libido (sexual energy) related Freud’s approach to other energeticist theories, opening the door for economic interpretations of psychoanalysis. In Psychoanalytical Psychotechnics (Psychoanalytische Psychotechnik, 1924, Russian translation 1926), the German psychologist Fritz Giese aspired to integrate psychoanalysis with psychotechnics, or applied psychology. Libido, he professed, could be converted to an economically productive activity.22 Giese argued for the importance of psychoanalysis for all three constituent parts of psychotechnics: differential psychology (psychological testing assessing fitness for a profession), studies of work productivity and fatigue, and the psychology of advertisement.23 Ladovsky, who, as will be discussed in chapter 3, was an ardent champion of psychotechnics, shared this vision, approaching spatial perception as an energetic process that architecture could optimize and regulate.

The energy-economic principle had been formulated in 1876 by Richard Avenarius in Philosophy as Thinking about the World according to the Principle of the Smallest Measure of Force (Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemass dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmasses, Russian translation 1913): “The soul invests in an apperception no more energy than necessary, and when presented with several possible apperceptions, prefers the one that achieves the same result with the least expenditure of energy or the best result with the same expenditure of energy.”24 Thinking, or inventing new notions, was, according to Avenarius, energetically wasteful, and whenever possible the soul tended to save energy by displacing thought into the domain of the unconscious. Lunacharsky, Avenarius’s student at Zurich University, participated in the two seminars offered by the philosopher, one on philosophy and another on “bio-psychology,” which discussed Avenarius’s book The Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, 1890), a Russian-language account of which he published in 1905.25 In his own major aesthetic treatise, Foundations of Positive Aesthetics (Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki, 1903, republished in 1923), Lunacharsky called aesthetics “a subfield of biology,” defining art as a form of higher nervous activity that helped the organism to adapt to its biological environment.26 The means of this adaptation were energetic: the aesthetic was that which replenished the organism’s repository of energy.27 Lunacharsky, however, viewed Avenarius’s scientific energeticism through a vitalist lens: he identified the energy of perception with life energy, manifested emotionally as enthusiasm and excitement, and behaviorally as artistic creativity, political struggle, and life-creating, constructive activity.

Among the readers of Avenarius was the predecessor of literary formalists Alexander Potebnya, who saw the study of unconscious cogitative processes as the clue to understanding poetic language. Potebnya’s follower Dmitry Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky considered attention a waste of psychic energy; he believed that unlike attention, automatism, or the unconscious, allowed for achieving results without expending energy: “This means that all the work was gratuitous for us, and a great economizing of intellectual power is obvious.”28 The idea of the productive unconscious later found support among other theoreticians of nascent Soviet culture, such as Lunacharsky’s protégé, the proletarian literary critic Fedor Kalinin, who described in Bogdanov’s journal Proletarskaya Kultura (Proletarian Culture) how Henri Poincaré once made a mathematical discovery while sitting in a car and thinking about unrelated matters. “Our psyche is more than consciousness,” Kalinin concluded:

[the latter] forms only its bright, immediately given area. Behind it lurks a vaster, darker side of the psyche—the unconscious, the richest repository of experience. . . . When consciousness finishes the job of accumulating and organizing material, then, if the discovery is ripe, the unconscious comes to help, connects it with the conscious area, storming into it as a mighty fruitful stream, and from its hidden treasures adds that which was needed for the solution for the task.29

The principle of the economy of energy provided the context for the term “rational architecture,” or “ratio-architecture” (ratsional’naia arkhitektura or ratsio-arkhitektura)—shortened to “rationalism” in subsequent historiography—which Ladovsky in the second half of the 1920s also used to refer to his method.30 Evoking his earlier definitions of construction and composition, he explained:

Like technical rationality, architectural rationality is based on the principle of economy. The difference lies in the fact that technical rationality is the economy of labor and material expended in the creation of an expedient building, whereas architectural rationality is the economy of psychic energy expended in the perception of spatial and functional qualities of a building. Rationalist architecture is the synthesis of these two rationalities.31

German authors equated rationalization with scientific management or, sometimes, with the energetic principle in general. Summarizing earlier heterogeneous definitions, Giese concluded that rationalization (Rationalisierung) dealt with “rational [vernunftgemäß] (practically regulated by scientific knowledge) intensive optimal design of energetic relationships.” Rationalization, he argued, was “not an ‘art’ or a trick, but a theory, a phenomenon that was to be scientifically explored and therefore striving for application.” It was none other than “practical design,” whose goal was “an optimum” rather than “a maximum.”32 In the 1920s, Osip Ermansky, a former revolutionary and now a professor of economics, identified rationalization with the scientific organization of labor (NOT), elaborating its principle as “physiological optimum” m=R/E, in which m is “the coefficient of rationality,” R the result of the work, and E the energy expended in the working process.33 Ermansky contended that his formula offered a more humane and holistic way of organizing industrial production than Western approaches. “What is the criterion of the rationality of work?” he asked, concluding that whereas Western luminaries of scientific management prioritized modes of being (Frederick Winslow Taylor was interested in time, while Frank Gilbreth favored space), Soviet rationalization had to be guided by “the essence of life phenomena”—the balance or “the collaboration” of forces.34 Relying on the psychotechnics of Giese and Ermansky, Ladovsky, who would proceed to open the Psychotechnical Laboratory of Architecture in 1927, embraced its energy-economic humanism.

The Analysis of Sensations

As Avenarius wanted to rationalize philosophical thinking by introducing general notions, Ladovsky proposed to start with determining and defining the general notions in architecture and with “freeing it from atrophying forms.”35 The first assignment that Ladovsky gave in his newly organized course at VKhUTEMAS in October 1920 asked the students to design the simplest of three-dimensional figures, a parallelepiped (or rather, a rectangular prism). It was, for Ladovsky, the primitive hut of modernist architecture—a statement about the minimal conditions of the discipline.36 The rectangle had been described as the basic geometrical “enclosure” “enframing” all animals, including humans, by Johannes Bochenek in his treatise on the normalization of human representation (1875).37 Ladovsky sympathized with such geometrical abstraction of organic form. In 1921, during a discussion within the Working Group of Architects, he opposed fellow rationalist A. Petrov who, following literary formalist Roman Jacobson, argued that the poetic method of personification could be applied to urbanism (such as, for example, in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s line “one-eyed [city] square sneaked nearby”).38 Evoking Worringer’s distinction between abstraction and empathy, Ladovsky warned against identifying the object and the human (a method that was, he argued, more appropriate for poetry than for architecture), and instead argued for architecture that would evoke not the humans but their organization. The act of perceiving architectural form, he contended, would let the beholders “see, feel, and understand” their own organization, of which they had previously been unaware.39

Architecture thus turned into an epistemological mechanism that revealed hidden organizational principles of the form. As a result, revealing, or explaining, the form became the first task of architecture. Dokuchaev explained:

To reveal [vyiavit’] a form means to make its structural properties—all the basic characteristics of form—visually clear and sharply perceived. In other words, an artist, an architect, wishing to endow his architectural form with certain qualities and properties, has to make these properties correctly perceived (according to his vision) by considering all possible impediments, such as: changing conditions of light, the distance and viewpoint from which the form is viewed, the impact and influence of the surroundings on the form, etc. Here, the artist has to approach the task as a composer.40

The Russian word for revealing, vyiavlenie, comprises the prefix vy- (signifying the movement outward) and the root iav’ (“reality”), meaning to reveal the inner truth through phenomena. Introducing it as a concept to architectural theory and pedagogy, Ladovsky relied on The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, 1893, Russian translation 1914) by the German sculptor and aesthetic thinker Adolf von Hildebrand.41 Attention, for Hildebrand, was an expenditure of perceptive energy, and accordingly, a good work of art was the one whose formal idea was immediately clear.42 Following Hermann von Helmholtz, the sculptor distinguished between “effective form” (Wirkungsform), or the phenomenal representation of an object (“a joint product of the object, on the one hand, and of its lighting, surroundings, and our changing vantage point, on the other”), and the ontological inherent form (Daseinsform).43 In Hildebrand’s terms, Ladovsky’s method of revealing exposed the Daseinsform through the Wirkungsform.

“What does it mean to reveal a geometrical image?” wondered Ladovsky, explaining the assignment on the parallelepiped. “Would we see in a mathematically correct parallelepiped some other form—a sphere, a cone, a cylinder, etc.? No, we will see neither a sphere nor a cylinder, but neither will we see a parallelepiped of the geometrical qualities specified in the assignment.”44 He supplemented the assignment with a set of data related to geometrical properties and the appearance of the object: its dimensions (20 × 20 × 30 meters), conditions of light (sunny), the spectator’s viewpoint (moving, but no farther than thirty meters away from the object), and the speed of movement (no more than fifteen meters per second). The students had to reveal spatial orientation, the equality of the figure’s sides, the relationship between its width and height, and the fact that all angles were 90 degrees. The task could be accomplished with the use of chiaroscuro, vertical and horizontal articulations of surfaces, or by engaging the texture (faktura) of the object. Describing a successful solution by one student, Petrov, which recalls and predates his own sketches of construction and composition, Ladovsky praised it for exposing the identity of the figure’s sides through the articulation of surfaces, most notably through inscribing circumferences into its sides.45 Additional half circumferences helped to comprehend the 1/2:1 relationship between the base and the sides of the parallelepiped; they were reinforced by the tripartite horizontal division of the figure: each half circumference was inscribed into one of the resultant identical rectangles. The vertical proportions of the parallelepiped were emphasized with the help of vertical divisions, which visually and, as it were, structurally tied together its three rectangular constituents.

Instead of departing from architectural details and gradually moving toward larger forms as was common within the academic tradition, the rationalist pedagogy began with a study of elements of perception, subsequently progressing to their combinations, and finishing by mastering space as the complex psychological projection of external reality. Beginning with geometrical form, the students moved on to explore such properties as surface, volume, mass, weight, and construction. A typical rationalist plan of student work explored and categorized these properties:

Geometric qualities of form in space.

1. Types of surfaces: (a) plane; (b) curved surfaces (cylindrical, conical, etc., convex and concave); (c) angles formed by polyline surfaces or by intersection of planes—internal and external.
2. Volume as a form, comprising a closed system of surface. Typical volumetric forms: cylinder, parallelepiped, cone, sphere, etc., and their combinations. . . .

Physical-mechanical properties of form.

1. Mass (of volume)—enclosed space infilled with matter. Systems of elements, which expose mass, have to evoke a visual penetration inside the volume and the sensation of the degree of density of its infill with mass.
2. Weight (of volume)—the movement of mass downward under the force of gravitation.
3. Construction—a balancing system of couplings of interacting forms under the effect of the gravitation force.46

The rationalist approach departed from Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations (Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, 1886), the philosophical opus magnum of Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, which, alongside Avenarius’s work, solidified the theory of empiriocriticism as based on the economic principle. Mach suggested an epistemological reduction of the material world to color, sound, temperature, and other elements of perception. Since every physical quality (or element, in Mach’s terminology) exists in the mind as sensation, the dualism of spirit and matter was explained away as a linguistic misunderstanding. The mosaic of elements or sensations that the world presents, so Mach, is not chaotic but is rather organized as complexes, which, although never absolutely stable, demonstrate a certain permanency. For the sake of our orientation in the world, relatively stable complexes of sensations are called bodies. As a result, concluded Mach, it is not bodies that produce sensations but, on the contrary, complexes of sensations (or elements) that comprise bodies.47 No single body is absolutely stable: “My friend may put on a different coat. . . . His complexion, under the effects of light or emotion, may change.” Nevertheless, we recognize a complex of sensations as our friend based on permanent qualities, which outnumber transitory ones. Even the self, for Mach, was only a relatively permanent combination of qualities, a “complex of memories, moods, and feelings, joined to a particular body (the human body).”48 This postulation of the ultimate instability of the ego allowed Mach to argue that the “I” and the world are inseparable, most vividly illustrated by his self-portrait showing how closing one eye forcefully merges the body with its environment.49 Similarly, Adolf Behne, in a passage from The Modern Functional Building that El Lissitzky marked as crucial for understanding the book, argued that form is a result of interaction between at least two people, a prerequisite of any social association.50

Subverting the familiar distinction between subject and object was, for Ladovsky, the key lesson of Mach’s epistemology. “Perceiving material form, we see in it not only a ‘thing-in-itself,’ but a mirror-like reflection of the entire world,” stated a draft of his programmatic article on the principles of rationalist aesthetics.51 This monistic lesson, the architect believed, equally undermined the constructivists’ absolutization of matter and Kantian idealism. During a discussion of the laws of mechanics in architecture within the Working Group of Architects in May 1921, Ladovsky argued for the importance of empiriocriticism for architecture, presenting it as a theory that replaced the Kantian distinction between organisms and mechanical objects with a vision of a more or less loosely connected complex of elements:

I will introduce you to the opinion of Mach, to his argumentation. You have drawn a construction and you argue that this is architecture. Let us take a watch: it too has a construction, but this does not make it architecture. We have, therefore, to start with establishing scientific terms.

Mach says: “Objects do not exist in the world.” Earlier, some theoreticians and philosophers told us that an object exists, while others claimed that only our perceptions are real. Both arguments, as it seemed, were correct, and no one could recognize a mistake in the assumptions. There is no difference between you and a thing . . . “I” can be infinitely extended. Existent are your body, mind, watch. A body is connected to a thing—through the eye and the brain. I say about the eye “this is me.” But I can also say “the watch is also me.” There is no boundary between myself and the external world. I can connect myself to the globe. There is no boundary, but there is a link that is convenient to confine oneself to.

What is an object? Earlier [one] thought about the object itself and its properties as an object. This led philosophers to mistakes. Think only of Kant’s useless attempts to give corresponding notions. Mach is attempting to remove this strange error. He determines that “only complexes of elements exist.” They are changeable, but connected in time. And those whose connection is more stable—these are the ones we talk about. Here is a dress. We could have said now that it is a complex of certain forces. But this would be inconvenient, because there are more stable and more temporal values; the latter do not give it a definite character. Thus Mach says: only changeable complexes of qualities temporally exist, while there are no things in themselves.52

In the absence of objects that previously served as basic structural units of architectural language (“a wall, a roof, a column, a beam, a plinth, a pediment, etc.”), the new architectural theory was to comprise perceivable spatial qualities in the same way that Mach’s epistemology imagined the internalized universe as a set of elements of perception.53 Just as Mach suggested going from sensations to bodies rather than from bodies to sensations, Ladovsky insisted on defining architectural elements first, and only then, based on these definitions, developing a new notion of architecture: “from a study of separate properties and qualities of a phenomenon—to building on these foundations conclusions and definitions of the phenomenon itself.”54 These qualities—formal, subjective properties of spatial perception—in turn formed the object of architectural creativity: space, not stone, was the material of architecture. Whereas construction was the method of object creation, the elusive psychological space was to be designed by compositional means.

Synthesis

Having dissected the spatial environment into a set of elements of perception, Ladovsky’s psychoanalytical method culminated with their reassembly as space—the architectural work par excellence. Such an understanding of space was an outcome of modern psychology. In the 1870s, the German psychologist Carl Stumpf argued that “what we perceive originally and directly is the visual field, the whole visual field. . . . If this continually changes through movement, we retain the disappearing parts in our minds and unite them with the newly perceived spaces into a whole. Thus, out of many spaces arises one space.”55 At the end of the nineteenth century, Stumpf’s theory (along with related discussions by Wilhelm Wundt, Robert Vischer, and Theodor Lipps) was applied to architecture by August Schmarsow, who defined space as a concatenation of images, and, via Schmarsow, informed the thought of Auguste Choisy, Sigfried Giedion, and Le Corbusier. Like these theorists, Ladovsky saw space as a function of movement—a dispositif linking and ordering visual sensations that unfolded as the subject progressed along a linear path.

This approach redirected Ladovsky’s attention from the architectural to the urban dimension. In 1928 he founded another architectural organization, ARU (Ob’edinenie arkhitektorov-urbanistov, Association of Architects–Urbanists), recruiting its members from the most recent generation of his graduates. Ladovsky reportedly liked to walk along Moscow streets early in the morning, before the flows of traffic and people could prevent him from observing contrasts and changes of spatial perspectives, to understand urban landscape as a spatial whole.56 His concept of the embodied, peripatetic viewer evoked the “picturesque” urbanism of Choisy, whose Histoire de l’architecture (1899, Russian translation 1935) would be famously employed by Sergei Eisenstein a decade later in his theory of architectural montage.57 When during the academic year 1929/30 Ladovsky’s student Viktor Kalmykov created a clay model of Avtostroy, a socialist town to be built near Nizhniy Novgorod, he suggested filming the model and montaging the film to make it appear as if perceived by a moving viewer.58 Yet this cinematic approach to architecture was different from the spatial approach of Eisenstein to film: unlike the latter, Ladovsky was interested not in the emotional but in the perceptual effect of montage.

As Ladovsky’s interests moved toward urban planning, the development of the theory of architectural composition was left to his former ASNOVA colleagues who remained at VKhUTEMAS as the teachers of “Space”: Dokuchaev, Krinsky, and former students Mikhail Korzhev, Balikhin, Mikhail Turkus, V. Petrov, Yury Spassky, and Ivan Lamtsov.59 The group rejected Ladovsky’s scientism, embracing a more vitalist perspective. The goal of rationalism, for them, was not a formalist “aestheticization” but a “healthy aesthetics.”60 As Dokuchaev had earlier articulated:

Contemporary aesthetics . . . lies in the economy of psychophysical energy within a person. The main task of aesthetics is not to teach and [not to] contribute to the development of capacities for the passive contemplation and admiration of architectural objects. Rather, it is to solve problems through the expression and organization of form and space, which would enable it to raise up, awaken energy, and enrich people’s emotions.61

The results of their work were published by Krinsky, Turkus, and Lamtsov as Elements of Architectural-Spatial Composition (Elementy arkhitekturno-prostranstvennoi kompozitsii, 1934).62 Instead of the technique of revealing, which was favored by Ladovsky, the new rationalist compositional theory prioritized expressivity as the method of making form recognizable. The term expressivity (Russian vyrazitel’nost’) referred to hyperbolizing and otherwise accentuating properties of form to augment the viewer’s emotional response. In his antiformalist pamphlet “Formalism in the Science of Art” (1924), Lunacharsky had hailed it as the quality that endowed the artist with a social function, allowing for the “deepest psychological effect of the artwork.”63

The book recommended that the key expressive compositional qualities, dynamism and the intensity of psychological effect, could be achieved though division, a hierarchical ordering of elements, and the creation of a compositional center.64 Korzhev had already explored these qualities in an “industrial” assignment he had submitted at Ladovsky’s studio as a student. While conceptual, or abstract, assignments such as the parallelepiped served to flesh out the student’s formal idea and were submitted in clay, paper, wire, wood, and other sculptural media, the purpose of rather traditional-looking industrial assignments, which were presented as architectural plans and drawings, was to prepare students for practical work. In 1921 and 1922, the parallelepiped was paired with the “grain elevator” as “an industrial assignment on revealing and expressing architectural form.”65 Korzhev organized the structure as four equal cylinders arranged in a row. A contrast of rectangles and circles created a tension of dynamism and statics. The articulations of cylindrical sections made the facade of the elevator appear as a grid of horizontal rectangles, while the diagonals of the pedestal and the loft neutralized each other, conveying a feeling of dynamic monumentality, accentuated by a slight narrowing of the cylinders toward the top. Meanwhile, the circles (curves of the cylinders, wheels, and quadrants) emphasized the rotation that lay at the heart of the elevator’s functional program, making the beholder visually trace the movement of the grain: starting at bottom left, up the conveyor belt to the highest point of the structure, then moving downward following the diagonal traversing the wheels, abruptly falling down into the elevator and slowly running toward the starting point, where the process, as it were, began anew.

Hierarchical order and an accentuated centrality, the rationalists explained, endowed composition with direction, translating aesthetic experience to bodily reaction and stimulating physical movement.66 This order resulted from a repetition of elements, or their arrangement in compositional rows (Plate 2). Rationalist compositional theory distinguished between two types of such rows: rhythmical, based on increasing or decreasing intervals, or metric, whose intervals were equal. Like musical bars, metric rows formed the spatial skeleton of composition; their combinations expressed force, serenity, monumentality, and scale. Conveying lightness and dynamism, rhythm, meanwhile, was defined as the law of the connection of spatial forms and elements. During the interwar period, the notion of rhythm became essential for fields as diverse as psychology, musicology, eugenics, labor theory, pedagogy, aesthetics, and political propaganda.67 Physiologists studied the rhythms of heartbeat and breath, and labor theorists explored the rhythms of the machine and the worker. Biological definitions prevailed, while mechanistic rhythms were subjected to criticism. “Lines, rails or chains” in Ford’s plants “move without interruptions,” Giese observed, making the worker follow the rhythm of the machine, “hour after hour, week after week.”68 In response, economists such as Karl Bücher (whose widely read Work and Rhythm [Arbeit und Rhythmus, 1896] was translated into Russian twice, in 1899 and 1923), as well as artistic, aesthetic, and esoteric thinkers, including Kandinsky, Rudolf Steiner, and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, explored the humanizing potential of rhythm.69

Rhythm had been a key category of Lunacharsky’s Foundations of Positive Aesthetics, which identified it as the principle of the pupil’s physiological movement and therefore the source of pleasing aesthetic sensation.70 Citing Gustav Fechner and the theoretician of the golden section Adolf Zeising, Lunacharsky associated rhythm with simplicity, order, and regularity. His account of the aesthetic effect of the Gothic cathedral relied on emotional contrast rather than on linear narrativity:

Gradually, the pleasing and mighty excitement of visual organs . . . penetrates all of your nervous system: a new rhythm, the rhythm of this stone prayer, the rhythm of these glaring patterned windows seems to be flowing into you; it washes away, wins over tremblings and spasms . . . expressed in anxiety, bad memories, sickness; it strives, at the very least, to replace the disharmony of your regular spiritual life with one chord. And then, at the moment when the feeling of mighty and quiet harmony begins to capture you, a shadow of sorrow that falls over your soul becomes ever more obvious. . . . Here, one perceives, as it were, the contrast between those parts of the psyche (or, physically, the nervous-brain system) that are captured by the aesthetic rhythm, and other [parts]—unreconciled, aching, ulcerated by life. . . . And if the thirst for beauty is still alive in you, it will turn into anger with reality, and when the fever of anger recedes—into a desire to again retire into the corners of beauty—or into the desire to make reality more beautiful, to harmonize it, to create.71

Plunging the human into a sublime “sweet, semi-hypnotic state,” rhythm, to Lunacharsky, captured the soul, transgressed the boundaries of the aesthetic, and awakened the desire to strive for an active transformation of life. The future theoretician of architectural constructivism Moisei Ginzburg was likewise fascinated with the potential of rhythm for a (hypnotic) stimulation of constructive activity. His early book Rhythm in Architecture (1922), which was indebted to Lunacharsky’s aesthetics, opened with an epigraph taken from Friedrich Nietzsche’s study of classical music: “Rhythm is a compulsion. It produces an irresistible desire for imitating, conforming; not only feet but the soul itself (including the souls of gods) follows the musical bar.”72 The book romantically observed the rhythms of planetary systems, of the pulsation of the human heart and the circulation of blood, detecting rhythm at the essence of every architectural creation.73 Rhythm, for Ginzburg as well as for ASNOVA theorists of composition, was the principle that united architecture with nature, the exemplification of the organic and synthetic notion of life.

The boundary between expressionist vitalism and consumerist or totalitarian compulsion turned out to be elusive. A hypnotizing technique, rhythmical movement was mobilized by both Western and Soviet consumer and political propaganda, becoming an “ideal ideological cipher” (a similar role, one could note, was assigned to psychoanalysis).74 Giese discovered that rhythmically repeated objects exerted upon the psyche of the consumer a stronger emotional effect than single objects (an array of electric bulbs, for example, was more impressive than one bulb).75 Accordingly, in Soviet Russia and elsewhere, rhythm became a principle of design for settings of parades and rallies.76 Transforming the disinterested monadic visitor into an emotionally engaged member of the collective organism, the theory of spatial rhythm relied on the concept of mass celebration as the site of forging collective subjectivity, which had been developed by Lunacharsky in the immediate aftermath of the revolution.77 By the time ASNOVA began the work on the theory of composition, the concept was revived on a new, mass, scale as the political rally, an organized and aestheticized form of mass action tasked with providing ideological support for industrialization.

In the 1930s, when Kalmykov (who had earlier followed Ladovsky to ARU) began to devise the principles for planning stadiums, parks, and rally grounds, he rejected metric rows in favor of rhythmical ones.78 Although, like Ladovsky, he departed from the figure of the peripatetic viewer, unlike his teacher, he relied on emotional rather than on physiological perception. Kalmykov advocated thoroughfares leading from the main entrance to the park’s center, which he suggested designing as rhythmical rows proportionally intensifying toward the endpoint (monotonous repetition of metric rows, he explained, would have provoked boredom). Rhythmical accents were to be created with the help of vegetation, sculpture, and small architectural forms, which orchestrated perspectives and viewpoints, inconspicuously regulating the visitors’ movement.

In the rationalist theory of composition, Lunacharsky’s aesthetics, which had been interpreted by Ladovsky from a positivist, psychotechnic, and energeticist perspective, was returned to its vitalist expressionist humanism. This rift between Ladovsky and his former students reflected the problem of the monistic via media approach, which left too much room for interpretation. Aspiring for a compromise between or, rather, a dialectical sublation of the oppositions of individuality and collectivity, specificity and universality, mechanicism and vitalism, Soviet rationalism vacillated between the presumed objectivity of scientific management and the politics of affect. What it ultimately struggled to achieve was a solution for the key problem that modernization posed in front of the country: how its ethos of productivism could be reconciled with humanism.

The rationalist theory of space found two—at first sight, unlikely—counterparts in the Western intellectual tradition. Both Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre elaborated their concepts of space during the 1920s, relying on a related entanglement of ideas and interests: the monistic concept of life, epistemology and philosophy of science, and psychoanalysis. Both, moreover, would proceed to elaborate their own notions of space: Bachelard’s phenomenological The Poetics of Space (La poétique de l’espace, 1957) was followed by Lefebvre’s sociological and Marxist The Production of Space (La production de l’espace, 1974). Both books presented space as subjective, individual reality that resisted Carthusian abstraction. In his dissatisfaction with philosophical rationalism, Bachelard turned to psychoanalysis and, subsequently, to surrealism: while the latter, he argued, expanded the meaning of “reality,” demonstrating its fluidity and variety, his own “surrationalism” revealed the elusive character of reason.79 Bachelard’s special interest was the sphere of the psychological, suspended between consciousness and the unconscious: it was in this sphere, which he called reverie, where poetic imagery emerged. As early as 1936, he suggested that “in exactly the same way that we refer to psychoanalysis, so there is a place for rhythmanalysis in psychology. A sick soul—especially one that suffers the pain of time and of despair—has to be cured by living and thinking rhythmically.”80 Lefebvre’s final book, Elements of Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (Éléments de rythmanalyse: Introduction à la connaissance des rythmes, 1992), builds upon Bachelard’s ideas, suggesting a study of rhythms as a tool for grasping the multiplicity and complexity of life as a unity of the biological and the social. Rhythm, for Lefebvre, emerged at the intersection of space, time, and energy, revealing “that which is not thought: the game and the risk, love, art, violence, in a word, the world, or more precisely the diverse relations between human being and the universe.”81 However, Lefebvre acknowledged that rhythm was just as much a part of discipline and normalization, or dressage, as he called it.82 It was the latter that Ladovsky, who turned away from rhythm at the moment when others were discovering it, successfully avoided. Whereas Bachelard and Lefebvre, like ASNOVA theorists of composition, explored rhythm as the Freudian unconscious of place—the hidden structure that enabled its uniqueness—Ladovsky was rather interested in unconscious perception as a strategy of universalization. Yet his energetic rationalization too was a humanist strategy, which, even while mechanicist, rigid, and depersonalized, proved to be less susceptible to appropriation by state and corporate ideologies than its more expressive Soviet counterparts, which salvaged individuality only to subordinate it to the order of the transindividual.