Notes

1. Stanford Anderson, “The Fiction of Function,” Assemblage, no. 2 (February 1987): 19.

2. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, “The Extent of Modern Architecture,” in Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, New York, February 10 to March 23, 1932 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), 21.

3. This opposition has been pertinent to architectural criticism that focused on modernism. Among its more recent examples are publications by Alan Colquhoun, Giorgio Ciucci, Oscar Newman, and Sarah Goldhagen. See Juliana Maxim, The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1949–1964 (London: Routledge, 2019), 65 n.105.

4. Morphology had been a key preoccupation of ecological thought since Ernst Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), in which he introduced the term “ecology.” The discussion by biologist D’Arcy Thompson in On Growth and Form (1917) was particularly influential within artistic circles. See Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts (1979; repr., London: Routledge, 2008), 12–13.

5. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), and Lynn Nyhart, Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

6. Their influence has been well studied. See, for instance, Oliver Botar, “Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism: Biocentrism, László Moholy-Nagy’s ‘New Vision,’ and Erno Kállai’s Bioromantik” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1998); Detlef Mertins, “Architecture, Worldview, and World Image in G,” in G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010); Charissa N. Terranova, Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); Oliver Botar and Isabel Wünsche, eds., Biocentrism and Modernism (London: Ashgate, 2011).

7. Adolf Behne, The Modern Functional Building, trans. Michael Robinson (Santa Monica: Getty Research Institute, 1996), 128–30.

8. Behne’s Modern Functional Building was written in 1923 and published in 1926. Lissitzky’s translation, which he expected to be published by ASNOVA, remained unpublished. It can be accessed at the Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts, fond 2361 (El Lissitzky), op. 1, ed. khr. 29. Lissitzky intended to supplement Behne’s text with his own chapter, devoted to modern architecture in Russia. See his letter to Jacobus Oud (1925), published in El Lissitzky, Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 131.

9. The First Five-Year Plan addressed the period between October 1, 1928, and October 1, 1933. The project was approved at the Sixteenth Conference of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in April 1929, and in the Fifth Congress of the Soviets in May 1929. The plan was completed ahead of schedule in four years and three months (by the end of 1932). These complexities explain the inconsistency of dating the plan in historiography.

10. Solomon Lisagor died in incarceration in 1937; Mikhail Okhitovich was executed in 1937; Vladimir Dedyukhin, who headed the Design Department of Mossoviet (Moscow Council of Workers’ Deputies) was executed in 1938. The rector of the Academy of Architecture Mikhail Kryukov was subjected to repression in 1938 (he died in the GULAG in 1944) following the execution of vice-rector Alexander Alexandrov in 1936; academic secretary and later vice-rector Genrikh Lyudvig was incarcerated between 1938 and 1956; architect Oleg Vutke was executed in 1938. Somewhat better was the fate of architects Mikael Mazmonyan (whose work is examined in chapter 6) and Gevorg Kochar, who in 1937 were arrested and sent to the Arctic city Norilsk, where they, alongside a number of other incarcerated architects, remained until after their rehabilitation in 1954.

11. V. Koval’, “No iarkikh krasok bol’she u sud’by” [Interview with Betty Glan], Komsomol’skaia Pravda, unknown issue. Central Moscow Archive-Museum of Private Collections, fond L-33, op. 1, d. 217.

12. As Loren Graham notes, the two books most important for the Marxist concept of nature and life—Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature and Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks—had not yet been published at that time. Loren Graham, Science, Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 73.

13. Danilo Udovički-Selb, Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes: Architecture and Stalin’s Revolution from Above, 1928–1938 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 168. The event singled out by Udovički-Selb is an anonymous article in the party newspaper Pravda published on February 20, 1936.

14. Udovički-Selb, Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes, 45–46.

15. For a discussion of such binarism, see chapter 1, “Binary Socialism,” in Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

16. In architecture, the symbolic break between the two periods has typically been associated with the 1932 competition for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. For a discussion of this approach, see Alla Vronskaya, “Deconstructing Constructivism,” in Re-framing Identities: Architecture’s Turn to History, 1970–1990, ed. Ákos Moravánszky and Torsten Lange (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016), 149–63.

17. For a similar argument, see Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 4.

18. It must be noted that Kloppenberg does not use the term “monism” in the same sense as I do in this book: instead, he refers to “via media” or “social democracy” (James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], 3, 5–6). During the 1920s, via media became a rhetorical trope widely used in art and architecture criticism. Adolf Behne believed that German architectural culture could build its identity around overcoming the split between the totalizing collectivity of “the East” and the individualism of “the West” (Behne, Modern Functional Building, 119–20); Ladovsky, musing about the future of skyscraper construction in Russia, argued for a middle ground between the pragmatic American approach and the idealist German one (Enael [N. A. Ladovskii], “Neboskreby SSSR i Ameriki,” Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 [1926]: 6); Sergei Eisenstein argued for overcoming the dualism of “emotion” and “reason” (Sergei Eisenstein, “Perspektivy,” Iskusstvo, no. 1–2 [1929]: 116–22); and as late as 1938, Mies van der Rohe declared his ambition to unite materialism and idealism (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Inaugural Address as Director of Architecture at Armour Institute of Technology,” in Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, trans. Mark Jarzombek [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991], 316–17).

19. Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 6. See also Jeffrey Herf’s influential book Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (1984; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), which argues that “modernism is not a movement exclusively of the political Left or Right” (12), and that German modernity presented a cultural paradox: “the embrace of modern technology by German thinkers who rejected Enlightenment reason” (1). Significantly, among the latter were engineers.

20. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [1995], trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4.

21. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 10. The notion of biopolitics was first developed by Michel Foucault, who juxtaposed biopolitics with politics in his History of Sexuality (1984).

22. On Huxley’s involvement with modernist architecture, see Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, 23–35; Hadas Steiner, “Life at the Threshold,” October 136 (Spring 2011): 133–55; and Lucia Allais, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 19.

23. Julian Huxley, “Scientific Humanism,” in The Uniqueness of Man (London: Readers Union, 1943), 260. Huxley elaborated his evolutionist vision of humanism in The Humanist Frame, ed. Julian Huxley (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961) and elsewhere.

24. Written from a vitalist position was Gustav Bunge, Vitalismus und Mechanismus: Ein Vortrag (Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, 1886), while Otto Bütschli, Mechanismus und Vitalismus (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1901) defended mechanicism. Both works were translated into Russian as appendixes to Isidor Rozental’, Obshchaia fiziologiia: Vvedenie v izuchenie estestvoznaniia i meditsiny, trans. from German by S. S. Salazkin (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-Efron, 1902). Many of Wundt’s works were translated into Russian.

25. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 58. On the notion of life, see, in particular, J. H. Woodger, Biological Principles: A Critical Study (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1929); J. B. S. Haldane, “The Origin of Life” [1929], in Science and Life: Essays of a Rationalist, intro. J. Maynard Smith (London: Rationalist Press, 1968), 1–11; Lancelot Hogben, The Nature of Living Matter (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1930).

26. Haeckel’s monism and the concept of evolution became the subject of multiple Russian-language publications and public discussions. Russian translations of Haeckel’s works include his seminal book about art and architecture Kunstformen der Natur (1904 [1899]), Der Kampf um den Entwickelungsgedanken (1909 [1905]), as well as Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1914 [1899]), Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen (1919 [1910]), and Indische Reiserbriefe (1925 [1882]). In this and subsequent endnotes citing translations, the date of the translation is given first, followed by the date of original publication.

27. Many of Spencer’s works were translated into Russian, such as Principles of Biology (1870 [1864]), Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1874 [1858]), The Inadequacy of Natural Selection (1894 [1893]), Principles of Psychology (1898 [1855]), Principles of Ethics (1899 [1884]), and Facts and Comments (1903 [1902]).

28. Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered” [1896], Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: George Wittenborn, 1947), 208.

29. J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes, Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 184.

30. Many of the supporters of Mendelian eugenics, however, maintained close relationships with the Soviet Union, among them Huxley, Geddes, Shaw, Karl Pearson, J. B. S. Haldane, H. J. Muller (who worked in the USSR during the 1930s), and Paul Kammerer (whose intention to move to the Soviet Union was prevented only by his death). Kammerer’s life and suicide were glorified by Lunacharsky in the scenario for the 1928 film Salamander. On eugenics in Russia, see Mark B. Adams, “Eugenics in Russia, 1900–1940,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 153–215.

31. Having grown up in Riga, Latvia, where he also began his academic career, Ostwald was fluent in Russian and maintained personal ties with his Russian followers (he was, for example, a foreign corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences). The translations of his works include Grundlinien der anorganischen Chemie (1902 [1900]), Vorlesungen über Naturphilosophie (1903 [1902]), Die Schule der Chemie (1904 [1903]), Prinzipien der Chemie (1910 [1907]), and Die Farblehre (1926 [1918]). In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), Lenin called Ostwald “a big chemist but little philosopher,” remaining skeptical about his energeticism (which he associated with the empiriocriticism of Avenarius). As a result, Ostwald’s philosophical (though not scientific) works were not published in Russia after the revolution, although his ideas continued to be disseminated through the influence of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky.

32. Niles R. Holt, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s ‘The Bridge,’” British Journal for the History of Science 10, no. 2 (July 1977): 146–50. The members of the Bridge included, among others, Henri Poincaré and Russian zoologist Ilya Mechnikov (while Ernst Mach declined Ostwald’s invitation to join). See also Nader Vossoughian, “On the Organization of geistige Arbeit: Historical Reflections on Die Brücke,” Library Trends 62, no. 2 (2013): 478–88; Markus Krajewski, World Projects: Global Information before World War I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 33–92.

33. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 89–90.

34. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 283; Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital [1847] (New York: International Publishers, 1933), 19.

35. Quoted in Igor Polianski, “Between Hegel and Haeckel: Monistic Worldview, Marxist Philosophy, and Biomedicine in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview, ed. Todd H. Weir (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 197.

36. Hermann Reinheimer, Evolution by Co-Operation: A Study in Bio-Economics (New York: Dutton, 1913), 1.

37. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformierte Descendenz-Theorie (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1866), 8.

38. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

39. Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, “When the Powers of Man Assisted Those of Nature,” in Natural History: General and Particular, vol. 9 (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1761), 404. Writing from a critical perspective, historian Peder Anker demonstrated how ecological reasoning was subsequently mobilized by modern colonial powers to justify their rule. Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

40. Herbert Wells, The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (London: William Heinemann, 1932), 84–117.

41. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

42. Linking the economic theories of planning with modern utopian thought, Manfredo Tafuri famously argued that the turn of modernist architects toward urban planning in the late 1920s represented the pinnacle of utopian tradition, after which “the utopia of the plan” became dissolved in the reality of the plan, i.e., in Keynesian economic politics. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (1973; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976).

43. Michael Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), xxii.

44. The PEP manifesto is cited in Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, 27.

45. Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, 32. On Huxley’s political views, see his Democracy Marches (London: Chatto and Vindus, 1941). As Anker’s pioneering study of the role of ecological thought in modernist architecture demonstrates, Huxley’s support for modernism was an outcome of his social biologism.

46. Gerald Young, ed., Origins of Human Ecology (Stroudsburg, Penn.: Hutchinson Ross, 1983). For more on Wells’s human ecology, see Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, 24–36.

47. H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells, The Science of Life, vol. 3 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1931), 641. On the ecologization of society, see Lynn K. Nyhart, Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 251–92.

48. Many of the NOT enthusiasts were later subjected to repression or otherwise persecuted, including Trotsky, Gastev, Klutsis, Zalkind, Spielrein, and Blonsky.

49. For a detailed account of the circle, its approach to architecture, and its repercussions during the second half of the century in the United States, see Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, and Avigail Sachs, Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018).

50. Both the founder of Russian materialist aesthetics Nikolay Chernyshevsky and the leading Marxist theoretician Georgy Plekhanov considered themselves Spinozians. This importance was solidified by a Russian translation of Spinoza’s Ethics in 1886, followed by a host of other translations. See A. D. Maidanskii, Benedikt Spinoza—pro et contra: lichnost’ i tvorchestvo B. Spinozy v otsenkakh russkikh myslitelei i issledovatelei. Antologiia (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkoi khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, 2012), 9. Radical scientism was promoted by authors like the scientist and writer Mikhail Filippov, who until his death during a chemical experiment was the editor of Nauchnoe obozrenie (Scientific Review, 1894–1903), a journal that published, alongside Mach, Helmholtz, and Bekhterev, the works of Lenin, Plekhanov, and other Bolsheviks. For an overview of monism in Russia, see Polianski, “Between Hegel and Haeckel.”

51. G. V. Plekhanov, The Development of the Monist View of History, vol. 1 of Selected Philosophical Works, trans. Andrew Rothstein and A. Fineberg (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974). V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 19 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1968), footnote on p. 313.

52. V. I. Lenin, “O karikature na marksizm i ob imperialisticheskom ekonomizme” [1916], in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 30 (Moscow: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma, 1958), 108.

53. Quoted in Polianski, “Between Hegel and Haeckel,” 197. Gorky also applauded Ostwald’s “fertile, productive idea of organization” (quoted in Holt, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s ‘The Bridge,’” 148).

54. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Vospominania iz revolutsionnogo proshlogo” [1919], Nasledie A. V. Lunacharskogo, September 5, 2019, http://lunacharsky.newgod.su/lib/vospominaniya-i-vpechatleniya/vospominania-iz-revolucionnogo-proslogo/.

55. Lunacharskii, “Vospominania iz revoliutsionnogo proshlogo.”

56. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki,” in Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzrenia (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S. Dorovatovskogo i A. Charushnikova, 1903), 51.

57. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Meschanstvo i individualizm,” in Ocherki filosofii kollektivizma (St. Petersburg: Izdanie tovarischestva “Znanie,” 1909), 91. Compare Lunacharsky’s exaltation of the fight as the highest manifestation of life with Donna Haraway’s seminal analysis of Carl Akeley’s nearly simultaneous taxidermic dioramas in the New York Museum of Natural History, which present manhood, identified with the fight, as the highest manifestation of life (Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text, no. 11 [Winter 1984–85]: 20–64).

58. Lunacharskii, “Meschanstvo i individualism,” 335. For more on Lunacharsky’s Nietzscheanism, see Alla Vronskaya, “From the Aesthetics of Life to the Dialectics of Collectivity: Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexander Bogdanov, and Maxim Gorky, 1905–1917,” in Productive Universals—Specific Situations: Critical Engagements in Art, Architecture, and Urbanism, ed. Anne Kockelkorn and Nina Zschocke (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), 316–35.

59. Aleksandr A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm: Stat’i po filosofii, vol. 2 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo S. Dorovatovskago i A. Charushnikova, 1905), 186. The German-Austrian psychiatrist Theodor Meynert believed brain anatomy to be the key to treating psychological disorders.

60. S. Suvorov, “Osnovy filosofii zhizni” [1904], in Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniia: Sbornik statei po filosofii, obshchestvennoi rabote i zhizni (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Dorovatskogo i Charushnikova, 1905), 79, 94.

61. The influence of Bogdanov’s thought on Russian postrevolutionary culture has been acknowledged by multiple scholars; for example, Isabel Wünsche, “Organic Visions and Biological Models in Russian Avant-Garde Art,” in Botar and Wünsche, Biocentrism and Modernism, 127–52; Barbara Wurm, “Factory,” in Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test, ed. Matthew Witkovsky and Devin Fore (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017), 218–25; Dmitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia Adaskina, Popova (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990); and Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 95–131.

62. Three out of eight key presentations at the First All-Russian NOT Conference were made by Proletkult members, including Bogdanov. Georgii Gloveli and Nadezhda Figurovskaia, “Tragedia kollektivista,” in Aleksandr Bogdanov, Voprosy sotsializma: Raboty raznykh let (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 23 n. 123.

63. See V. Kemenov, “Dovol’no metafiziki! (Protiv idealizma Novitskogo),” Za proletarskoe iskusstvo, no. 11–12 (1931): 8–12, and Charlotte Douglas, “Mach and Malevich: Sensation, Suprematism, and the Objectless World,” The Structuralist 49/50 (2009): 58–65.

64. See Mark Crinson, Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017); David Ayers, Modernism, Internationalism, and the Russian Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

65. The postrevolutionary wave of “Russophilia” was carefully cultivated by the Soviet government. See Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

66. Those who traveled in Russia at the invitation of the Soviet government included Behne, Theodore Dreiser, Dewey, Wells, Keynes, Shaw, Huxley, Diego Rivera, Knud Lönberg-Holm, Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland, André Gide, Walter Benjamin, and Bruno Taut, as well as those architects who received commissions or were employed by the Soviet government.

67. Oliver Botar, “Defining Biocentrism,” in Botar and Wünsche, Biocentrism and Modernism, 31. Lebensphilosophie is a term retrospectively applied to a set of philosophies (including Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Bergson, and Georg Simmel) that opposed positivism and asserted, instead, the irrationality of life.

68. Polianski, “Between Hegel and Haeckel,” 212–13.

69. Huxley criticized Lysenko’s ideas in Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity (London: Chatto and Vindus, 1949). On Lysenko’s Lamarckism, see Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).

70. A. Toporkov, Tekhnicheskii byt i sovremennoe iskusstvo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928), 223.

71. Spinoza, Ethics, IVD1 and IVD2.

72. John Bernal, “The Freedom of Necessity” [1942], in The Freedom of Necessity (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1949), 8.

73. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181–82.

1. Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm (ratsio-arkhitektura) “Formalizm” (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), 140–43.

2. Selim Khan-Magomedov, Mikhail Korzhev (Moscow: Russkii Avangard, 2009), 32.

3. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Doklad na III sessii VTsIK 7-go sozyva” [1920], in O vospitanii i obrazovanii (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1986), 78.

4. V. Petrov, “ASNOVA za 8 let,” Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1–2 (1931): 49. In 1929, the “collective method of pedagogy” was defined as a combination of the collective elaboration of programs and methods, collective conversations with students and field trips, collective reviews of student projects, and collective research: “Obshchaia programma raboty Osnovnogo Otdeleniia” (Moscow, 1929), cited in Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 140–43; Khan-Magomedov, Mikhail Korzhev, 360.

5. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 146.

6. Formed in 1919 (and disbanded in 1920), the group was first known as Sinskul’ptarkh (Synthesis of Sculpture and Painting). A thorough account of Zhivskulptarkh and INKhUK discussions and their role in the formation of rationalist theory is given in Anatole Senkevitch, “Aspects of Spatial Form and Perceptual Psychology in the Doctrine of the Rationalist Movement in Soviet Architecture in the 1920s,” VIA 6 (1983): 78–115.

7. Accordingly, the program of the INKhUK Group of Objective Analysis aimed at an “analysis of elements and the laws of their organization in works of art” (the definition of Varvara Bubnova [1920]; quoted in Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005], 32).

8. Nikolai Dokuchaev, “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska k kursu ‘Iskusstvo arkhitektury’ dlia khudozhestvennykh tekhnikumov,” in Sbornik materialov po khudozhestvennomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), 79. The course “Space” was first offered in 1923.

9. Similarities between the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS pedagogy have been noted by many, leading to the popular curatorial branding of VKhUTEMAS as “the Russian Bauhaus.” The role of psychological techniques in the pedagogical curriculum of the two schools provides another ground for comparison. On the role of psychological ideas at the Bauhaus, see Oliver Botar, “Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism: Biocentrism, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s ‘New Vision,’ and Erno Kállai’s Bioromantik” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 1998), and Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

10. For more on VKhUTEMAS, see Anna Bokov, Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930 (Zurich: Park Books, 2021).

11. In addition to Ladovsky and Krinsky, participants in the debate included the artists Varvara Bubnova, Alexander Drevin, Karl Ioganson, Ivan Klyun, Konstantin Medunetsky, Nadezhda Udaltsova, brothers Vladimir and Georgy Stenberg, as well the sculptors Aleksey Babichev and Boris Korolev and the art critic Nikolay Tarabukin. On the debate, see Gough, Artist as Producer, 21–59.

12. P. N. Medvedev [identified as Mikhail Bakhtin], “Uchenyi sal’erizm (o formal’nom (morfologicheskom) metode),” in Freidizm. Formal’nyi metod v literaturovedenii. Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka. Stat’i (Moscow: Labirint, 2000), 8.

13. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 107.

14. See “Minutes of the meeting of the Working Group of Architects in INKhUK” (“Protokol zasedaniia rabochei gruppy arkhitektorov INKhUKa,” in Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 108).

15. Ladovsky’s personal profile at VKhUTEMAS. Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts (RGALI), fond 680, op. 2, ed. khr. 2597. The same document mentions his conversion from Judaism to Lutheran Protestantism. Cited after Margarete Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frühen Sowjetunion (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), 52.

16. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 127; Vladimir Krinskii, “Otchet o teoreticheskoi rabote gruppy arkhitektorov IkhUK,” in Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 126–27. K. Pirson, Nauka i obiazannosti grazhdanina, trans. K. Timiriazev (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerov, 1905); K. Pirson, Grammatika nauki, trans. V. Bazarov and P. Iushkevich (n.p.: Shipovnik, n.d.).

17. Besides Ladovsky, among ASNOVA’s founding members were Krinsky, Dokuchaev, the dean of the VKhUTEMAS Architecture Department Aleksey Rukhlyadev, Ladovsky’s first students Sergey Mochalov and Viktor Balikhin, and architects Efimov and Vladimir Fidman. Not a prolific writer, Ladovsky preferred to disseminate his ideas through teaching and conversation. Alongside publications by his associates (most notably Dokuchaev), documents related to Ladovsky’s pedagogical activity offer the best insight into the theory of rationalism.

18. Quoted in Alexey Alexeyevich Kurbanovsky, “Freud, Tatlin, and the Tower: How Soviet Psychoanalysts Might Have Interpreted the Monument to the Third International,” Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 895. The Russian Psychoanalytical Society functioned between 1922 and 1930, and numerous translations of Freud were published both before and after the revolution of 1917. On psychoanalysis in Russia, see Alexander Etkind, The Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), and Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).

19. On the role of psychoanalysis in the thought of Vygotsky and Luria, see René Van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 78–111.

20. B[ernard] Bykhovskii, “O metodologicheskikh osnovaniiakh psikhoanaliticheskogo uchenia Freida,” Pod znamenem Marksizma 11–12 (1923): 166.

21. Aleksandr Luria, “Psikhoanaliz kak sistema monisticheskoi psikhologii,” in Zigmund Freid, psikhoanaliz i russkaia mysl’, ed. V. M. Leibin (Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 193–94.

22. On the economic potential of libido, see also Tijana Vujošević, Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 58–61.

23. Giese’s prolific work was well known to the Bauhaus designers (and likely to their Soviet colleagues) due to his friendship with László Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy authored the entry “The Work of the Bauhaus” in the Dictionary of Work Science: Handwörterbuch der Arbeitswissenschaft, ed. Fritz Giese, 2 vols. (Halle, 1927–30), 1:654–66. In 1926 psychotechnics ventured into architectural pedagogy: while Hannes Meyer introduced it to the curriculum of the Bauhaus (where it focused on advertisement psychology), Ladovsky opened the Psychotechnical Laboratory at VKhUTEIN.

24. Richard Avenarius, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäß dem Prinzip des kleinsten Kraftmaßes: Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1876), iii.

25. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Vospominania iz revolutsionnogo proshlogo” [1919], in Vospominania i vpechatlenia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1968), 19–20; R. Avenarius and A. Lunacharskii, R. Avenarius, Kritika chistogo opyta v populiarnom izlozhenii A. Lunacharskogo. Novaia teoria pozitivnogo idealizma (Holzapfel, Panideal). Kriticheskoe izlozhenie A. Lunacharskogo (Moscow: Izd. Dorovatskogo i Charushnikova, 1905).

26. Anatolii Lunacharskii, Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki (1903; repr., Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), 23.

27. Lunacharskii, Osnovy pozitivnoi estetiki, 13–19.

28. Dmitrii Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, “Vvedenie v nenapisannuiu knigu po psikhologii umstvennogo tvorchestva (nauchno-filosofskogo i khudozhestvennogo),” in N. V. Os’makov, Psikhologicheskoe napravleneie v russkom literaturovedenii (Moscow: Prosveschenie, 1981), 111.

29. Fedor Kalinin, “Proletariat i tvorchestvo,” Proletarskaia Kul’tura 1 (1918): 10. For the original account of Poincaré’s story, see Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1914). On the notion of the unconscious in Soviet criticism, see John Fizer, “The Problem of the Unconscious in the Creative Process as Treated by Soviet Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21, no. 4 (Summer 1963): 399–406.

30. Whereas Ladovsky used the terms “rational architecture” or “ratio-architecture,” the term “rationalism” was coined as a counterpart to “constructivism” by historian Selim Khan-Magomedov. See Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik, 42.

31. Nikolai Ladovskii, “Osnovy postroeniia teorii arkhitektury (pod znakom ratsionalisticheskoi estetiki),” Izvestia ASNOVA 1 (1926): 3.

32. Fritz Giese, “Rationalisierung,” in Handbuch der Arbeitswissenschaft, vol. 1 (Halle: Carl Marhold, 1930), 3622. For an example of an application of this principle to design, see, for instance, August Schirmer, “Handwerk und Rationalisierung,” Schweizerischen Maler- und Gipsermeister-Zeichnung 7 (1929): 125–27.

33. O. A. Ermanskii, Teoriia i praktika ratsionalizatsii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 134–35. Like Lunacharsky, Ermansky studied in Zurich, graduating from Zurich Polytechnic Institute in engineering in 1895 (the year Lunacharsky began his studies). It is unclear whether or not Ermansky could have studied with Avenarius. For more on NOT, see the introduction to this book.

34. Ermanskii, Teoriia i praktika ratsionalizatsii, 133.

35. [ASNOVA’s manifesto], Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): 1.

36. In its modernist self-reflexivity, the parallelepiped presages Peter Eisenman’s reading of Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino (1914–15) (Peter Eisenman, “Maison Dom-Ino and the Self-Referential Sign,” Oppositions 15/16 [1979]: 189–98), although unlike the latter, it reveals not the process but the product of design.

37. Johannes Bochenek, Die männliche und weibliche Normal-Gestalt nach einem neuen System (Berlin: A. Haak, 1875), 15.

38. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 112–14. According to the minutes of the meeting published by Khan-Magomedov, Petrov’s quote from Mayakovsky’s poem “Ulichnoe” (Streetways, 1913) was imprecise. Petrov’s position evokes the argument made by Roman Jacobson the same year (Roman Iakobson, “Noveishaia russkaia poezia. Nabrosok pervyi: Podstupy k Khlebnikovu” [1921], in Serguei Oushakine, Formal’nyi metod: Antologiia russkogo modernizma, vol. 3 [Ekaterinburg: Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2016], 246–304).

39. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 113. The importance of Worringer’s book for Russian formalism was noted by Aage A. Hansen-Löve, Russkii Formalizm [1978] (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2001), 70.

40. N. Dokuchaev, “Osnovy iskusstva arkhitektury: Kurs dlia khudozhestvennykh tekhnikumov,” in Sbornik materialov po khudozhestvennomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), 90.

41. Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1893); A. Hildebrand, Problema formy v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve, trans. N. B Rozenfel’d and V. A. Favorskii (Moscow: Musaget, 1914). Hildebrand’s book was translated to Russian by N. B. Rozenfel’d and graphic designer Vladimir Favorskii, the rector of VKhUTEMAS between 1923 and 1926. The book is cited by Dokuchaev (“Osnovy iskusstva arkhitektury,” 88) and Aleksei Mikhailov, Gruppirovki sovietskoi arkhitektury (Moscow: OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1932), 44.

42. Adolf Hildebrand, “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 235, 245. A similar understanding of art was suggested by Pearson: “The single statement, a brief formula, the few words of which replace in our minds a wide range of relationships between isolated phenomena, is what we term a scientific law.” Art, for Pearson, allowed one to find “concentrated into a brief statement, into a simple formula or a few symbols, a wide range of human emotions and feelings.” Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (London: A. and C. Black, 1900), 31, 35.

43. Hildebrand, “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts,” 233. An artist, according to Hildebrand, operated with effective form, creating not objects, but phenomenal impressions. Architects of Renaissance Genoa, for instance, solved the problem of narrow streets by leaning cornices down and making them shorter, which created the effect of a regular cornice observed from a distance. Hildebrand, “Anhand zur 6. Auflage. Nachträgliche Aufsätze zum Problem der Form,” in Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst, 130–36. Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: Voss, 1867).

44. Ladovskii, “Osnovy postroeniia teorii arkhitektury (pod znakom ratsionalisticheskoi estetiki),” 4.

45. Ladovskii, “Osnovy postroeniia teorii arkhitektury (pod znakom ratsionalisticheskoi estetiki),” 4. Petrov is a common Russian surname, and it remains unclear whether V. Petrov, the author of the project praised by Ladovsky, was the same person as the member of the Working Group of Architects A. Petrov. The difference in initials, likely suggesting that they were two different people, might also be a result of a typographic mistake.

46. Viktor Balikhin, “Programma prostranstvennogo konstentra Osnovnogo Otdeleniia VKhUTEMAS,” quoted in Selim Khan-Magomedov, Viktor Balikhin (Moscow: Russkii avangard, 2009), 83–86.

47. Ernst Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations [1886], trans. C. M. Williams (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1897), 22.

48. Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations, 2–3.

49. Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations, 16.

50. [El Lissitzky and] Adolf Behne, “Sovremennaia tselesoobraznaia arkhitektura,” unpublished manuscript, RGALI, fond 2361, op. 1, ed. khr. 59, l. 27.

51. Nikolay Ladovsky, “Osnovy postroeniia teorii arkhitektury (pod znakom ratsionalisticheskoi estetiki),” unpublished draft of Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926), RGALI, fond 2361, op. 1, ed. khr. 59, l. 33. The sentence was deleted from the published version of the article.

52. Quoted in Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 119.

53. “Protokol zasedaniia rabochei gruppy arkhitektorov INKhUKa,” March 26, 1921, 108–9.

54. “Protokol zasedaniia rabochei gruppy arkhitektorov INKhUKa,” 108.

55. Carl Stumpf, Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1873), 278. Translated in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, “Introduction,” in Empathy, Form and Space, 60. Stumpf’s 1907 book Erscheinungen und Funktionen was translated into Russian in 1913 (Karl Stumpf, “Iavleniia i psikhicheskie funktsii,” Novye idei v filosofii 4 [1913]: 50–101).

56. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 385.

57. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” introduction by Ive-Alain Bois, Assemblage, no. 10 (December 1989): 101–31, and Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representations of Space (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), 180–92.

58. V. Kalmykov, “Avtostroi,” Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1–2 (1931): 22–26.

59. After graduating from VKhUTEMAS in 1926, Korzhev, Balikhin, and Turkus spent the summer developing the course as a theory of architectural composition. They rented a house in a village near Moscow, where Petrov, Spassky, and Lamtsov visited them. For more on “the summer in Kriushi,” see Khan-Magomedov, Mikhail Korzhev, 84–90. The diary documenting the theoretical work of Balikhin, Korzhev, and Turkus in Kriushi in 1926 was published by Khan-Magomedov (Mikhail Korzhev, 143–71).

60. Nikolai Dokuchaev, “Sovremennaia russkaia arkhitektura i zapadnye paralleli,” Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, no. 2 (1927): 13.

61. Dokuchaev, “Sovremennaia russkaia arkhitektura i zapadnye paralleli,” 12–13.

62. Vladimir Krinskii, Ivan Lamtsov, and Mikhail Turkus, Elementy arkhitekturno-prostranstvennoi kompozitsii (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1934). The second edition came out in 1938 (Lamtsov and Turkus, Elementy arkhitekturnoi kompozitsii [Moscow: Glavnaia redaktsia stroitel’noi literatury, 1938]). Reprinted in 1968, it remained a key textbook on architectural composition for generations of Soviet students (Krinskii, Lamtsov, and Turkus, Elementy arkhitekturno-prostranstvennoi kompozitsii [Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1968]). Moreover, in 1962, Lamtsov, Krinskii, and Turkus, together with V. S. Kolbin and N. V. Filasov, published another book, Vvedenie v arkhitekturnoe proektirovanie (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo po literature i stroitel’stvu), which partially drew upon Elements of Architectural-Spatial Composition.

63. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Formalizm v nauke ob iskusstve,” Pechat‘ i revoliutsiia 5 (1924): 19–32; accessed online: http://lunacharsky.newgod.su/lib/ss-tom-7/formalizm-v-nauke-ob-iskusstve/.

64. Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Vysshii Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskii Institut, Programma raboty osnovnogo otdeleniia [1929], reproduced in Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 361.

65. Technical requirements specified that the elevator had to be divided into several areas for grain storage; grain was to be received through pouring reservoirs and lifted to the upper level where it would pass through purifying devices and then pour back down. Architectural requirements stated that the form of the elevator had to be revealed and expressed as a holistic volumetric structure. Nikolai Dokuchaev, “Programma na izuchenie form dlia II-oi gruppy Osnovnogo otdeleniia Ob’edinennykh masterskikh VKhUTEMASa,” quoted in Khan-Magomedov, Mikhail Korzhev, 56–57, and Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 165–67.

66. Moskovskii Gosudarstvennyi Vysshii Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskii Institut, Programma raboty osnovnogo otdeleniia, 362.

67. Michael Golston, “‘Im Anfang war der Rhythmus’: Rhythmic Incubations in Discourses of Mind, Body, and Race from 1850–1944,” Stanford Electronic Humanities Review 5, Supplement (December 1996): Cultural and Technological Incubations of Fascism; accessed online at https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-supp/text/golston.html. See also his Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

68. Fritz Giese, Girlkultur, vergleiche zwischen amerikanischem und europäischem rhythmus und lebensgefühl (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1925), 25.

69. As Peter Michael Mowris has demonstrated, they were influenced by experimental psychology, in particular, the work of Wilhelm Wundt (Mowris, “Nerve Languages: The Critical Response to the Physiological Psychology of Wilhelm Wundt by Dada and Surrealism,” PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2010). Kandinsky’s second cousin, the psychiatrist Viktor Kandinsky, was among the first translators of Wundt’s work to Russian (Wundt’s Principles of Physiological Psychology [1874] was published in his translation in 1880–81). See also Robin Veder, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2015).

70. Lunacharskii, Osnovy positivnoi estetiki, 70.

71. Lunacharskii, Osnovy positivnoi estetiki, 115–18; Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis, 191.

72. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Sämtliche briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 8 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), 1975–84; Moisei Ginzburg, Ritm v arkhitekture (Moscow: Sredi kollektsionerov, 1922), 9.

73. Ginzburg, Ritm v arkhitekture, 7–9.

74. Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science, 7. On the use of psychoanalysis for consumer and political propaganda, see Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (1976; repr., New York: Basic Books, 2008), and PR! A Social History of Spin (1996; repr., New York: Basic Books, 2003).

75. Fritz Giese, Psikhoanaliz i psikhotekhnika, trans. A. A. Goriainov (Leningrad: Sovremennik, 1926), 17.

76. “It is necessary to introduce visual spatial rhythms (rise, beat, fall) to support and facilitate the perception of a topic,” stipulated a guide for the decorators of mass celebrations. A. Kuznetsova, A. Magidson, and Yu. Shchukin, Oformlenie goroda v dni revoliutsionnykh prazdnenstv (Moscow: Izogiz, 1932), 66.

77. For more on Lunacharsky’s concept of mass spectacle, see Alla Vronskaya, “Objects-Organizers: The Monism of Things and the Art of Socialist Spectacle,” in A History of Russian Exposition and Festival Architecture, 1700–2014, ed. Alla Aronova and Alexander Ortenberg (London: Routledge, 2018), 151–67.

78. Viktor Kalmykov, “Arkhitekturnye problemy parkov (Doklad po pervomy etapu raboty nad temoi),” 1936, 2; manuscript in the collection of Russian State Archive in Samara.

79. Bachelard’s essay “Le Surrationalisme” opened the sole issue of Inquisitions (1936), a review edited (among others) by Louis Aragon and Tristan Tzara.

80. Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration [1936], trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000), 21. The notion of rhythmanalysis was first introduced by the Brazilian philosopher Lucio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos. La Rythmanalyse was published by the Rio de Janeiro Psychological and Philosophical Society in 1931.

81. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life [1992], trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), 15. Only the triad “time-space-energy,” he believed, could adequately analyze reality.

82. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 16–17.

1. Izvestiia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926). In February 1923, Ladovsky had sent Lissitzky a written invitation to join ASNOVA, and in February 1924 welcomed him, also by mail, as a member (El Lissitzky, Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky [Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst Dresden, 1977], 177). As late as November 1928, Lissitzky represented ASNOVA at the discussion of Ginzburg’s report on the typification of housing at the Gosplan (State Planning Committee) of the Russian Federative Republic. Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1 (1929): 26.

2. On Soviet Americanism, see Jean-Louis Cohen, Building a New New World: “Amerikanizm” in Russian Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020).

3. El [El Lissitzky], “Chelovek—mera vsekh portnykh,” Izvestiia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): 10.

4. R[oman] Ia. Khiger, Puti arkhitekturnoi mysli, 1917–1932 (Moscow: OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1933), 49.

5. Khan-Magomedov believed that what Lissitzky suggested measuring in architecture was the strength of the psychological effect (Selim Khan-Magomedov, Lazar’ Lissitzky [Moscow: Russkii Avangard, 2011], 239). Vöhringer saw the clue to the photo collage in the arrow pointing to the pattern and a picture of a boy: a comparison with architecture, she argued, made one recognize the smallness of the human (Margarete Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frühen Sowjetunion [Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007], 44–46).

6. See, for instance, Alan C. Birnholtz, “El Lissitzky, the Avant-Garde, and the Russian Revolution,” Artforum 11, no. 1 (1972), 71–76; Werner Hofmann, “Sur un Auto-Portrait de El Lissitzky,” Gazette des beaux-arts 107 (1986), 39–44; Joachiim Heusinger von Waldegg, “El Lissitzky Der Konstrukteur (Selbstbildnis) von 1924: Künstlerbildnis zwischen Funktionalismus und Utopie,” Pantheon: Internationale Jahreszeitschrift für Kunst 50 (1992): 125–34.

7. See Paul Galvez, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Monkey-Hand,” October 93 (Summer 2000): 109–37; and the section “Hand-Eye” (articles by John Bowlt, Margarita Tupitsyn, and Leah Dickerman) in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow, ed. by Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003).

8. Leah Dickerman, “El Lissitzky’s Camera Corpus,” in Perloff and Reed, Situating El Lissitzky, 153–76.

9. El Lissitzky, “The Film of El’s Life” [1928], in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 325.

10. Lissitzky studied at Riga Polytechnic during the First World War, when it was evacuated to Moscow.

11. The sketches of the emblem by Georgy Mapu are reproduced in Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm (ratsio-arkhitektura) “Formalizm” (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), 29.

12. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 472. For an example of citing this phrase in the Soviet context, see V. E. Bykov, “Kak rabotal Mel’nikov” [1969], in Konstantin Stepanovich Mel’nikov, ed. by A. A. Strigalev (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985), 241. Here, the saying is wrongly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

13. Khan-Magomedov, Lazar’ Lissitzky, 89–90. For more on the INKhUK debate, see chapter 1.

14. Lissitzky’s letter to Küppers, December 12, 1924, Getty Research Institute, cited in Galvez, “Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Monkey-Hand.” Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man [1876] (New York: International Publishers, 1950).

15. Ernst Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture [1877], trans. Lauren K. Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 19, 35.

16. The photograph had already been used by Lissitzky in 1924 in a Pelican Drawing Ink advertisement.

17. El Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry” [1925], in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 348.

18. Lissitzky, “The Film of El’s Life,” 325.

19. El’ Lisitskii, “Glaz arkhitektora (izlozhenie knigi E. Mendel’sona),” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 2 (1926); Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin: Rudolf Mosse, 1926). On Lissitzky’s reading (and looking at) Amerika, see Cohen, Building a New New World, 215–26.

20. El Lissitzky, “Die künstlerischen Voraussetzungen zur Standardisierung individueller Möbel für die Bevölkerung: Vortrag für die Sektion Standardisierung NTU VSNCh” [1928], in Proun und Wolkenbügel. Russian-language original at the Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts, fond 2361.

21. Lissitzky, “Die künstlerischen Voraussetzungen zur Standardisierung individueller Möbel für die Bevölkerung,” 93.

22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [1886], trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 162. Quoted in Bryan L. Moore, Ecological Literature and the Critique of Anthropocentrism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 20.

23. These ideas were developed by such nineteenth-century art theorists as Adolf Zeising, who suggested the ancient theorem of the golden section as the standard of beauty present in all things natural, including the human.

24. Yve-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America, April 1988, 174.

25. Based on the observations collected during two field trips to central Asia in 1931–32, Luria discovered the absence of visual illusions in “primitive” Uzbek people, entering into debate with Kurt Koffka, who argued for the universality of core illusions. A. Yasnitsky, “Kurt Koffka: ‘U uzbekov EST’ illuzii: zaochnaia polemika mezhdu Luriei i Koffkoi,” Dubna Psychological Journal, no. 3 (2013): 1–25.

26. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 349. See Yve-Alain Bois, “From -∞ to +∞: Axonometry, or Lissitzky’s Mathematical Paradigm,” in El Lissitzky, 1890–1940: Architect, Painter, Photographer, Typographer (Eindhoven: Van Abbe Museum, 1990), 31.

27. Jean Arp, On My Way: Poetry and Essays, 1912–1947, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948), 35. Lissitzky and Arp collaborated on the publication of Die Kunstismen / Les ismes de l’art / The Isms of Art (Zurich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925).

28. Arp, On My Way, 91.

29. El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, Merz, no. 8–9 (April–July 1924), cover page.

30. Peter Nisbet, “An Introduction to El Lissitzky,” in El Lissitzky, 1890–1941: Catalogue for an Exhibition of Selected Works from North American Collections, the Sprengel Museum Hanover, and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, ed. by Peter Nisbet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1987), 28–30. Lissitzky and Schwitters were particularly influenced by Francé’s books Die Pflanze als Erfinder (1920) and Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt (1921).

31. Karl Culmann, Die graphische Statik (Zurich, 1866). Culmann’s discovery was discussed by Kapp (Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 82–84) and D’Arcy Thompson (D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form [1917; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945], 976–78). In Russian, it was discussed in detail in P. K. Engelmeier, Teoriia tvorchestva (St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie, 1910), 168–72.

32. Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, 163. On measure, see John Harwood, “The Interface: Ergonomics and the Aesthetics of Survival,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 74–83.

33. Cantor’s discoveries were popularized in Russia by theologian and theoretician of perspective Pavel Florensky, who used them as evidence against the claims of perspective to truthfulness. Pavel Florenskii, “Obratnaia perspektiva” [1919], Sochineniia v 4kh tomakh vol. 3(1) (Moscow: Mysl’, 2000), 81–83.

34. El Lissitzky, “Der Suprematismus des Schöpferischen” (originally published as “Suprematizm tvorchestva,” Al’manach Unovis, no. 1 [1920]), in Proun und Wolkenbügel, 19.

35. Nisbet, “An Introduction to El Lissitzky,” 29.

36. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (1984; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 49–69.

37. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 62.

38. The collage was used as an illustration to Ilya Ehrenburg’s book Six Stories with Easy Endings. Il’ia Erenburg, Shest’ povestei o legkikh kontsakh (Moscow: Gelikon, 1922).

39. Adolf Behne, “Biologie und Kubismus,” Der Sturm, no. 11–12 (September 1915): 71.

40. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 128. For more on Crary’s interpretation, see chapter 3, “Fitness.”

41. David Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction (London, 1856), 53. Quoted in Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 120–22.

42. Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1893). The book was translated into French (1893), English (1907), and Russian (1914) and was often cited by the rationalists. For more on the rationalists’ reading of Hildebrand, see chapter 1.

43. Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture [1893], trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907), 229–36, 251–60. For a discussion of Hildebrand’s planar concept of space in the context of stereoscopic photography, see Richard Difford, “In Defense of Pictorial Space: Stereoscopic Photography and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century,” in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, ed. Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 295–312.

44. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 125.

45. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 485. Quoted in Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 126.

46. Königsberg, then in East Prussia, is Kalingrad, Russia, today.

47. Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018), 174–75.

48. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 350.

49. Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’architecture (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899). As Robin Evans ironically remarked, by making parallel lines converge, perspectival representation in fact broke the laws of Euclidian geometry; while aspiring to get rid of Euclidian geometry, modernist artists introduced something that was even more like it. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 62.

50. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 350–51. For more on this diagram, see Bois, “From -∞ to +∞.”

51. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983); Lynn Gamwell, Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016).

52. Malevich’s letter to Mikhail Matyushin, June 1913, cited in Evgenii Kovtun, “Kazimir Malevich: His Creative Path,” in Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935: Works from the State Russian Museum, Leningrad, the State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1988), 154. See also Peter Michael Mowris, “Nerve Languages: The Critical Response to the Physiological Psychology of Wilhelm Wundt by Dada and Surrealism” (PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2010), 172–86.

53. El Lissitzky, “Proun: Nicht Weltvisionen, sondern–Weltrealität,” De Stijl 5, no. 6 (1922): 83.

54. Ladovsky’s interest in set theory arose from his work on standardization: the problem that he hoped to resolve was the combination of standardized architectural modules and details. Similarly, around the same time, Lissitzky was engaged in designing furniture that was “combinable” from standardized parts. For more on standardization, see chapter 4, “Process.”

55. See, for instance, the widespread Minnesota Spatial Relations Test, developed prior to 1930. D. G. Peterson et al., Minnesota Mechanical Ability Tests (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1930). As early as 1910, Russian “testologist” Grigory Rossolimo suggested testing “the ability of combination” with a puzzle-like test that asked the subject to combine two-dimensional shapes into a geometric figure. G. I. Rossolimo, Psikhologicheskie profili: Metod kolichestvennogo issledovaniia psikhicheskikh protsessov v normal’nom i patologicheskom sostoianii (St. Petersburg: M. A. Aleksandrov, 1910), 38.

56. Wilhelm Ostwald, Die Welt der Formen, vols. 1–4 (Leipzig: Unesma, 1922–25). See Thomas Hapke, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Combinatorics as a Link between In-formation and Form,” Library Trends 61, no. 2 (2012): 286–303.

57. N[ikolai] Ladovskii, introduction to G[eorgii] Krutikov, “Prilozhenie teorii soedinenii k issledovaniiu i izmereniiu sposobnosti prostranstvennogo kombinirovaniia,” Arkhitektura i VKhUTEIN, no. 1 (1929): 5.

58. Hermann Maertens, Der Optische-Maassstab, oder, Die Theorie und Praxis des ästhetischen Sehens in den bildenden Künsten: Auf Grund der Lehre der physiologischen Optik (Bonn: Max Cohen & Sohn, 1877). For a discussion of Maertens’s book, see Albert Erich Brinckmann, “Der Optische Maßstab für Monumentalbauten im Stadtbau,” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukhunst 2 (1914): 57; Ákos Moravánszky, “The Optical Construction of Urban Space: Hermann Maertens, Camillo Sitte and the Theories of ‘Aesthetic Perception,’” Journal of Architecture 17, no. 5 (2012): 655–66.

59. Lisitskii, “Glaz arkhitektora.” Here cited after: El Lissitzky, “Das Auge des Architekten,” in Proun und Wolkenbügel, 64.

60. Dziga Vertov, “The Council of Three” [1923], in Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien, ed. by Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 17. Similar ideas were simultaneously explored by Alexander Rodchenko in his photographic work.

61. El’ Lisitskii, “Arkhitektura zheleznoi i zhelezobetonnoi ramy,” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 1 (1926): 63.

62. “Here the 250-meter aerial masts stand in one spot,” Lissitzky had earlier written about the transmitting station in German Nauen. “The Egyptian Pyramid is obsolete” (Lissitzky, “Wheel—Propeller and What Follows” [1923], translated in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 349). The image resembled the so-called spherical perspective (invented by artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin shortly earlier), which employed a high horizon line recessing toward the edges of the painting and making horizontal surfaces convex.

63. Lissitzky, “Das Auge des Architekten,” 67. Although this building by architect Ernest R. Graham, photographed by Knud Lönberg-Holm, was reproduced in Mendelsohn’s book, Lissitzky used another image in the Izvestia ASNOVA photo collage.

64. Commercial sewing patterns proliferated in Europe and the United States from the 1860s on. Joy Spanabel Emery, A History of the Paper Pattern Industry: The Home Dressmaking Fashion Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 29–34.

65. Maria Gough, “Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky’s Dresden and Hannover Demonstrationsräume,” in Perloff and Reed, Situating El Lissitzky, 77–125.

66. El Lissitzky, “Proun: Not World Visions, BUT—World Reality” [1920], in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 343.

67. Lissitzky, “A. and Pangeometry,” 352.

68. László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision [1928], trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 57.

69. Sigfried Giedion, “Lebendige Museen,” Der Cicerone 21, no. 4 (1929): 105–6. Translated in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 379.

70. Maria Gough, “Lissitzky on Broadway,” in Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949, ed. Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Gough.pdf. ASNOVA’s project—the major practical preoccupation of the association—remained unrealized.

71. Mendelsohn, Amerika, 44.

72. For accounts of the project and its reception in English, see Selim Khan-Magomedov, The Flying City and Beyond, trans. Christina Lodder (Barcelona: Tenov Books, 2015), and Alla Vronskaya, “Two Utopias of Georgii Krutikov’s City of the Future,” in Writing Cities: Working Papers, vol. 2, Distance and Cities: Where Do We Stand?, ed. Gunter Gassner, Adam Kaasa, and Katherine Robinson (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2012), 46–56.

73. “Dela Asnovy,” Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): 6 (the article mentions that the work on the architectural design of Tsiolkovsky’s dirigible was conducted by Lissitzky and Krutikov in collaboration with engineer Vinogradov [first name unknown]); Selim Khan-Magomedov, Georgii Krutikov (Moscow: Russkii Avangard, 2008), 118–30.

74. The Archive of the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, Georgy Krutikov’s collection, KPof 5291/131.

75. The first table explored the situation in which the moving object and its trajectory visually merged, creating, as it were, a new body endowed with new physical qualities: examples included lightning, a flying airplane, a falling meteorite, and long-exposure photography. The second table described connections between static and vertical compositions (such as a skyscraper) on the one hand, and between dynamic and horizontal compositions (such as a profile of a city) on the other. In the third table, Krutikov presented the discovery he made in the laboratory: “when moving, two equal forms are perceived as having different sizes depending on their location on the axis of movement.”

76. Heinz Rasch and Bodo Rasch, Wie bauen? Materialien und Konstruktionen für industrielle Produktion (Stuttgart: Wedekind, 1928), 156–57. Lönberg-Holm’s membership in ASNOVA is mentioned in Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): 1. From 1929, Lönberg-Holm was also an American delegate to the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne, CIAM). At least two meetings between Lissitzky and Lönberg-Holm are documented in the latter’s archive (letter to Til Brugmann, 1923; I am indebted to Adrian Täckman for this information). Lönberg-Holm, Fuller, and Frederick Kiesler befriended each other in 1929 and met often, elaborating a “functionalist” concept of modernism that they juxtaposed to Philip Johnson’s “international style.” See Suzanne Strum, The Ideal of Total Environmental Control: Knud Lönberg-Holm, Buckminster Fuller, and the SSA (London: Routledge, 2018).

77. Georg Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life” [1903], in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 11. Simmel’s text was well known in Russia. It was discussed in detail, for example, by Alexander Toporkov in Tekhnicheskii byt i sovremennoe iskusstvo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928).

78. Erich Mendelsohn, Erich Mendelsohn’s “Amerika”: 82 Photographs [1926] (New York: Dover, 1993), 56.

79. Michael K. Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 192–94.

80. El Lissitzky, Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution [1930], trans. Eric Dluhosch (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 62.

81. El Lissitzky, “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 328.

82. Lissitzky, “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” 329.

83. In 1914, Brinckmann elaborated Hildebrand’s parenthetical idea that optical scale could be used for an analysis of buildings’ visual proportional relationships. In “Optical Scale for Monumental Structures in City Planning,” he introduced a new set of concepts, such as the visual effect of buildings’ scale, the Leitlinie (optical transition between scales), and an expression of scale through an articulation of surface (Brinckmann, “Der Optische Maßstab für Monumentalbauten im Städtebau”). Brinckmann’s article was cited by N. Dokuchaev in “Osnovy iskusstva arkhitektury: Kurs dlia khudozhestvennykh tekhnikumov,” in Sbornik materialov po khudozhestvennomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), 97.

84. N. Dokuchaev, “Arkhitektura i planirovka gorodov,” Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, no. 6 (1926): 14.

85. Enael [N. A. Ladovskii], “Neboskreby SSSR i Ameriki,” Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): 5–6.

86. El’ Lisitskii, “Seria neboskrebov dlia Moskvy: WB 1 (1923–1925),” Izvestia ASNOVA, no. 1 (1926): 2–3. Lissitzky discussed the structural aspects of the project with Swiss architect Emil Roth. See Christoph Bürkle and Werner Oechslin, El Lissitzky: Der Traum vom Wolkenbügel. El Lisitzky-Emil Roth-Mart Stam (Zurich: gta Ausstellungen, 1991), and Samuel Johnson, “El Lissitzky’s Other Wolkenbügel: Reconstructing an Abandoned Architectural Project,” Art Bulletin 99, no. 3 (September 2017): 147–69.

87. Lisitskii, “Seria neboskrebov dlia Moskvy,” 2. In this sense, the Wolkenbügels presaged Lissitzky’s later work on developing color schemes for Kuznetsky Most and Dzerzhinsky streets in Moscow, which (alongside several other artists, who were responsible for other streets) he conducted following Leiba Antokolsky’s recommendations to code the city by color whose intensity increased proportionately to the centrality of the area, inducing people to move in that direction.

88. El’ Lisitskii, “Amerikanizm v evropeiskoi arkhitekture,” Krasnaia Niva, no. 49 (1925): 1189.

89. Toporkov, Tekhnicheskii byt i sovremennoe iskusstvo, 80.

90. Toporkov, Tekhnicheskii byt i sovremennoe iskusstvo, 100.

91. Lisitskii, “Amerikanizm v evropeiskoi arkhitekture,” 1189; Lisitskii, “Arkhitektura zheleznoi i zhelezobetonnoi ramy,” 61–62.

92. Standardized and prefabricated parts were to be assembled on site without the use of scaffolding. Lisitskii, “Seria neboskrebov dlia Moskvy,” 3.

93. See Lissitzky, “Proun Room, Great Berlin Art Exhibition” [1923], in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 361.

94. El Lissitzky, “Exhibition Rooms,” in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, 362.

95. Gough, “Constructivism Disoriented,” 93.

96. In the words of Martino Stierli, these representations invited the viewer “to walk around the structure in his or her imagination and gain a more complete idea of the building than a single representation can provide.” Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis, 101.

97. Lissitzky, “Proun,” 343. On the affinity between the Prouns and the W2 Wolkenbügel, see Johnson, “El Lissitzky’s Other Wolkenbügel.”

98. Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, 6.

99. Moore, Ecological Literature, 19–20; H. P. Blavatzky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, vol. 2 (1888; Theosophical University Press Online Edition, https://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd-pdf/SecretDoctrineVol2_eBook.pdf), 684, 197–201.

100. Lissitzky, “Der Suprematismus des Schöpferischen,” 20.

1. The anecdote is reported by Margarete Vöhringer after Selim Khan-Magomedov’s words. Margarete Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frühen Sowjetunion (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), 35.

2. Richard Difford, “Infinite Horizons: Le Corbusier, the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau Dioramas and the Science of Visual Distance,” Journal of Architecture 14, no. 3 (2009): 295–323.

3. See Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). On Americanism in Soviet architecture, see Jean-Louis Cohen, Building a New New World: “Amerikanizm” in Russian Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020), and Danilo Udovički-Selb, Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes: Architecture and Stalin’s Revolution from Above, 1928–1938 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

4. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Salaried Masses: Duty and Destruction in Weimar Germany” [1930], in Class: The Anthology, ed. Stanley Aronowitz and Michael J. Roberts (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 223.

5. Michael Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 131.

6. Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia, Part I: Albert Kahn,” Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology 36, no. 2 (2010): 57–80; Christina E. Crawford. “From Tractors to Territory: Socialist Urbanization through Standardization,” in “Second World Urbanity,” special issue, Journal of Urban History 44, no. 1 (2017): 54–77; Cohen, Building a New New World, 144–307.

7. See Claire Zimmerman, “The Labor of Albert Kahn,” Aggregate, December 12, 2014, http://www.we-aggregate.org/piece/the-labor-of-albert-kahn.

8. On Fordism in Russia, see Cohen, Building a New New World, 133–44.

9. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius,” Architectural Review, January 1947, 3–6, quoted in Zimmerman, “The Labor of Albert Kahn.”

10. Nikolai Il’inskii, “Vziat’ vse luchshee is amerikanskogo proektirovaniia,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 11 (1931): 25.

11. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem,” 62–63.

12. Torgovo-promyshlennaia gazeta, June 12, 1929, quoted in I. A. Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov: Organizatsiia proektirovaniia (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2009), 141.

13. Mary McLeod, “‘Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 137.

14. For discussions of Gastev’s scientific organization of labor, see Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 95–131; Barbara Wurm, “Factory,” in Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test, ed. Matthew S. Witkovsky and Devin Fore (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017), 218–25, particularly the discussion of Gastev’s “visual interface” (zritel’naia ustanovka), which subjected the eye to the same mechanizing training as other body elements and their movements (222–23); and Cohen, Building a New New World, 101–8, 117–33.

15. See Julia Kursell, “Piano Mécanique and Piano Biologique: Nikolai Bernstein’s Neurophysiological Study of Piano Touch,” Configurations 14, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 245–73. I am thankful to Myles Jackson for this reference.

16. Andrey Smirnov, Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early-20th-Century Russia (London: Sound and Music and Koenig Books, 2013), 115–32.

17. For an analysis of stereophotogrammetry in the work of Marcel Duchamp, see Penelope Haralambidou, “Stereoscopy and the Architecture of Visual Space,” in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, ed. Andrew Higgott and Timothy Wray (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 313–30.

18. Aleksandr Bogdanov, “O tendentsiiakh proletarskoi kul’tury (Otvet A. Gastevu),” Proletarskaia Kul’tura 9–10 (1919): 46.

19. V[ladimir] Lenin, “‘Nauchnaia’ sistema vyzhimaniia pota” [1913], in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 23 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1973), 18; V[ladimir] Lenin, “Sistema Teilora—poraboshchenie cheloveka mashinoi” [1914], in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 24 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1973), 369.

20. Andrei Burov, Pis’ma. Dnevniki. Besedy s aspirantami. Suzhdeniia sovremennikov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), 35, cited in Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov, 141.

21. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Chto takoe obrazovanie” [1918], in O vospitanii i obrazovanii (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1986), 356.

22. In 1930, VKhUTEIN was again reorganized, as VASI (Vysshii Arkhitekturno-Stroietel’nyi Institut, Higher Institute of Architecture and Construction). Bruno Taut, “Spetsialisty,” Russko-germanskii vestnik nauki i tekhniki 3 (1931): 49–50, cited in Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov, 143. A similar adherence to holism and humanistic education (Bildung) was demonstrated by László Moholy-Nagy. See Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 183–84.

23. Cited in Andreas Killen, “Weimar Psychotechnics between Americanism and Fascism,” in “The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences,” special issue, Osiris 22, no. 1 (2007): 50.

24. See Annette Mülberger, “Mental Association: Testing Individual Differences before Binet,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 53, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 176–98; Benoît Godin, “From Eugenics to Scientometrics: Galton, Cattell, and Men of Science,” Social Studies of Science 37, no. 5 (2007): 691–728.

25. Translations included the works of Münsterberg and Fritz Giese, and such books as Georg Schlesinger Psychotechnik und Betriebswissenschaft (1922 and 1925 [1920]), and Franciszka Baumgarten, Psychotechnics (translation of her essays, 1922 and 1926). Among the original publications were S[olomon] G. Gellerstein, Psikhotekhnika (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1926); N[ikolai] D. Levitov, Psikhotekhnika i professional’naia prigodnost’: Problemy i metody (Moscow: Moszdravotd., 1924).

26. For more on psychotechnics in Russia, see Franciska Baumgarten, Arbeitswissenschaft und Psychotechnik in Russland (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1924); Paul Devinat, Scientific Management in Europe (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1927); N. S. Kurek, Istoria likvidatsii pedologii i psikhotekhniki v SSSR (St. Petersburg: Alteiia, 2004); Marcel Turbiaux, “Sous le drapeau rouge: La conférence internationale de psychotechnique de Moscou de 1931,” Bulletin de psychologie 5, no. 527 (2013): 417–35; 6, no. 528 (2013): 513–26.

27. In 1901, Alexander Nechaev founded the Laboratory for Experimental Pedagogical Psychology, where he designed a set of simplified experimental devices and testing cards for the use of school teachers. As early as the 1910s, the founder of “characterology” (character studies) Alexander Lazursky and neuro- and development pathologist Grigory Rossolimo had developed a method of graphic representation of the psychological profile of a child. See Valerii Kadnevskii, Istoriia testov (Moscow: Narodnoe obrazovanie, 2004), and Andy Byford, “The Mental Test as a Boundary Object in Early-20th-Century Russian Child Science,” History of the Human Sciences 27, no. 4 (2014): 22–58.

28. See, for instance, I. V. Aevergetov, Vvedenie v eksperimental’nuiu pedagogiku (Leningrad: 1-aia Tip. Transpechati NKPS im. Vorovskogo, 1925).

29. Quoted in Gellerstein, Psikhotekhnika, 27–28.

30. Tijana Vujošević, Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 37–38.

31. Quoted in Sonia Moore, “The Method of Physical Actions,” Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 4 (Summer 1965): 92. See also O. V. Aronson, “Neokonchennaia polemika: Biomekhanika Meierkhol’da ili psikhotekhnika Stanislavskogo?,” Russkaia antropologicheskaia shkola. Trudy 4, no. 1 (2007): 410–23.

32. Konstantin Stanislavskii, “Rabota aktera nad soboi,” in Sobranie Sochinenii v 8mi tt. (Moscow: Iskusstov, 1954–61), vol. 3, 316.

33. For more on the collectivist roots of this program, see chapter 1 of this book.

34. Nikolai Ladovskii, “Psikhotekhnicheskaia laboratoriia arkhitektury”; selection translated from Russian by Anatole Senkevitch Jr., “Trends in Soviet Architectural Thought, 1917–1932: The Growth and Decline of the Constructivist and Rationalist Movements” (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1974), 335–36. Hugo Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik (Leipzig: Barth, 1914), 610.

35. Georgii Krutikov, “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoriia pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete Moskovskogo Vysshego Khud.-Tekhnich. Instituta,” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 5 (1928): 374.

36. Aleksandr Karra, “Za sotsialisticheskuiu ratsionalizatsiiu proektnykh kontor,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 4 (1930): 2–5, quoted in Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov, 143–44. For the ensuing discussion (responses by A. V. Fridliand and N. A. Krapukhin), see Fridliand, “Kak ratsionalizirovat’ proektirovanie?,” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 7 (1930): 17–20; Krapukhin, “Struktura proektnoi kontory,” Stroitel’noe proektirovanie 1 (1931): 13–17.

37. The Dalton Plan was introduced to Soviet Russia in 1923 and was actively used until its condemnation by the decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in August 1932.

38. Quoted in Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov, 142. See also I. S. Cheredina and P. P. Zueva, “Eshche odna stranitsa v istorii russkoi arkhitektury sovetskogo perioda,” in Arkhitektura mira: Materialy konferentsii “Zapad-Vostok: Lichnost’ v istorii arkhitektury,” vol. 4 (Moscow: Arkhitektura, 1995), 151–56. Meyer also testified that “his” projects were in fact results of the collective work of a group of people from different backgrounds and with different areas of expertise (“Kak ia rabotaiu,” Arkhitektura SSSR 6 [1933]: 34–35).

39. Lewis Siegelbaum, “Production Collectives and Communes and the ‘Imperatives’ of Soviet Industrialization, 1929–1931,” Slavic Review 45, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 65–84.

40. Karra, “Za sotsialisticheskuiu ratsionalizatsiiu proektnykh kontor,” 4.

41. For a similar scheme of American factory organization, see Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand, 155.

42. Quoted in Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh gorov, 73.

43. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Iskusstvo slova v shkole” [1928], in O vospitanii i obrazovanii, 467.

44. Karra, “Za sotsialisticheskuiu ratsionalizatsiiu proektnykh kontor,” 4.

45. G. T. Krutikov, “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoriia pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete VKhUTEIN,” Arkhitektura i VKhUTEIN, no. 1 (1929): 2–4.

46. Krutikov, “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoriia pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete Moskovskogo Vysshego Khud.-Tekhnich. Instituta,” 375.

47. Hugo Münsterberg, Vocation and Learning: A Popular Reading Course. Part IV. Vocation (St. Louis, Mo.: Lewis Publishing Company, 1916), 241–44.

48. Krutikov, “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoriia pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete VKhUTEIN”: 2.

49. G. I. Rossolimo, Psikhologicheskie profili: Metod kolichestvennogo issledovaniia psikhicheskikh protsessov v normal’nom i patologicheskom sostoianii (St. Petersburg: M. A. Aleksandrov, 1910). The work of Rossolimo and his colleague Fedor Rybakov pioneered psychological testing and was highly esteemed by Giese.

50. Gellerstein, Psikhotekhnika, 12.

51. See Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1867); Paul Kramer, “Anmerkungen zur Theorie der räumlichen Tiefenwahrnehmung,” Jahresbericht des Königlich Preuß. Gymnasiums zu Schleusingen, 1872: 3–38; Carl Stumpf, Über den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellungen (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1873).

52. Editor, “What Does Anschauung Mean?,” The Monist 2, no. 4 (July 1892): 530. Albert E. Brinckmann, Plastik und Raum als Grundformen künstlerischer Gestaltung (Munich: R. Piper, 1922).

53. See Vladimir Krinskii, “Otchet o teoreticheskoi rabote gruppy arkhitektorov IKhUK,” in Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm (ratsio-arkhitektura) “Formalizm” (Moscow: Arkhitektura-S, 2007), 126–27, and N. Dokuchaev, “Osnovy iskusstva arkhitektury: Kurs dlia khudozhestvennykh tekhnikumov,” in Sbornik materialov po khudozhestvennomu obrazovaniiu (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), 97.

54. Dokuchaev, “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska k kursu ‘iskusstvo arkhitektury’ dlia khudozhestvennykh tekhnikumov,” in Sbornik materialov po khudozhestvennomu obrazovaniiu, 79.

55. Among the publications that attracted his interest and were, he believed, worth studying by architects were Edgar Pierce, “Aesthetics of Simple Forms (I): Symmetry,” Psychological Review 1 (1894): 483–96; Ethel D. Puffer, “Studies in Symmetry,” Harvard Psychological Studies 1 (1903): 467–541; Rosewell Parker Angier, “The Aesthetics of Unequal Division,” Harvard Psychological Studies 1 (1903): 541–64; Eleanor Harris Rowland, “The Aesthetics of Repeated Space Forms,” Harvard Psychological Studies 2 (1906): 193–269.

56. Wilhelm Wundt, Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Tierseele (Leipzig: Voß, 1863), 164.

57. Hugo Münsterberg, Business Psychology (Chicago: La Salle Extension University, 1915), 13–14.

58. Selim O. Khan-Magomedov, Georgii Krutikov (Moscow: Russkii Avangard, 2008), 39–40.

59. See, for instance, E. Zimmermann, Psychologische und Physiologische Apparate: Liste 50 (Leipzig, 1928).

60. Georgy Krutikov described the set of devices for assessing visual estimation in “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoriia pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete VKhUTEIN,” 2–4, and publicized them in “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoria pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete Moskovskogo Vysshego Khud.-Tekhnich. Instituta,” 372–75.

61. A. I. Tupikova-Fraishtadt, “Apparat dlia ispytaniia lineinogo staticheskogo glazomera,” in Voprosy somaticheskogo i psikhotekhnicheskogo profpodbora voditelei mestnogo transporta (Leningrad: Transportnoe upravlenie Lensoveta, 1936), 195–96.

62. These tests were common in measuring intelligence and had a wider application; for example, the “Alpha Test” was developed by American psychologist Robert Yerkes to select recruits for the United States Army during the First World War.

63. See R. S. Turner, In the Eye’s Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

64. For more on this concept of Ladovsky, see chapter 1.

65. P. A. Rudik, Standarty psikhotekhnicheskikh ispytanii (Leningrad: Prakticheskaia meditsina, 1926), 8.

66. Krutikov, “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoriia pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete Moskovskogo Vysshego Khud.-Tekhnich. Instituta,” 374–75.

67. Rudik, Standarty psikhotekhnicheskikh ispytanii, 7–8.

68. I am deeply indebted to the participants of the seminar “Curating 1917: The Architecture of the Russian Revolution” at the ETH Zurich (in particular, to Pierluigi D’Acunto and Juan Jose Castellon Gonzalez) and to my co-teacher Torsten Lange for helping me analyze the mechanism of its work.

69. Krutikov, “Arkhitekturnaia nauchno-issledovatel’skaia laboratoriia pri Arkhitekturnom fakul’tete Moskovskogo Vysshego Khud.-Tekhnich. Instituta,” 374–75.

70. Ewald Hering, “Der Raumsinn und Bewegungen des Auges,” in Handbuch der Physiologie, ed. Ludimar Hermann (Leipzig: Vogel, 1879–80), 3.1:343–601 (translated into Russian in 1888). In Russian, see G. Chelpanov, Problema vospriiatiia prostranstva v sviazi s ucheniem ob aprionosti i vrozhdennosti (Kyiv: I. N. Kushner, 1896), Part 1 “Predstavlenie prostranstva s tochki zreniia psikhologii,” 250–327. A similar but enclosed device was used by Edward Titchener (“Photograph Album on Psychological Instruments,” 1895, Collection Rand B. Evans; published online at http://vlp.uni-regensburg.de/library/data/lit13651/index_html?pn=31&ws=1.5).

71. Fritz Giese, Psychotechnische Eignungsprüfungen an Erwachsenen (Langensalza: Wendt & Klauwell, 1921), 15–16.

72. Giese, Psychotechnische Eignungsprüfungen an Erwachsenen, 16.

73. I am deeply indebted to Martin Frimmer for helping me understand the work of the space-meter’s optical part.

74. As early as 1856, British scientist Robert Hunt reported that “the stereoscope is now seen in every drawing room; philosophers talk learnedly upon it, ladies are delighted with its magic representations, and children play with it.” “The Stereoscope,” Art Journal 18 (March 1856): 118.

75. This stereoscope is currently on display at Gorki house-museum (Moscow region, Russia).

76. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 129–32.

77. Like other techniques of viewing, stereographs were used in both science and entertainment. The fact that any attempts to retouch the image inevitably led to the visual effect of “floating” of the modified part gave stereography an air of truthfulness, contributing to its documentary credibility. See Robert J. Silverman, “The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19th Century,” in “Biomedical and Behavioral Technology,” special issue, Technology and Culture 34, no. 4 (1993): 729–56.

78. Ernst Mach, “On the Stereoscopic Application of Roentgen’s Rays,” The Monist 6, no. 3 (April 1896): 321–23.

79. S. Kravkov, Glaz i ego rabota (Moscow: Meditsina, 1932). Kravkov taught at VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN between 1924 and 1928.

80. See G. I. Chelpanov, “Obzor noveishei literatury po voprosu o vospriiatii prostranstva,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 37 (1897): 276–87.

81. S. Kravkov, Glaz i ego rabota, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Meditsina, 1945), 292; N. D. Levitov, “Problemy, metody i osnovnye vyvody issledovaniia po difpodboru v FZU po kholodnoi obrabotke metalla,” in Differentsial’nyi podbor v shkoly FZU metallopromyshlennosti, ed. N. D. Levitov and V. N. Skorsyrev (Moscow: Tsentr. nauch.-issl. in-t okhrany zdorov’ia detei i podrostkov, 1935), 22.

82. Eduard von Hartmann, “Die Stellung der Baukunst in der modernen Ästhetik,” Westermanns Illustrierte Deutsche Monatshefte 59 (1886): 744.

83. Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture [1893], trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907), 241.

84. Seeing, for example, could be “linear” or “painterly.” Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: H. Bruckmann, 1921), 11–12. See Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing, 63–96.

85. Khan-Magomedov, Ratsionalizm, 371. No images or descriptions of this device have been preserved.

86. Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing, 89.

87. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 59, quoted in Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 316.

88. Karra, “Za sotsialisticheskuiu ratsionalizatsiiu proektnykh kontor,” 2.

1. A. Toporkov, Tekhicheskii byt i sovremennoe iskusstvo (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1928), 132–33.

2. Johannes Bochenek, Die männliche und weibliche Normal-Gestalt nach einem neuen System (Berlin: A. Haak, 1875).

3. See Karen Rader, Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900–1955 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). I am thankful to Marion Thomas for this reference.

4. Nader Vossoughian, “Standardization Reconsidered: Normierung in and after Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre (1936),” Grey Room, no. 54 (Winter 2014): 35. See also John Harwood, “The Interface: Ergonomics and the Aesthetics of Survival,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 70–92.

5. L. Il’in, A. Klein, and A. Rozenberg, “Poiasnitel’naia zapiska k proektu gorodskoi bol’nitsy imeni Petra Velikago pod devizom ‘Zelenyi krug,” Zodchii, no. 47 (1906): 473–78, 483–86; Il’in, Klein, and Rozenberg, Proekt gorodskoi bol’nitsy imeni Petra Velikago v S.-Peterburge na 1000 krovatei (St. Petersburg: Zhurn. “Stroitel’,” 1908); and Il’in, Klein, and Rozenberg, Sovremennoe bol’nichnoe stroitel’stvo v sviazi s postroikoi gorodskoi bol’nitsy imeni Petra Velikogo (St. Petersburg: Gosudastvennaia Tipografia, 1911).

6. J. Müller, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen (1837), quoted in Tobias Cheung, “From the Organism of a Body to the Body of an Organism: Occurrence and Meaning of the Word ‘Organism’ from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 3 (September 2006): 337.

7. Rudolf Virchow, Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology, trans. from 2d ed. of the original by Frank Chance (London: John Churchill, 1860), 13–14. I am thankful to Myles Jackson and the participants of the History of Sciences seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study for this reference.

8. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine Gründzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformierte Decendenz-Theorie (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1866), 1:241.

9. Aleksandr Bogdanov, Tektologiia: Vseobshchaia organizatsionnaia nauka, vol. 1 [1913] (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1989), 92, 113–14.

10. The influence of Bogdanov’s thought upon Russian postrevolutionary culture has been acknowledged by multiple scholars. See, for example, Isabel Wünsche, “Organic Visions and Biological Models in Russian Avant-Garde Art,” in Biocentrism and Modernism, ed. Oliver Botar and Isabel Wünsche (London: Ashgate, 2011), 127–52; Barbara Wurm, “Factory,” in Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test, ed. Matthew Witkovsky and Devin Fore (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017), 218–25; and Devin Fore, “The Operative Word in Soviet Factography,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 95–131.

11. Bogdanov, Tektologiia, 1:141. Bogdanov’s points of reference included Serbian mathematician and inventor Mihailo Petrović and German sociologist Johann Plenge in addition to the work of such theorists of technology as Ludwig Noiré. For more on Bogdanov’s theory and its roots, see the Introduction to this book.

12. Bogdanov, Tektologiia, 1:48.

13. Biographical information about Alexander Rozenberg (1877–1935) is scarce, as his work has been missing from accounts of modernist architecture. Together with Klein and Ilyin, he won the competition for the Hospital of Peter the Great in 1906. In 1908, the three conducted a trip to Germany to study modern hospital construction. In 1922, Rozenberg developed the Regional Construction Plan for the Petrograd region. In the 1920s, he was an editor of Zodchii (The Architect), the journal of the Leningrad Society of Architects, and a professor at the Technical-Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad. In 1926, he again visited Germany to learn about the practice of organization of the architectural profession, industry, and architectural competitions. In the late 1920s, he worked for the Union of Architects. The only critical text that tackles Rozenberg’s legacy is a short “Zabytaia tektologiia arkhitektury: Malen’kii traktat A. V. Rozenberga ‘Filosofiia arkhitektury’ 1923 goda i bol’shoe sovremennoe arkhitekturovedenie” by Andrei Puchkov published in Suchasni problemy doslidzhennia, restavratsii ta zberezhennia kul’turnoi spadshchini / IPSM AMU (Kyiv: Khimdzhest, 2010), 7:279–317.

14. Aleksandr Rozenberg, Filosofiia arkhitektury (Petrograd: Nachatki znanii, 1923), 5.

15. Aleksandr Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia arkhitekturnykh sooruzhenii (Moscow: Plankhozgiz, 1930), 15, 27–28.

16. M. G. [Moisei Ginzburg], “‘Filosofiia arkhitektury,’ arkhitektor Rozenberg,” Arkhitektura: Ezhemesiachnik MAO, no. 3–4 (1923): 66.

17. Moisei Ginzburg, “Novye metody arkhitekturnogo myshleniia,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1926): 3.

18. The first standardized architecture, American “balloon-frame” construction, was wooden, and a factory for standardized wooden houses, perhaps the earliest standardization experiment in Russia, functioned in Moscow in the early 1920s. It succeeded, standardization enthusiasts proudly reported, in reducing the cost of labor by 78 percent. See V. Lazarev, Standardizatsiia: Populiarnyi ocherk (Moscow: NKRKI SSSR, 1925), 60. The book explains that overall, standardization reduced the cost of labor by 30 percent, largely because standardized elements could be assembled by less expensive unskilled labor.

19. El’ Lisitskii, “Amerikanizm v evropeiskoi arkhitekture,” Krasnaia Niva, no. 49 (1925): 1188.

20. O. A. Ermanskii, Teoriia i praktika ratsionalizatsii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 270.

21. Ermanskii, Teoriia i praktika ratsionalizatsii, 269–71. Standardization in the narrow sense was pioneered by such organizations as the German Die Brücke. Different aspects of standardization in Germany have been covered in publications by Nader Vossoughian, Markus Krajewski, and Anna-Maria Meister.

22. For a discussion of the technical backwardness of the Soviet state in the context of standardization, see V. I. Vel’man, ed., Tipovye proekty i konstruktsii zhilishchnogo stroitel’stva rekomenduemye na 1930 god (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe tekhnicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1929), 77–136.

23. On the notions of type and typification in the context of the postwar Soviet Bloc, see Juliana Maxim, The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1949–1964 (London: Routledge, 2019), 67–115.

24. The Work Regulation had been repeatedly published and updated since 1811 (most important, in 1843). In 1869 it was rewritten by Nicholas de Rochefort, and subsequent editions relied on this version. In 1894, the government recognized the necessity of revising the document again. Unfinished by the time of the revolution, in its aftermath the work was continued by Rozenberg and his team.

25. The group working on revising the Work Regulation included V. Bashinsky, S. Bashinsky, S. Beknev, I. Braginsky, L. Budnevich, N. Bykovsky, N. Galler, V. Gulyaev, N. Dikov, I. Dubinkin, A. Dykhovichny, A. Zubritsky, B. Ivinsky, S. Kazakov, A. Kirshon, A. Kiselev, P. Porfiriev, P. Sidorenko, N. Sobolev, P. Sokolov, A. Sushkov, among others. A[leksandr] V. Rozenberg, Teoriia normirovaniia stroitel’nykh protsessov (Moscow: Aktsionernoe izdatel’skoe obshchestvo, 1928), 5. The introduction to New Work Regulation (1931) mentions the following list of authors: S. I. Aslanov, V. N. Afonsky, A. M. Bogoslovsky, N. N. Bukharev, N. A. Butsenin, P. I. Vasilyev, P. I. Vinogradov, M. G. Ginodman, A. M. Gonyaev, V. P. Gorozhansky, N. N. Grigoryev, A. A. Egorova, N. N. Ivanovsky, I. N. Krotov, Kruglikov [sic], B. P. Lavrovsky, P. A. Mamatov, I. L. Mittelman, N. V. Mordovin, A. V. Pozdnyakov, A. N. Ponomareva, A. V. Rozenberg, M. S. Rudominer, K. A. Rusakov, B. I. Tatarinov, Tumolsky [sic], Iu. I. Fidrus, V. S. Florinsky, L. L. Shapiro, and L. S. Yanovich.

26. Aleksandr Rozenberg, “K peresmotru urochnogo polozhenia,” Zodchii, no. 1 (1924): 35.

27. Viktor Sokol’skii, Printsipy ekonomichnosti i ikh vyrazhenie v sovremennom stroitel’stve (St. Petersburg: Tip. Shtaba otdel’nogo korpusa pogran. strazhi, 1910). Among Rozenberg’s other sources was the work of engineer Vladimir Glazyrin on railroad construction (Osnovy proektirovaniia zheleznodorozhnykh grazhdanskikh sooruzhenii [St. Petersburg: Institut inzhenerov putei soobshcheniia imperatora Aleksandra I, 1918]). Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia, 4.

28. Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia, 5.

29. Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten (Berlin: Carl Dunckers, 1871), and Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life [1874], trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). In Russian, a discussion of Hartmann’s theory as a philosophy of world process was offered in A. A. Kozlov, Sushchnost’ mirovogo protsessa, ili ‘Filosofia bessoznatel’nogo’ E. von Gartmana, vols. 1–2 (Moscow: Tip. Gracheva, 1873–75).

30. In an example suggested by Rozenberg, at a school, the classroom with all the equipment represented the environment; the students, the teacher, and all their belongings comprised the mass; and all their activity in its logical order was the sequence. See Rozenberg, Filosofiia arkhitektury, 8.

31. Vel’man, Tipovye proekty i konstruktsii, 26–28; “Issledovanie glubiny korpusa,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1929): 29.

32. Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia, 195–96.

33. Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia, 15, 191.

34. Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia, 15.

35. Rozenberg, “K peresmotru urochnogo polozheniia,” 35.

36. Rozenberg, Teoriia normirovaniia stroitel’nykh protsessov, 20–70.

37. Rozenberg, Teoriia normirovaniia stroitel’nykh protsessov, 40–41.

38. Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia, 192.

39. Hannes Meyer, “Building” [1928], in Hannes Meyer, Bauten, Projekte und Schriften / Buildings, Projects and Writings, ed. Claude Schnaidt, trans. D. Q. Stephenson (Teufen: Niggli, 1965), 95–107.

40. On Strumilin’s time budgets, see also Tijana Vujošević, Modernism and the Making of the Soviet Man (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 65–68. See also John Bernal, “Architecture and Science” [1946], in The Freedom of Necessity (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949), 206–7.

41. Moisei Ginzburg, “Tsvet v arkhitekture,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929): 74; M. Ia. Ginzburg, “Tselevaia ustanovka v sovremennoi arkhitekture,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1927): 5.

42. Ginzburg, “Novye metody arkhitekturnogo myshlenia,” 4.

43. Christopher Green, “Darwinian Theory, Functionalism, and the First American Psychological Revolution,” American Psychologist 64, no. 2 (2009): 75–83.

44. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Psychological Review 3 (1896): 364.

45. See John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (New York: New Republic, 1929).

46. El Lissitzky, “Idole und Idolverehrer,” in Proun und Wolkenbügel: Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 46–47 (originally published in Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 11–12 [1928]).

47. Toporkov, Tekhnicheskii byt i sovremennoe iskusstvo, 147.

48. Moisei Ginzburg, “Funktsional’nyi metod i forma,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 4 (1926): 90.

49. Ginzburg, “Novye metody arkhitekturnogo myshleniia,” 3.

50. On Ginzburg’s interest in Taylorism and Fordism, see Jean-Louis Cohen, Building a New New World: “Americanizm” in Russian Architecture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020), 236–45.

51. Christoph Lueder, “Evaluator, Choreographer, Ideologue, Catalyst: The Disparate Reception Histories of Alexander Klein’s Graphical Method,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 1 (March 2017): 82–106.

52. Alexander Klein, “Grundrißbildung und Raumgestaltung von Kleinwohnungen und neue Auswertungsmethoden,” in Technische Tagung in Berlin 1929 (Berlin: RFG, 1929), 4. Quoted in Lueder, “Evaluator, Choreographer, Ideologue, Catalyst,” 94–95.

53. Ginzburg, “Tselevaia ustanovka,” 10.

54. Ginzburg, “Tselevaia ustanovka,” 4–10; Ginzburg, “Novye metody arkhitekturnogo myshlenia,” 1.

55. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s original phrase (from Anti-Goeze, 1778) was “The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth.” A. Gastev, Kak nado izobretat’ (Moscow: Izd-vo TsIT, 1922).

56. Moisei Ginzburg, Style and Epoch [1924], trans. Anatole Senkevitch (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 91.

57. Ludwig Lange, “Neue Experimente über den Vorgang der einfachen Reaction auf Sinneseindrücke: Erster Artikel,” Philosophische Studien, no. 4 (1888): 479–510; Karl Marbe, “Über Unfallversicherung und Psychotechnik,” Praktische Psychologie 4 (1923): 257–64; Karl Marbe, “Theorie der motorischen Einstellung und Persönlichkeit,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie 129 (1933): 305–22. Later on, the idea was applied to social psychology by American scholars Florian Znaniecki and William Thomas, who defined attitude as “a process of individual consciousness which determines real or possible activity of the individual in the social world.” Florian Znaniecki and William I. Thomas, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Boston: Richard Badger, 1918–20), 22.

58. Hugo Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychotechnik (Leipzig: Barth, 1914), 152; Aron Zalkind, Zhizn’ organizma i vnushenie (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izd-vo, 1927).

59. P. K. Engelmeier, Teoriia tvorchestva (St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie, 1910); P. K. von Engelmeyer, Der Dreiakt als Lehre von der Technik und der Erfindung (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1910).

60. Uznadze’s first experimental study of ustanovka, published in 1931, slightly postdated the use of this term by Ginzburg. A. A. Leont’ev, Deiatel’nyi um (Deiatel’nost’, znak, lichnost’) (Moscow: Smysl, 2001), 127.

61. Ginzburg, “Tselevaia ustanovka,” 4.

62. Ginzburg, “Tselevaia ustanovka,” 10.

63. Rozenberg, Filosofia arkhitektury, 25–26.

64. Stroykom (Stroikom) was created in January of 1928 for “general regulation and rationalization of construction on the territory of RSFSR.” It was headed by economist Vladimir Velman. I. A. Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov: Organizatsiia proektirovaniia (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2009), 293. Translating the section’s title to German, Ginzburg used the term Typenbildung, “the development of types.” Moisei Ginzburg, “Problemy tipizatsii zhil’ia v SSSR,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 1 (1929): 4.

65. Vladimirov had studied architecture at the Institute of Civil Engineers in St. Petersburg, where Rozenberg was a professor. In 1930, Ginzburg’s group was expanded and reorganized as the Section of Socialist Settlement under the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) of the Russian Federative Republic. It was not the only group engaged in developing techniques of standardized construction in the Soviet Union: in March 1931, Soiuzstandartzhilstroi (from [All-]Union Standard Residential Construction) was founded to develop both standardized dwellings and new towns throughout the country. This was a much bigger organization than the Section of Typification, employing over six hundred specialists (among them, foreign experts such as Ernst May) in 1933. Kazus’, Sovetskaia arkhitektura 1920-kh godov, 157–59.

66. Five other buildings using the same typified plans were built in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, and Saratov.

67. For more on Scheper’s color schemes for the Narkomfin building, see chapter 5, “Activity.”

68. The CIAM conference on Existenzminimum was held in Frankfurt in 1929 at the initiative of Ernst May, who would move to the USSR in 1930, remaining in the country until 1933.

69. See the discussion of Stroykom’s project in Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 2 (1929), especially the responses of Serk, Voeykov, Kopelyansky, and Venderov.

70. Viktor Sokol’skii, Printsipy ekonomichnosti v stroitel’nom dele (St. Petersburg: Tip. Usmanova, 1912), 180.

71. Sokol’skii, Printsipy ekonomichnosti v stroitel’nom dele, 115–16.

72. Aleksei Gastev, Kak nado rabotat’: Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (1921; repr., Moscow: Ekonomika, 1972), 197. See also A[leksei] Gastev, Normirovanie i organizatsiia truda (Obshchee vvedenie v problemu) (Moscow: VTsSPS, 1929).

73. Rozenberg, “K peresmotru urochnogo polozhenia,” 36.

74. Rozenberg, Obshchaia teoriia proektirovaniia, 192.

75. For a similar approach by Austrian modernist Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (to work in the USSR between 1930 and 1937), see Sophie Hochhäusl, “From Vienna to Frankfurt Inside Core-House Type 7: A History of Scarcity through the Modern Kitchen,” Architectural Histories, no. 1 (2013), Art. 24: 1–19.

76. Ginzburg, “Problemy tipizatsii zhil’ia v SSSR,” 5.

77. Moisei Ginzburg, Zhilishche: Opyt piatiletnei raboty nad problemoi zhilishcha (Moscow: Gosstroiizdat, 1934), 82–96. The expression “social condenser” was introduced by Ginzburg to describe the mission of socialist housing. Redaktsiia, “Desiatiletiiu Oktiabria,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura, no. 4–5 (1927): 111, and Ginzburg, “Tselevaia ustanovka,” 7. See also Michał Murawski, “Introduction: Crystallising the Social Condenser,” Journal of Architecture 22, no. 3 (2017): 372–86. See also Ginzburg, “Problemy tipizatsii zhil’ia v SSSR,” 5; Ginzburg, Zhilishche, 68.

78. A. Chaldymov, “K voprosy sozdaniia zhilishcha rekonstuktivnogo perioda,” in Doma-Kommuny, ed. by E. Vernik et al. (Leningrad: Kubuch, 1931), 5.

79. Lissitzky was instrumental in opening the Laboratory of Furniture within the Institute of Timber in 1929, although it is not clear whether he became affiliated with it. The laboratory is mentioned in D[avid] Arkin, “Stroitel’stvo i ‘mebel’naia problema,’” Stroitel’stvo Moskvy, no. 10 (1929): 7. For a discussion of Lissitzky’s organicist theory of urbanism, see chapter 2, “Orientation.”

80. El Lissitzky, “Wohnkultur,” in Proun und Wolkenbügel, 56 (originally published in Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 12 [1926]).

81. Lissitzky, “Wohnkultur,” 56–57.

82. Lisitskii, “Amerikanizm v evropeiskoi arkhitekture,” 1189.

83. Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question)” [1925], trans. Christina Kiaer, October 81 (Summer 1997): 126–27.

84. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, “Life and Letters,” in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 81. Lissitzky described the house in detail in his article “Kul’tura zhil’ia,” Stroitel’naia promyshlennost’, no. 12 (1926): 877–81.

85. These ideas inspired Toporkov (who, having graduated from VKhUTEMAS in 1921, had since then been teaching decorative art) to design transformable furniture, such as a collapsible chair and a cabinet whose door, when unfolded, became a desk.

86. Concurrently, and likely in collaboration with Lissitzky, Georgy Krutikov was conducting research on architectural combinatorics. For more on this, see chapter 2, “Orientation.”

87. Toporkov, Tekhnicheskii byt i sovremennoe iskusstvo, 44; Vel’man, Tipovye proekty i konstruktsii, 32. See also Vujošević, Modernism and the Making of the Soviet Man, 72–81.

88. El Lissitzky, “Die künstelerischen Voraussetzungen zur Standardisierung individueller Möbel für die Bevölkerung: Vortrag für die Sektion Standardisierung NTU WSNCh,” in Proun und Wolkenbügel, 101, 107. The Russian-language original is in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, fond 2361 (El Lissitzky), op. 1, ed. khr. 30.

89. El Lissitzky, “Protokoll des Gesprächs Meyerholds mit dem Architekten Lissitzky,” in Lissitzky, Proun und Wolkenbügel, 201.

90. Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” 121.

91. [El’ Lisitskii], “Oborudovanie zhil’ia mebel’iu,” in Vel’man, Tipovye proekty i konstruktsii, 31–35.

92. El Lissitzky, “Aus einem Fragebogen über Möbel,” in Proun und Wolkenbügel, 197.

93. Kenneth Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of The Human Condition” [1979], in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. by Michael Hays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 370.

94. Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects,” 370.

95. Interview by designboom. Available online at https://www.designboom.com/architecture/chicago-architecture-biennial-pezo-von-ellrichshausen-watercolors-finite-format-09-15-2017/.

96. Pier Vittorio Aurelli, “Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt,” Log 23 (Fall 2011): 108.