Fitness

Americanism and Its Discontents

During the second half of the 1920s, “avant-garde” artistic and architectural practices in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were reformulated as scientifically organized disciplines endowed with an economic function. In 1925, Walter Gropius gave the Bauhaus its new motto, “Art into Industry,” while in the Soviet Union, the constructivists redefined their program as productivism. In 1926, the rebranding of VKhUTEMAS as VKhUTEIN (changing “studios” to “institute”) followed the same logic. Eventually, in 1928, the economic and political terms of this trend toward productivism were defined by the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan, which subordinated the entire life of the country to the goal of economic modernization.

In the language of the time, the pursuit of efficiency, industry, and organization was known as “Americanism.” In the late 1920s, Americanism fascinated and excited, even if sometimes repelled, Europeans.3 The German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer could scarcely subdue his enthusiasm when describing a visit to a modern American factory, where work was “rationalized down to the last detail”:

[The commercial director] points to diagrams whose colorful networks of lines illustrate the whole operation. The plans hang in frames on the walls of his room. On the other wall, there are two peculiar cases that look a bit like children’s abacuses. Within them brightly colored balls, arranged on vertical cords, rise in close formation to varying heights. One glance at them and the director at once knows all about the firm’s current situation. Every couple of days the little balls are repositioned by a statistics clerk.4

Calling this method of regulation “brainwork” (after Frederick Winslow Taylor), Michael Osman aptly compared the image of the factory as a system that constantly fluctuates in response to market demands to the ecologist’s vision of nature as a dynamic system.5 The mechanisms of its regulation became a matter of debate, in the Soviet Union no less than elsewhere.

In architecture, American rationalization was exemplified by the work of Albert Kahn’s Detroit office, renowned for its numerous large-scale industrial projects, most notably those for the Henry Ford automobile plants. Kahn’s inexpensive, robust, standardized, flexible open-plan structures could be designed and built, all by the same office, within a record time of several months. This is why, in February 1930, the Soviet government signed a contract with Kahn, and over the next two years his team would design over five hundred factories in different parts of the country, effectively making Kahn the architect of the First Five-Year Plan. Entire factories, such as the tractor plants in Stalingrad, Kharkiv, and Chelyabinsk, were prefabricated in New York, delivered to the Soviet Union by water and land, and assembled on site by over five hundred American engineers and builders, assisted by the Russian workers they oversaw and trained.6

Although at first sight, these commissions seem to be driven by considerations of economy alone, Kahn’s mission was more ambitious. The size and complex organization of Kahn’s office, where architectural work was structured according to an industrial model, mirrored the scale and organization of labor in the buildings it produced. In other words, while designing Ford’s factories, Kahn introduced to architecture the principles of Fordism—a system of optimizing mass production by rationalizing the division of labor, which at Ford’s factories was famously achieved by the assembly line.7 It was this industrialized design method that the Soviet government hoped to import, in addition to industrial infrastructure.8 Anticipating Hannes Meyer’s functionalist maxim, “Building is just an organization,” Kahn’s system undermined both academic and avant-garde visions of architecture as art driven by inspiration and genius. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the American architectural historian and the champion of modernism, argued that the “strength of a firm such as Kahn . . . depends not on the architectural genius of one man (there is sufficient evidence that Kahn was a mediocre architect considered as an individual), but in the organizational genius which can establish a foolproof system of rapid and complete plan production.”9 Kahn’s factory-style organization of work was very different from that to which Soviet architects were accustomed. The architect Nikolay Ilyinsky described the habitual scene in a Soviet architectural office, which included “a common hall, which hosts a small number of workers of different specializations. Architect-constructor, draftsman, quantity surveyor often sit next to each other and are united in the same group.” Unlike their Soviet counterparts, American offices such as Kahn’s, Ilyinsky explained, “follow strict separation and intentionally place architects, constructors, and specialized departments on different floors.”10

Forty-five of Kahn’s architects and engineers were employed by Gosproektstroy (the State Trust of Design and Construction of the Supreme Council of the People’s Economy), a central design office that had been created in Moscow in 1930 with the arrival of the Americans in mind. The mission of Gosproektstroy—the fulfillment of the goals of the Five-Year Plan—was to be achieved by industrializing architecture with the help of American expertise. Replacing the previous system of independent design workshops as “one powerful organization,” Gosproektstroy, indeed, acted on an American scale: the arriving specialists had to train over two thousand Soviet ones.11 But Gosproektstroy was more than a centralized design office: it was “an educational-industry organization, which, receiving American experience in the process of its industrial activity,” was to “transmit this experience to the utmost possible number of construction organizations and young Soviet specialists.”12 The economic promise of standardization and rationalization of labor outweighed ideological differences. Kahn believed that (American) standardization and (Soviet) centralized planning complemented each other—centralization enabled greater standardization, which meant a dramatic reduction of costs. Meanwhile, communist bureaucrats, economists, and even artists enthusiastically welcomed American “ideologically neutral” techniques of efficiency, including Fordism and Taylorism. In the words of Mary McLeod, the advocates of industrial management believed social justice to be “a product of technical rationalization, not of material equality.”13 Among others, Soviet revolutionaries welcomed it as an instrument of revolutionizing society by modernizing the subject—something akin to artist Vladimir Tatlin’s Letatlin, a flying device that provided the human subject with prosthetic wings.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, American pioneers of industrial management Frank and Lillian Gilbreth suggested using chronocyclegraphs (photographs that captured movement) to rationalize the movement of workers and their work environment. Along with the theories of Taylor and Ford, their methods inspired the activity of Alexey Gastev’s Central Institute of Labor, in which he collaborated with physiologist Nikolay Bernstein.14 Describing his approach to the physiology of movement, Bernstein coined the term “biomechanics,” which was soon picked up by another eminent admirer of motion studies, the avant-garde theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold.15 Gastev and Bernstein modified the Gilbreths’ method by bringing together physiology and motion studies with the help of cyclogramometry (using cyclograms for measuring movement) and stereoscopic photography.16 The employment of stereoscopy in the Institute of Labor’s analysis of the movements of a piano player, which redefined musical talent as correctly performed labor, not only added accuracy to the representation of movement by introducing the third dimension, but also cast this representation as modern and objective.17

Contemporaries accused motion studies of mechanicism, which eclipsed life’s holistic dimension, and both Taylor and Gastev became common targets of criticism and satire in the United States as well as in the Soviet Union. Although as the head of the Proletarian Culture movement, Alexander Bogdanov provided Gastev with a platform for the research and publication of his ideas, he was one of the most vocal critics of Gastev’s Taylorism. Social life and culture, Bogdanov contended, could not be reduced to technology, and even economic processes were dependent on human creativity no less than on mechanic efficiency.18 Lenin likewise called Taylorism “a ‘scientific’ system of squeezing sweat,” which turned the human into a slave of the machine.19 The mechanicism of Kahn’s architectural production was criticized along the same lines. When in 1930 the young constructivist architect Andrey Burov, an admirer of Le Corbusier, whom he had met in Moscow two years earlier, visited Kahn’s American office, he condemned what he saw. Kahn’s industrialism, for him, was antagonistic to the nature of architecture:

As for architecture, it is absolutely dull. Instead of architects they have a giant office. . . . The first impression is that one is designing a sketch, another—a plan, the third—a facade, the fourth—interiors, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the -teenth—electricity, constructions, plumbing, sewage, ventilation, refrigeration, etc. All this is signed by the owner of the firm, who has nothing to do with all this. The result is an American work of art.20

Burov’s skepticism echoed debates that had earlier raged around Narkompros’s attempts to humanize secondary and adult education in the Soviet Union. Anatoly Lunacharsky opposed industrialized specialist education, instead promoting a “polytechnic” educational system inspired by Renaissance universalism. Like liberal arts education, this model focused not on one narrowly defined professional skill but on a broad understanding of scientific, political, economic, cultural, and social contexts of work. While polytechnic education remained an aspirational ideal resulting from the original humanist agenda of the revolution of 1917, the new practicalities of the country’s economy required specialists, and Lunacharsky was soon forced to seek a compromise. Modern economy and social life, he had to agree, were based on the division of labor, which allowed humanity to accumulate knowledge—even though human culture would have disintegrated without an understanding of the work of others.21

Lunacharsky’s nearly failed attempt at introducing polytechnic education revealed the victory of state capitalism in the USSR—and with it, of the division of labor and of the organizational ethos. According to German modernist Bruno Taut, who worked in Moscow in 1932–33 (returning in disappointment to Berlin):

It is characteristic that the construction university in Moscow (VASI) divides its department according to different types of construction, thereby from early on sacrificing students to fatal professional narrowness. Introduced in hyper-American form, such a misunderstanding of the calling of the architect can inflict utmost harm on construction in the economic and technical as well as in the artistic sense.22

And yet the victory of industrial management did not equal an unmitigated acceptance of mechanicism. Within this discourse, room for discussion and debate emerged as architects and theorists sought, in the manner of Lunacharsky, opportunities for compromise. In what follows, I will examine one such compromising program, psychotechnics, which aspired to reconcile industrial management with individuality.

From Motion to Talent

The Soviet debate about the American approach to architecture was informed by a related discussion in industrial management—the debate between two forms of the Fordist organization of labor, motion studies (represented by the work of Taylor and the Gilbreths) and psychotechnics. Unlike motion studies, which focused on physiological aspects of work, psychotechnics was concerned with individual psychological differences. Rejecting the Taylorist conception of the body and the society as machine, psychotechnics substituted it with an organicist vision of society as ecosystem. In this model, individuals were grouped according to their “psychological profiles,” which assigned everyone to a particular social niche in accordance with their innate physiological, psychological, and intellectual abilities. Coining the term “psychotechnics” in 1900, psychologist William Stern suggested that this goal could be achieved through the study of individual differences, while psychotechnics’s most notable proponent, American-based Hugo Münsterberg, believed that a study of differences offered a middle ground between “reckless capitalism” (industrial efficiency) and “feeble sentimentality” (social reformism).23 Yet the roots of this program could also be discerned in the psychometrics of Francis Galton and his followers, such as Rudolf Schulze and James McKeen Cattell, whose laboratory instruments, tests, and devices were actively used by psychotechnics’s proponents.24

Its origins in capitalist Germany and the United States notwithstanding, during the 1920s, psychotechnics quickly gained popularity in Soviet Russia, becoming particularly vibrant after the announcement of the First Five-Year Plan, whose goals it promised to support. Münsterberg’s Foundations of Psychotechnics (Grundzüge der Psychotechnik, 1914) appeared in Russian translation in 1924, followed by other translations of foreign authors.25 The first Soviet psychotechnical laboratory was opened in 1922 by Isaak Spielrein under the umbrella of Gastev’s Institute of Labor. The All-Russian Psychotechnic Society, founded in 1927, published two journals and had branches in Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan, and Sverdlovsk. By 1930, more than one hundred psychotechnical institutions, including large laboratories, departments within institutes, and regional offices, existed throughout the country.26 A related field, testology (the science of psychological testing), which had experienced a rise in Russia during the first years of the twentieth century, was incorporated into the framework of psychotechnics; the Moscow Testological Association was also founded in 1927.27

In the aftermath of the revolutionary education reforms, psychological testing seemed to offer a viable alternative to the traditional grading system, and psychotechnics was embraced by education theorists, in particular those adhering to the equally popular experimental pedagogy, a science based on child psychology and physiology.28 It proved to be compatible with the humanist, Lunacharsky-inspired pedagogical model, which favored multisidedness and erudition. According to education theorist and psychologist Avgusta Dernova-Ermolenko, the pedagogue of the future

will have to learn not less but more than the builder of edifices, bridges, roads, and machines. He will have to know anatomy, physiology, and partially pathology as a doctor; physics and chemistry as a scientist; mathematics and mechanics as an engineer. Like a skillful strategist, military commander, politician, and activist-organizer, he will have to manage complex manifestations of the developing nervous system of a children collective; like an astronomer, he will have to operate with complex mathematical calculations.29

The debate between Taylorism and psychotechnics continued on the cultural front. On one side was Meyerhold’s Taylorist “biomechanic” theater, for which constructivist artists Alexander Vesnin (soon to become a leading figure in constructivist architecture) and Lyubov Popova produced stage-set designs in the early 1920s, treating the body of the actor as a mechanical automaton whose movements they aspired to optimize. “With the invention of a new theater,” writes Tijana Vujošević, “came the invention of both a new kind of space and a new kind of man, one who inhabits and traverses the new space and who understands movement of his own body in a way that corresponds to the demands of the modern age of technology and progress.”30 On the other side were the likes of theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky, who critiqued Meyerhold for failing to make actors perform as live human beings, arguing that “though important, Meyerhold’s theatre—without human, alive people on stage—was dead.”31 Instead, Stanislavsky subscribed to the James-Lange theory of emotion, which postulated that emotions result from physiological changes in the body rather than vice versa, as well as to Indian yoga tradition. He elaborated a method of acting that he called psychotechnics—a system by which the actors identified with their stage roles through the full physical experience of emotions rather than merely represented them. According to Stanislavsky, these (unconscious) emotions had to be released by conscious means. In this model, consciousness and the unconscious were not opposed but rather supported each other:

Psychotechnics must help organize unconscious material because only organized unconscious material can assume artistic form. The sorceress organic nature can create it. It owns and manages the most important centers of our creative apparatus. Human consciousness does not know them, our sensations do not orientate there, but a true creativity is impossible without them.32

It was this compromise approach that Ladovsky chose to follow in his quest for individuality without individualism.33 Quoting from Münsterberg, whose laboratory at Harvard University he took as the model, he later explained, “Psychotechnics cannot create artists . . . , but it can provide all of them with a basis for achieving in the most reliable way those particular goals to which they aspire and, above all, for avoiding certain pitfalls.”34 For the rationalists, psychotechnics presented an opportunity to establish a relationship between the formal aspects of architectural composition and “socioemotional needs.”35

In April 1930, the journal Stroitelstvo Moskvy (Moscow Construction) published an article by Ladovsky’s former student, the architect Alexander Karra, titled “For a Socialist Reorganization of Design Offices.” Although generally sympathetic to Americanism, Karra suggested revising it to make it more humane, reconciling its ethos of efficiency with socialist values of collectivity and mutual support.36 The differentiation and specialization of labor, Karra argued, necessitated a synthesis. If it were to unify separate tasks into a single organized and organic process, this synthesis required a new institutional structure, which Karra elaborated as “the brigade method.” “The brigade method” was a popular term in both industrial and educational contexts in Russia and beyond. In education, the brigade method emerged as a modification of the Dalton Plan, a project-based pedagogical technique developed in the United States by Helen Parkhurst and advocated by John Dewey. During the 1920s, it was embraced by Narkompros as a teaching strategy for elementary and middle schools. Unlike the Dalton Plan, which advocated individual work on projects, the brigade-laboratory method organized students in groups.37 Hannes Meyer used it as a pedagogical principle of the Bauhaus, where he united students of different academic standing (from first year to last year) into brigades, enabling them, so he hoped, to learn from each other. In 1930, Meyer moved to the USSR as the head of the Rot-Front (die Rote Front) Brigade, which included several of his former Bauhaus students. According to one of them, Philipp Tolziner, for German architects, the “brigade” meant “a group of co-thinkers who share views, behavior, perception, and education.”38 In Soviet industry, the brigade method structured labor as work units (brigades), which shared responsibility and benefits in the cause of “comradely competition.”39 The brigades were organized both vertically and horizontally—hierarchically structured and differing by specialization (there could be, for example, brigades of bricklayers or woodworkers). While solidifying the division of labor, the brigades also mitigated its dehumanizing effects, creating small, family-like teams, whose members, at least in theory, were tied by bonds of comradeship.

Introducing the brigade method to architectural work, Karra defined it as based on “strict organization, on freeing designers from any additional work, on maximal differentiation of their labor and its surveying, on selection and training of employees according to their inclinations and abilities for this or that kind of work based on scientific methods.”40 He juxtaposed the brigade method not only to “craft-universal [kustarno-universal’nyi]” but also to “office” and “group” methods, which were based on consecutive elaboration of the project by different specialist teams. Unlike the latter, the brigade method presupposed simultaneous work on the project by several brigades to increase efficiency and coordination. The actions of different workers would provide “the chain of the same operation, the same general, organically united process,” which would eliminate “the gaps between the initial project (idea, concept) and subsequent surprises of constructional, technological, or other order.” The method simplified and rationalized the structure of a design office, replacing its complex hierarchy (typically consisting of the chief architect, the head architect, constructors, engineers, technicians, draftsmen, and so on) with a quadripartite structure: the leadership brigade (mirroring the modern American factory’s planning department), the design (“idea”) brigade, the specialist brigade, and the draftsman brigade.41 This, Karra believed, could reduce the number of work operations (communications between different units) necessary for a design of the building from more than forty to ten.

Reminiscent of Fritz Kahn’s contemporaneous popular anatomic illustrations that presented the body as factory, in Karra’s anthropomorphic scheme, the “leadership brigade” functioned as the nervous system: it received commands from the brain (the office head), organized the work of body organs (complex brigades of designers and specialists), and coordinated the output mechanism (the draftsmen brigade). Whereas Fritz Kahn’s homunculus industrialized the human, Karra’s scheme aspired to humanize the modern production place. In Karra’s vision, each employee became an organic cell fulfilling its natural purpose. Such a biologization promised not only to mitigate the dehumanizing effects of the modern division of labor but also to forge a balance between the interests of the individual and those of the collective. In doing so, it reflected the aspirations of his teacher Ladovsky, who had in 1919 defined the goal of the Moscow Architectural Artel as strengthening “the ties between separate architectural-artistic forces into a single creative organism (the collective), which will allow separate individualities [to influence each] other in a wholesome way due to their constant communication and creative interaction and [to] create forms of collective creativity through personal experience.”42 In 1927, speaking about secondary education, Lunacharsky similarly argued that it “cannot oppress individuality, but it equally cannot allow apostasy. Its goal is a creation of socialist individuality, of that which can be called a collectivistically educated originality.”43 What consequences did this dialectic entail for the individual worker, and how was it to regulate the division of labor?

Discussing the division of labor, Karl Marx had distinguished between skilled and unskilled labor (a division that he explained as based on education), while Hannah Arendt was to juxtapose labor and work (as based on their cultural significance and the durability of their results). In his turn, Karra, who grounded his scheme in the presumed innate and acquired abilities of workers, explained the divide as a difference between creative and technical labor. Karra specified that “Cultivation [kul’turnost’] [and] a talent for combination of spatial forms is the central quality of the architect-designer, who conducts complex design work (in the conceptual sphere).”44 Meanwhile, “brigades of working drawings” would include “lesser qualified and talented comrades.” This hierarchical division nevertheless remained porous and could be overcome as the architects improved their skills. In this picture, psychotechnics emerged as a mechanism of the assessment, evaluation, and development of these abilities. The Psychotechnical Laboratory at the VKhUTEIN was to play a key role in both fostering this new organic professionalism and promoting a new vision of the architect as a worker whose labor, although divided, was natural and thus not subjected to alienation.

From Harvard to Moscow

The Psychotechnical Laboratory (or, officially, the Architectural Research Laboratory) at VKhUTEIN, in fact, had a broader mission, extending its activity in several directions: vocational selection and pedagogy (“the psychotechnics of the architect”), social reform (“the education of the consumers of architecture and the development of workers’ housing”), devising a new theory of architecture (“the fundamentals of architecture”), furthering architectural psychology (“the experimental testing of spatial disciplines”), and finally, the development of the methodology for landscape architecture.45 Student Arkady Grudzinsky, for example, was responsible for the rationalization of drafting and the reform of the drafting table.46 Ladovsky, with the help of his former student Georgy Krutikov, oversaw the psychotechnical section, which remained the laboratory’s flagship. It is unknown whether Ladovsky was familiar with Münsterberg’s vision of an architect as a technical specialist elevated above his peers by the love of art and the knowledge of foreign languages and art history. Although Ladovsky would have agreed with Münsterberg that architecture was a polytechnic discipline (which, according to Münsterberg, “demands more than a mere specialistic training” and “is to take its energy from all sides of human life”), his understanding of what constituted architectural work was a far cry from Münsterberg’s ideal of aesthetic feeling cultivated by drawing from casts and “decorative figure-design.”47 Instead, Ladovsky and Krutikov identified architectural talent as the ability to see, or “spatial dexterity,” a faculty they found to be “as vital for an architect as the sense of equilibrium is for a pilot.”48 It was this ability that the psychotechnical section aspired to test and analyze.

Ladovsky recorded the results of his tests in each student’s personal profile form, which he borrowed from existing psychotechnical literature and which, he hoped, would eventually supplement academic transcripts. Resembling the forms developed by Russian “testologists” as early as the 1910s and later developed by such advocates of psychotechnics as Fritz Giese in Germany and Petr Rudik in the Soviet Union, Ladovsky’s form consisted of three columns (Index, Rank, and Category), a grid for a graphic of architectural giftedness, and a space for a general conclusion.49 According to the cumulative result of the tests, students were divided into five categories, so that even before meeting a student in person the pedagogue was aware of the weak sides of his or her talent. Later on, as adequate pedagogy was to foster the development of the student’s talent, the profile would allow the monitoring of improvement, thus illustrating the success of architectural education.

Like Rudik, whose work targeted students of science and technology, Ladovsky began his tests by examining attention and memory before proceeding to evaluate a student’s capacity for processing perceptual data. For Rudik, the key among these second-order properties was intellectual giftedness—the acuity of understanding and remembering material. The psychologist defined intellectual giftedness not as a cognitive but rather as a psychological, unconscious property. He referred to the work of the British psychologist Charles Edward Spearman, who saw giftedness as a general function of the central nervous system, and who thus treated humans not as autonomous agents but as biological organisms interacting with their environment. “The task of education,” stated the Soviet psychologist Solomon Gellerstein, espousing a similar opinion, “is to create a balance between an organism and the environment that surrounds it.”50 Tailoring Rudik’s scheme to students of architecture, Ladovsky replaced intellectual giftedness with such abilities as visual estimation and spatial giftedness (which included spatial coordination, spatial orientation, spatial visualization, spatial imagination, and spatial combination). His interest in seeing emerged against a rich background of discussions of this notion in psychology, physiology, aesthetics, and art history, initiated by Hermann von Helmholtz’s psychological studies of vision.51 Helmholtz, arguing against the nativism of Ewald Hering, postulated an empiricist theory, according to which stereoscopic vision was not an innate but a learned ability, which depended on memory and attention. The idea that seeing could be learned inspired the rising discipline of art history. Heinrich Wölfflin interpreted seeing (das Sehen) as the driving force of stylistic change. Similarly, the epistemological concept of das Anschauung, “the looking at an object in its immediate presence” (which had been used already by Immanuel Kant), was developed by Albert Brinckmann, who called for die Anschauungstheorie, a general system of ways of looking.52 The work of both authors was translated to Russian and read by ASNOVA members.53 In 1926 Nikolay Dokuchaev had distinguished the physiological function of looking (smotrenie) from the analytical process of seeing (videnie), the latter leading to an understanding of that which is “the most characteristic of an object—what it consists of and how its elements are united in a coherent architectural whole.”54 Unconscious visual perception thus provided a key to conscious spatial analysis. To explore it, Ladovsky recommended to Soviet architects the studies conducted in Münsterberg’s Harvard laboratory, whose research on the perception of forms possessed, he argued, immediate relevance for architecture.55

Already the first modern philosophers such as John Locke had postulated a hierarchical structure of the human interpretation of the world. The lowest level comprised sensation, purely physiological and pertinent to both animals and humans; sensory data was then transmitted for interpretation to the brain in a process known as perception. These two basic processes, nineteenth-century philosophers added, were subsequently continued by the work of spatial imagination, association, and memory, which belonged to the domain of higher (and uniquely human, as it was then believed) psychic processes. If the founder of experimental psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, was preoccupied with sensation, during the twentieth century scientific interest shifted toward perception and, ultimately, imagination. Ladovsky’s psychotechnics, and particularly the notion of visual estimation (glazomer in Russian, or Augenmaß in German—both words literally translate as “measuring by the eye”), which came to be seen as the elementary unit of spatial interpretation, reflected this shift. Münsterberg and Wundt defined Augenmaß as a physiological sensation of eye muscles; Wundt believed that eyeballs required different amounts of energy for different types of movement: vertical lines, for example, seemed longer because a vertical movement was more energy-consuming than horizontal. Ladovsky, instead, aligned himself with the psychological and empiricist approach of Helmholtz and Theodor Lipps, who treated Augenmaß as an apperception (a comparison with present and past experience based on the principle of contrast, during which the subject became aware of the act of perception).56 Taking place in the mind and yet relying on sensation, visual estimation, for Ladovsky, was suspended between the physiological and the cognitive: the conscious idea emerged as a product of the psychological process of comparison. The ambiguity of visual estimation as apperception betrayed the limits of psychotechnics’s rehumanizing ambitions; although reintroduced, the conscious remained restrained and subordinated to the unconscious and the physiological.

To test the faculty of visual estimation, Ladovsky acquired a special room in the VKhUTEIN building. Following the example of Münsterberg’s Harvard laboratory, this room was entirely painted in black, from floor to ceiling, to avoid distractions and possible spatial reference points.57 According to the anecdote, the workmen who were hired to paint it were so appalled by the unusual idea that they refused to perform their job, leaving Ladovsky and his students to do it on their own. A contemporary remembered that “the black room produced a whimsical impression, all filled with various devices with stretched threads and bright color spots for experiments with color. It looked as if after a fire.”58

Ladovsky could have modeled such laboratory devices as color wheels and threads after those described in psychotechnical textbooks and catalogs, but one group of apparatuses remained idiosyncratic.59 These devices, which Ladovsky considered his own contribution to psychotechnics, were designed to test just one group of subjects—architects.60 Almost all of them had the Russian word for visual estimation (glazomer) in their title. Some of these devices were adaptations of existing psychological testing machines, while others had no immediate analogs. Quite similar to a device for testing the visual estimation of tramway and bus drivers developed by the Central Institute of Labor psychologist Nikolay Levitov, the simplest of Ladovsky’s apparatuses, the liglazomer (from Russian linia, line), consisted of a freely hanging ruler turned with its back toward the subject. The subject was asked to mark the required length with the help of a slide; the deviation could be then measured by the scale on the ruler’s back side.61 The subject tested by the ploglazomer (from ploskost’, surface), derived from Münsterberg’s Augenmassapparat, was asked to cut a certain part of a flat figure using a sliding glass plane. Based on Walther Moede’s device that Gellerstein described as an uglomer (from ugol, “angle,” and root -mer, “measure”), Ladovsky’s uglazomer consisted of a rotating circle with a line for marking an angle of required magnitude; the fixed vertical hand and the measuring scale on the back allowed checking the precision of estimation. The oglazomer (from ob’em, “volume”) was a set of vessels of various geometrical shapes that the subject had to fill with the requested volume of liquid that came from graded glass cylinders via a system of rubber pipes and faucets (no analogs of this device have been found). Finally, the prostrometr (from prostranstvo, “space,” and izmeriat’, “to measure”) featured two pairs of surfaces that served as supports for objects and tested the capacity for spatial perception.

Visual estimation, the first-order psychological quality, was the prerequisite for more complex functions, such as spatial combination. According to the rationalists, the ability to combine spaces was key for architectural composition—a crucial second-order component of architectural talent. Ladovsky evaluated this quality with the help of psychotechnical paper tests, whose development he delegated to Krutikov, his advisee and subsequently doctoral student.62 As discussed and illustrated in the previous chapter, Krutikov’s exploration of combinatorics (a branch of set theory) resulted in new formulas that described the spatial location (rotation) of the object. Krutikov wanted to create a system of classification for the potentially infinite variety of possible spatial combinations. Combinatorics allowed him to rationalize and accommodate individuality, subordinating it to an organizing idea in the same way as psychotechnics, transforming individuality to difference, as he attempted to study and systematize it for the benefit of the collective corporate whole. While Krutikov’s figures performed a spatial dance to contribute to the unity of architectural composition, in psychotechnics, composition became a model for social organization, in which each element, albeit different, had a particular place and function, defined not only by what it was but also by what it was not.

The Space-Meter

Of all the aspects of visual estimation, the estimation of depth—and thus space—was singled out by Ladovsky as the core of the architect’s talent. By that time, the identification of space with stereopsis was a well-known psychological postulate. In the 1830s, Charles Wheatstone demonstrated that binocular parallax—the disparity of planar images received by the two eyes—enabled the emergence of a three-dimensional image in the human mind. Spatial perception later became the subject of the most heated debate in the history of nineteenth-century psychology, known as the Helmholtz–Hering controversy. Whereas Helmholtz argued, from an empiricist position, that humans learn to perceive space by visual experimentation in the course of the early months of life, Ewald Hering (supported, among others, by Ernst Mach) contended that spatial perception is innate.63 Meanwhile, ensuing aesthetic theories, such as that of August Schmarsow, proceeded to pair architecture, as a three-dimensional genre of fine arts, with spatiality. “Space, not stone, is the material of architecture,” Ladovsky likewise believed.64 In the context of the psychotechnics of the architect, the Helmholtz–Hering debate acquired a new significance: the question was not only about the mechanisms of perception, but whether architectural talent is innate or acquired.

The space-meter (prostrometr) was an instrument that could help answer that question. For the rationalists, it was thus more than a psychotechnical testing device. Indeed, although Soviet psychologists used an apparatus named glazomer (“[the meter of] visual estimation”) to study the precision of eye-measuring, Ladovsky preferred a different name.65 Singled out by Krutikov as a device whose prime purpose was not psychotechnics but an experimental study of space, the space-meter was, in fact, the only one of Ladovsky’s devices that did not have the part -glazomer in its title.66 Moreover, Ladovsky chose not to use Rudik’s version of glazomer, which rejected the compact laboratory device in favor of a system that was as close to real-life perceptual conditions as possible (in Rudik’s system, the subject, standing by a wall of the room, was estimating the distance between two points on the opposite wall seven meters away), even despite its simplicity and inexpensiveness in comparison to laboratory apparatuses.67 What was missing in Rudik’s glazomer was the aspect of binocularity. Unlike it, Ladovsky’s space-meter consisted of two identical pairs of intersecting transverse surfaces, which could change their angle of incidence, with additional suspending devices.68 This construction enabled diverse spatial placement of testing objects, while a system of scales allowed for measuring magnitudes. The subject was to occupy a fixed position in front of the rectangular binocular frame, which isolated and, when necessary, enlarged the analyzed space.69 The frame was located exactly on the axis of the boundary between the two horizontals, making the subjects unable to estimate the degree of the surfaces’ incidence, while a system of scales measured the precision of their judgments (Plate 7).

The space-meter was derived from Hering’s apparatus for measuring depth perception (Tiefenwahrnehmungsapparat). First described by its creator in 1879, it had since then become a standard instrument for studies of strabismus.70 Most importantly, the space-meter was related to a modification of the Tiefenwahrnehmungsapparat devised by Giese and used in professional fitness testing.71 Hering invented the instrument to conduct the “fall test,” which proved his hypothesis that depth is perceived retinally rather than kinetically (in other words, that it was independent from movement). The apparatus fixed the subject’s head, directing her or his eyesight with the help of a cardboard cylinder that pointed to a small object (such as a bead) suspended within a two-meter-long rectangular frame that ended with a black screen. The experimenter dropped small balls through the opening in the lid of the apparatus. Unlike a person suffering from strabismus or another defect of stereoscopic vision, a visually healthy subject would inevitably be able to tell whether the ball fell ahead of or behind the bead. Hering’s followers, including the psychotechnician Giese, made the subject look at the ball not through a cardboard cylinder but through a diaphragm, which limited the viewing period to fractions of a second to exclude possible movements of eyeballs. Giese, moreover, suggested a test in which the subject was positioned perpendicularly to the device, at two or three meters’ distance, and was asked to estimate the distance between the main rod and the side threads suspended from the top. Significantly, both Hering and his followers believed that depth perception, although innate, could nevertheless be developed and improved with experience, and that the Tiefenwahrnehmungsapparat could be used to train it.72 Sharing this belief, Ladovsky adapted the psychologists’ apparatus to his own concept of spatial perception in architecture. He replaced the diaphragm with a lens, asking the subject to focus not on falling, but on static objects. Thus eliminating the pressure of time, he let the subject move his or her eyeballs and practice binocular comparison, which he considered crucial for an architect. At the same time, he made the two horizontal boards movable, placing objects not only in front of or behind but also above or below each other, thus complicating their spatial relationships.

The novel, optical part of Ladovsky’s space-meter consisted of a lens providing a slight magnification, which directed vision to the objects in front of the eyes and eliminated everything else from view.73 This part was based on the stereoscope, an instrument for testing binocular vision invented by Wheatstone in 1838. The stereoscope separated the fields of vision of the two eyes, presenting each with a view taken from a slightly different standpoint: the disparity of these images (imprinted on the so-called stereocards) mimicked binocular parallax. Like the space-meter later, most stereoscopes (for instance, the widely produced Brewster’s stereoscope) included lenses that divided the eyes’ fields of vision while simultaneously compensating for the shortness of the distance between the eyes and the images. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the stereoscope, which quickly became a popular entertainment device, for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture.74 Among others, Vladimir Lenin acquired a stereoscope as a part of the Gorki manor, and enthusiastically used it after moving there in 1921.75

Examining the history of the stereoscope, Jonathan Crary linked spectatorship with social discipline while identifying a shift from one model of perception to another in the first half of the nineteenth century. Each of these models was represented by its own optical device. The monocular model, a product of sixteenth-century optics, was embodied by the camera obscura, whose mechanics repeated the physiology of the eye. The stereoscope, instead, was based upon a binocular model of vision, presenting the eyes with two disparate planar images, while a third one, the “true” three-dimensional picture, different from the other two images, emerged in the mind of the beholder. This model, Crary argued, reflected not only modern optics but also the modern economic system: the stereoscope transformed the eye into a mechanical element that complemented the technology of the device. Both the eye and the device thus became elements of the physiological-mechanical complex and could function only as a support for each other; the coordination of the two followed the economic principle of the division of labor.76 The invention of the stereoscope coincided with another major technological innovation of the century, photography. Wheatstone’s stereoscope preceded the invention of the daguerreotype by just one year. The two technologies were soon synthesized in the invention of the stereograph, a pair of photographic images to be used in the stereoscope.77 Stereography was claimed by science when Ernst Mach suggested applying it to Roentgen technology to create three-dimensional images of internal organs, and when Gastev and Bernstein used it to analyze working movement.78 The use of stereography within the Institute of Labor proved, as it were, the scientific status of biomechanics. And what is more, inasmuch as stereography became a tool of the industrial manager, the act of seeing emerged as not only a psychological but also a socially valuable and productive activity—the work of the organizer. Tellingly, the 1932 book by the psychologist Sergey Kravkov, who had taught a course on visual perception at VKhUTEMAS, was titled The Eye and Its Work (Glaz i ego rabota).79

Psychologists explained this work of vision as the labor of comparison, performed by the brain during the process of synthesizing the nonidentical data of two planar images in a three-dimensional picture. It was the process of comparison—that of two objects in space or of a current sensation with the memory of a past one—that defined visual estimation.80 According to Kravkov, visual estimation was “a faculty of the eye to compare spatial magnitudes,” while Levitov explained that the processes of comparison, differentiation, and evaluation “possessed a special importance” for the ability to visually assess space.81 The concept of comparison was soon applied to psychological aesthetics, particularly to the aesthetic perception of space. In 1886, Eduard von Hartmann, the author of the first theory of the unconscious, had argued that visual estimation was no less important for architects than the musical ear for composers: while music was perceived directly, as a pleasing or displeasing sensation, architecture was perceived as an understanding of relationships between objects.82 Likewise, Adolf von Hildebrand believed that comparison allowed the mind to unite discrete spatial objects into a coherent picture.83 The idea was subsequently developed by Wölfflin, whose binary pairs, as well as the double slide projection method of art history lectures that he pioneered, asserted contrast and comparison as a principle of both art and its history.84 Ladovsky responded to these arguments by inventing a “device for testing spatiality [prostranstvennost’], ponderability [vesomost’] and balance [that] enables the visual comparison of architectural projects in regard to the above-mentioned qualities.”85 Comparing the data received by the two eyes rather than that of two different experiences, his space-meter likewise relied on the principle of comparison.

As Zeynep Çelik Alexander observed, stereoscopic vision provided proof that “the ability to synthesize form was precisely that which distinguished the human eye from that of the machine.”86 The organizational work of comparison, emerged as productive activity that was simultaneously modern and humanist. Here, the division of labor was not rejected but sublated in the process of synthesis, which relied on prior analytical work. Having transcended the mechanicism of the physiological, modern subjectivity—and the modern architect as its epitome—thus emerged within the zone of psychological indeterminacy between consciousness and the unconscious. “One-eyed reason, deficient in its vision of depth” was Alfred North Whitehead’s criticism of eighteenth-century philosophic mechanicism.87 By 1925, when these words were written, stereoscopic vision, or the capacity for the psychological production of space, was firmly established as a synonym for humanness.

For Ladovsky and other rationalists, the organizational work of the architect consisted in enabling the adaptation of the humans to their three-dimensionality through synthesizing reality fragmented by the division of vision and labor. The product of this architecture was space as a legible psychological interface that structured and regulated the world and the human. Accordingly, the architect had to possess superb physiological and psychological abilities for the analysis of space. These abilities were innate but improvable and could be measured by the space-meter—simultaneously a psychotechnical testing device, a pedagogical instrument, and a laboratory apparatus for spatial research. Merging productivist and aesthetic concerns, Ladovsky’s rationalism turned architecture into an activity in which the economy of perception became indistinguishable from the economy of work.

Seeking a middle ground between collectivity and individuality, nativism and empiricism, humanism and Taylorist efficiency, the organism and the machine, psychotechnics remained both ethically and politically ambiguous. Its answer to the problem of alienation was to naturalize the division of labor—making it appear as if stemming from the biological and psychological abilities of workers. It aspired to perform this naturalization by prioritizing the psychological as the middle ground between the physiological and the conscious. Salvaging psychological individuality from Taylorist mechanization, it subjected this individuality to technocratic control. And yet the story of Soviet architectural psychotechnics is relevant beyond histories of Soviet architecture and interwar European Americanism. Arguing for a psychotechnics-based brigade system of the organization of architectural work, Karra responded not only to the dehumanizing ethos of Taylor and Kahn but also to the humanist attempts of Narkompros to introduce polytechnic education. Although his intent was to overcome alienation by endowing workers with erudition and providing them with a comprehensive, multisided education, as Karra argued in his article, the “polytechnic specialist” had developed in response to the rules of the capitalist labor market, where an ability to perform different tasks guaranteed flexibility and thus survival. In an organically envisioned socialist society, a profession would instead be a “social function,” whose regulation and distribution would be based exclusively on “social purposefulness.”88 The humanist intentions of a flexible and multisided work environment, Karra explained, did not prevent it from paving the way for new forms of exploitation. Although formulated in support of an organicist version of state capitalism, Karra’s argument anticipated the effects of the new form of labor management that emerged in the 1970s and has since the 1990s been known as post-Fordism. Based on the myth of making work pleasurable and blurring the division between work and leisure, post-Fordism masks and intensifies rather than overcomes alienation, extending it into the sphere of private and emotional life.