Building the Revolution - Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 at the Royal Academy

Building the Revolution - Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 at the Royal Academy

03 November, 2011
by: Mary Selman

How are the mighty fallen: a bleak and compelling narrative of the rise and demise of Soviet Socialism, written in its own avant-garde visual language

A “dynamic synthesis” of art, architecture and political ideology, Building the Revolution showcases the doomed grandeur of not only the Constructivist, but also the Soviet experiment. This is architecture as propaganda: architecture as an expression of a new world order, built in the image of the noble, newly empowered proletariat.
 
Richard Pare's remarkable decade-spanning photographic campaign lies at the heart of the Royal Academy's show; indeed, the paintings and drawings featured mainly serve to place the architectural works in context. Taken from across the former USSR's eleven time zones, these relics of a collapsed empire have survived through "malign neglect" rather than any desire to conserve – and it shows. Contrasted with vintage shots of the buildings at their inception, Pare's uncompromising laser-printed studies leave one, in Pare's own words, "surprised, yet not" to find that these crumbling edifices are still standing, as oligarch backers lose enthusiasm for restoration work and severe housing shortages underline the lack of money to tear anything down. Fast-food outlets now occupy the ground floor of the Izvestia building, once home to the media mouthpiece of the Soviet government; the contrast between then and now would be poignant, if it were not simultaneously so arrogant. The joyful industrial utopianism that characterised the ingenious collapsible ring design of the Shabolovka radio tower – centrepiece for one of many cities of the future – would cede by 1935 to Stalin's architecturally clunking cult of personality.
 
Combining cutting edge engineering and technology with a Communist social purpose, so many of the structures featured here are design one-offs – extraordinary, deeply influential  works of genius by designers who had no real predecessors or (tellingly) successors. Melnikov may have designed many weird and wonderful Soviet structures, but kept the best for himself – his own house-cum-studio is a honeycomb lattice shell built from bricks with hexahedral cells forming a double cylinder covered in hexagonal windows. Yes. Workers' communal housing projects would be both built for purpose, yet designed straight from one of Tarabukin's more extravagant planar dreams.
 
The bizarre, spiralling structure that one sees on entering the courtyard of the Royal Academy is perhaps the most emblematic of them all, despite never having being realised as a  functioning building: Tatlin's Tower, monument to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, would have been a rotating steel and glass office block topped by a radio station. The three tiers of offices stacked around this double helix would have rotated at different speeds – once per year, per week and per day respectively. The astonishing, and frankly insane ambition of this unfulfilled project epitomises much of what went wrong with the system it was meant to embody.
 
Indicative not only of great optimism, energy and purpose, but also of grinding, relentless megalomania, it is fitting that the final image should be of Lenin's blood-red tomb.
 
Richard Pare, the photographer whose research and images are so integral to this exhibition, is fascinating in person; I would strongly recommend catching him 'in conversation' on Friday 11th November (Reynolds Room; 6:30pm-7:30pm; £16/£7 reductions (includes exhibition entry).
 
Building the Revolution - Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 is at the Royal Academy of Arts from 29th October 2011 to 22 January 2012.

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Mary Selman