possible. This approach resulted in forests of grey concrete housing, building an image of monotony and austerity.
Return to building the ideal state The confrontation with the achievements of American consumer society highlighted the disparity between the bleak reality of the reconstruction struggle and the ideal socialist state that communism first set out to build. This disparity bears a certain resemblance to the Soviet Union’s beginnings, when the technically ambitious projects imagined by the avant-gardes pointed towards a future in which the achievements of socialism would make such constructions possible. The contrast between strong ideals and a difficult reality may likewise have been the driving force that produced the powerful forms of the Druzhba. Besides its structural boldness, the building’s resemblance to a flying saucer is revealing as an expression of pointing towards an ideal. The use of cosmic imagery is not surprising, given the importance of the space race and the fact that this race was one of the few areas in which Russia was equal with America, head and shoulders above the rest. The Druzhba was in fact mistaken by the Americans to be a launching pad. The rush towards the future was also the context for the St.Petersburg Central R&D Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics, a hollow tower that serves for testing the resistance of materials when falling at high speeds, resembling a rocket about to take off. Chaubin links this cosmic imagery with a kind of science fiction, which is interesting because it then represents an escape from reality and the speculation on future worlds. Like religion, science fiction is concerned with the unknown source of things, and directing attention towards the cosmos would have served as a vector of belief. The bold imagery of such elementary forms
St.Petersburg Central R&D Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics (photo by Frederic Chaubin)
is characteristic of revolutions, when strong ideals need to be stated clearly. These simple forms were a defining trait of the Constructivist images of the revolutionary years, when a new order was being defined that needed to be communicated to the public. Cosmic imagery was then also used, for instance in Tatlin’s monument. Inside the interlacing spirals of lattice-work were suspended three volumes – a cube, a pyramid, and a cylinder – containing congress halls. Each volume was to revolve at a different speed – once a year, once a month, and once a day – according to their importance, not unlike the celestial bodies of the solar system.
imagined ideal. When Stalinist Russia was celebrating its victory in the Second World War, and it seemed that the project of communism was succeeding, the architecture regressed to an archaic neoclassicism. Also, in cold war America, where material wealth was already a reality, architectural expression was not as bold as in soviet Russia, where this wealth was but a distant future. Perhaps only the urgency of a present lack or need is strong enough to inspire a creativity and invention that parallels the projects of soviet Russia.//
Comparing the “aesthetic outsiders” that started to appear among the sea of grey that characterized soviet architecture of the cold war period with the similarly bold projects envisioned by the earlier Constructivists suggests a relation between the power of invention and experiment and the strength of an
>>Chaubin, Frédéric. Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed. Köln: Taschen, 2011. >>Curtis, William J. R. “Architecture and Revolution in Russia.” Modern Architecture since 1900. [London]: Phaidon, 1996. 201-15. >>Frampton, Kenneth. “The New Collectivity: Art and Architecture in the Soviet Union 1918-32.” Modern Architecture: A Critical History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. 167-77. >>“Kitchen Debate.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 June 2013. Web. 28 June 2013.
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