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Leningrad: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955–1991
The flower pavilion at the entrance to the cemetery, 1973
But opposite them, on the other side of the highway-striking an unexpected contrast-an absolutely transparent flower pavilion stood in the 1960s. However, when designing the cemetery, and even the parkland around it, “the authors deliberately avoided including flowers in the plantings,” a reviewer commented on the second part of the project. “The landscape composition of the avenue should be distinguished by strict solemnity, a noble restraint of colors.”[53] Yet trees, carefully selected and neatly cropped, were an important part of the ensemble: “Four rowan trees in front of the propylaea, a linden grove at the entrance, a semicircle of birches encompassing the monument, silver spruces on small terraces on the back of the stele, two weeping elms standing apart on the upper level …”[54]
An equally important part of the whole was the music, Shostakovich’s Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony, which plays continuously over the cemetery. Soviet architecture had never seen such a powerful Gesamtkunstwerk. The architects, of course, drew an open parallel with Leningrad’s Field of Mars, and it is not only the sharp disparity between the scale of the space and its design that associate them but also the role of words. The lines by Olga Berggolts were written in accordance with specified dimensions, all the way down to the number of letters in a line! “No, I did not think that it should be my duty to give this wall a voice,” recalled Berggolts. “But somebody had to give it words and a voice. And it was such a miserable Leningrad fall, and it seemed to me that time had already run out.”[55]
Halted in 1949, on the back of the “Leningrad Affair,” work on the creation of the memorial recommenced only in 1955, and it was unveiled on May 9, 1960. To this day it remains the purest and most honest architectural statement about the siege, in spite of how much already “has been said about the paradoxical situation of the existence of two parallel histories of the siege-the official one, with the granite, gilding, and emptiness of monuments, and the personal, domestic one, with the silence of our relatives, with the impossibility of eating your fill, of throwing away bread, and at the same time with the impossibility, the enormous difficulty in finding the right words to say what this bread was.”[56]
4. 124th Quarter 1957–1960
ARCHITECTS EVGENY LEVINSON, DAVID GOLDGOR, ANATOLY SHPRITS, KONSTANTIN EMELYANOVBETWEEN ULITSA SEDOVA, ULITSA BABUSHKINA, ULITSA SHELGUNOVA, AND BULVAR KRASNYKH ZOR
The hero of Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House “had not once left the old town in all his life” and “knew about the outer districts only through hearsay.”[57] When he got there, he was astounded. “There were no archways, just like there were no streets. Everything was one large courtyard, around which the wind tore, twisting into dry, evil tornadoes. There was lots of space for the wind here, nothing limited or directed it; in some sense there was nowhere for it to blow, and it blew everywhere.”[58] For city natives, resettlement to the new districts inflicted a powerful psychological blow, a trauma that today we would identify as a loss of identity. It was not only an estrangement from the places that had formed them but also a rupture with the urban tradition of life as determined by the streets, courtyards, and archways. Yet it was precisely these archways and well-yards-gray, dank, unhealthy-that the new districts had been designed to counterbalance. The architects genuinely counted on the poverty of the new housing being compensated for by the space around it-vast, meaningful, and landscaped. It provided air and light, and that meant health and freedom. “The outskirts are all the more to my liking because they give a feeling of spaciousness,” as Joseph Brodsky recalled his Leningrad youth. “And I suddenly realized that the outskirts are the beginning of the world, not the end. They are the end of the familiar world, but the beginning of the unfamiliar world, which, of course, is much bigger, it’s huge, right?”[59]
General view of the 124th quarter from Ulitsa Sedova
In fact, the process of replacing the courtyard with a quarter did not begin under Khrushchev, and not even in the 1920s. The first example of this new typology was Gavansky Gorodok, a quarter of small-scale apartments built in 1904–1906 by Nikolai Dmitriev. It consisted of three buildings for families and two for bachelors, with a store, nursery, canteen, library, classrooms, and an outpatient clinic on the ground floors. The novelty was both in the layout of the apartments (corridors were kept to a minimum, and the bachelors’ buildings featured communal kitchens) and of the quarter itself, where for the first time in the city they deviated from perimeter construction, supplementing it with elements of ribbon development. The exterior of the buildings is extremely charming: white bands of pilasters and moldings embroider the brick walls and carved brackets cling to the pediments. The same goes for the courtyards. For the very first time, “the contraposition between the grand street frontage and the inner area of the quarter had been removed.”[60]
Nikolai Dmitriev and Vasily Fedorov, Gavansky Gorodok, 1904–1906
Nonetheless, it was dark and cramped (land still cost money at the time), and the next step was taken only with the mass housing of the 1920s and 1930s, when “architects were able for the first time to move away from crowded capitalist housing in favor of separate, freestanding buildings on spacious, landscaped territory. Urban residential buildings became separate volumes, instead of façades in an even line of contiguous housing.”[61] But in the mid-1930s everything changed again. Perimeter housing came into vogue, corner buildings appeared, the inner space of quarters began to be divided into small courtyards, and kindergartens were situated on the first floors. As a result, although construction was of the same density, the “sanitary and hygienic quality deteriorated.”[62] Comparing constructivist and Stalinist quarters in 1959, Yuly Shass was still very cautious in expressing a preference for the former: “It is not difficult to see that the construction of the earlier quarters was often conducted at a higher level than what followed.”[63] He cites as the first (and at the time the only) praiseworthy contemporary example the 124th quarter in Shchemilovka, where “construction is no longer being carried out indifferently (along the perimeter), as it was in quarters 122 and 123[2], and is now taking into account the purpose of the adjacent streets, their orientation, and the nature of the building itself.”[64]
Nikita Khrushchev inspects the construction of new quarters in Shchemilovka, May 23, 1957
The 124th quarter in Shchemilovka. General plan
The layout of those first two quarters-the still solid houses of Series 506 – also remained very Stalinist, especially that of the 122nd quarter. It was closed in by perimeter housing (L-shaped buildings on the corners), strictly symmetrical, and decorated with fountains with sculptures. But on May 22, 1957, Khrushchev came to the city, and in a speech at an agricultural laborers’ meeting he promised to catch up with the United States. The next day he inspected the new quarters in Shchemilovka and realized that at this pace the USSR would only be able to catch its rival in meat and milk production and would never close the gap in terms of housing. In spring 1958, new rules and regulations on construction came into force. Built in accordance with them, the 124th quarter was the very cheapest housing: Series OD, the Leningrad version of the “Lagutenko” five-story residential buildings. It was this that compelled the quarter’s designers to seek new paths in order to compensate for the “brave new lifestyle” to which its inhabitants would have to become accustomed.
Maximum diversity became the chief guiding principle, and the first way of doing this was in the layout of the quarter, which the designers called “open-plan,” reasoning that it was neither perimetral nor ribbon development. In fact, it brought together all possible types: both perimetral and ribbon development and linear. At the same time, they are all fairly geometrical, but buildings from different series are grouped together, since they needed to be built using a rapid construction method. Nonetheless, the 124th quarter can be considered the birthplace of Soviet open-plan urban layout, which would take off explosively in the 1960s. Later, critics would also express disappointment in it, grieving “about classical traditions, about the fact that the ‘free’ arrangement of buildings results in disorder, ruins the composition, brings chaos to the intra-quarter spaces.”[65]
But this would be said 20 years later, amid the postmodernist return to the classics. At the time the 124th quarter was built, Stalinist pomposity had only just been cast aside, and the designers saw problems with an open-plan layout: they “cannot organically become part of the general landscape of the city. They effectively live their own life and practically turn into a system of through streets or dead-end inner streets.”[66] So the architects diligently linked the 124th quarter with the city, making each of its four sides absolutely different in accordance with the direction they faced. Ulitsa Sedova was to become the district’s main artery, while the parallel Ulitsa Babushkina opened onto Kurakina Dacha park and the river; Ulitsa Shelgunova had electric power lines running along it, and Bulvar Krasnykh Zor was slated to eventually become the Yuzhny Obvodny Canal. The buildings were therefore placed in a “П” shape along the canal/boulevard (four sideways-on and two front-facing, flanking them). Along the opposite street, with its power lines, they were set at an angle. Ulitsa Babushkina can be seen from the Neva, so here they built large volumes with seven stories (Series E-5-58, a more advanced version of Series 507), and the ribbon development of housing on Ulitsa Sedova with its Series OD five-story buildings was interposed by the “dots” of towers.
This was the first example of this simple approach (“dot-dash-dot”), which went on to be widely used in Leningrad. Novoizmailovsky Prospekt[14], Sverdlovskaya Embankment[26], Prospekt Geroev-all the city’s new main roads would be configured this way. But in each of these cases the role of the “dots” was played by highrise towers built to original designs. Here the role of the vertical is played by modest eight-story buildings from Series G. While they look wonderful in Natalya Zakharina’s sketches, in real life they are clearly rather low and are lost in the open space of the street. They are even outshone by their neighbors, five-story Series OD buildings that are “greater in volume with large window apertures.” So writes Alexander Vasiliev, citing as an example the housing on Krasnoputilovskaya Ulitsa, where all the buildings are of the same scale. There, the buildings are from Series G, but are six-story rather than eight-story, and the towers are not “running out” toward the street, like here. On the contrary, they are set back from the road. At the same time, the five-story buildings there are from the same Series G, while in the 124th quarter for the first time they tried to combine not only two types of building, but houses of different series – OD, G, and 507.
This was a second step toward diversity, but the architects also constructed the quarter from buildings of different heights. Here there are buildings of one, two, five, seven, and eight stories! It was after the completion of the 122nd and 123rd quarters that the disadvantages of building to a uniform height became obvious, although this had been clear earlier. In a city with a flat relief it is very important to create an attractive skyline. Over time it would become clear that differences of one or two stories were insufficient for this, and in any case the sprawling trees serve to level off any silhouette. Nonetheless, the architects were on the right path, as evidenced by their idea of adding a contrast in materials by inserting glass structures of stores into the gaps between the rows of buildings (in Zakharina’s sketch their facades are not only completely glazed but also tilted). Naturally, there were not just stores but also a kindergarten, a daycare center, a boiler house, a laundry, garages. Everything was built from the same panels, but most importantly, at the same time. Because it was this that would become a major problem in the future: the pace of infrastructure construction would lag catastrophically behind the pace of housing construction.
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Примечания
1
From the song “Russian Symphony” by Aquarium.
2
From Alexander Kushner’s poem “As the Maple and the Rowan Grow on the Threshold” (1976).
3
This series of books uses the Soviet names of cities, some of which have since changed.
4
Sergei Dovlatov, Zapisnye knizhki. Solo na undervude. Solo na IBM (St. Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2003), 19.
5
Numbers in square brackets denote the chapter number of the building in this book.
6
Samuil Lurie, Muraveinik. Fel’etony v prezhnem smysle slova (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal “Neva”, 2002), 11.
7
From an interview with Natalia Tsendrovskaya by the authors of the book, September 12, 2021.
8
Solomon Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim (Moscow: Eksmo, 2012), 13.
9
From Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Piazza Mattei” (1981).
10
Vladimir Frolov, “Klassika leningradskogo modernizma,” Leningradskii modernizm. Vzgliad iz XXI veka (St. Petersburg, Al’fa, 2006), 10.
11
The buildings (and architects) of Leningrad modernism came to the attention of historians earlier, but they were presented in the broad historical context. (See the books Yuri Kurbatov (ed.), Arkhitektory ob arkhitektorakh. Leningrad – Peterburg. XX vek (St. Petersburg: Ivan Fedorov, 1999); V.G. Isachenko (ed.), Zodchie Sankt-Peterburga. XX vek (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2000); Alexey Levchuk, “Arkhitekturnaia istoriia Leningrada,” Project Russia, 26, 2003; L. Lavrov and L. Likhacheva, Sankt-Peterburg. Arkhitekturnyi putevidotel’. 1703–2003 (St. Petersburg: Eklektika, 2003.) This was the first project that looked exclusively at the epoch of Soviet modernism.
12
Alexey Levchuk, “Musornoe prostranstvo sovetskoi arkhitektury,” Leningradskii modernizm. Vzgliad iz XXI veka, 10.
13
See Konstantin Khrupin, “Reorganizatsiia arkhiteturno-stroitel’noi nauki: sozdanie nauchnogo tsentra pri Gosstroe SSSR. Akademiia stroitel’stva i arkhitektury SSSR” in Olga Kazakova (ed.), Estetika “ottepeli”. Novoe v arkhitekture, iskusstve, kul’ture (Moscow: Rosspen, 2013), 383–401.
14
In 1963 this sector became part of the Leningrad Zonal Research Institute for Standard and Experimental Design of Residential and Public Buildings (LenZNIIEP).
15
Stenographic record of the meeting of the Leningrad architectural community to discuss various trends in Soviet architecture today. Central State Archive of Literature and Arts of St. Petersburg, Ф. Р-341. Оп. 1–2. Д. 540.
16
See E.I. Kargina, Tekhnicheskaia informatsiia i obmen opytom v proektnom institute (Leningrad: Leningradskii dom nauchno-tekhnicheskoi propagandy, 1960).
17
Stenographic record of the discussion between Nikita Khrushchev and the leaders of the Moscow City Council regarding questions of urban planning. Central Archive of Social and Political History of Moscow, Ф. 4. Оп. 124. Д. 9.
18
Central Archive of Literature and Arts of St. Petersburg, Ф. Р-341. Оп. 1–2. Д. 540.
19
Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation, Ф. 1. Оп. 3. Д. 480.
20
Decree no. 392 of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR of May 26, 1969, “On measures to improve the quality of residential and civil construction.”
21
V s”ezd arkhitekorov SSSR (Moscow: no publisher, 1970), 7.
22
“Doklad pervogo sekretaria pravleniia SA SSSR G.M. Orlova na V s”ezde arkhitektorov,” V s”ezd arkhitekorov SSSR, 15.
23
Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation, Ф. Р36. Оп. 12. Д. 785.
24
Senate Square was the location of the Decembrist Revolt (1825). Palace Square was the location of the Bloody Sunday massacre (1905) and the seizure of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution (1917).
25
“Zhiloi dom na ul. Poliarnikov, 10,” www.citywalls.ru
26
A khrushchevka is a panel apartment block constructed during the 1960s under Khrushchev.
27
Elena Soroka, “Protokhrushchevka,” The Village, April 5, 2017.
28
Y.V. Trubinov, “Pervye postroiki Peterburga. Issledovanie i restavratsiia,” SiAL, no. 9 (1973): 28.
29
V.A. Korentsvit, Letny sad Petra Velikogo. Rasskaz o proshlom i nastoiashchem, chapter 1, part 1.
30
Y. Galkina, “Ia zhivu v protokhrushchevke,” The Village, April 5, 2017.
31
“Melodiia mikroraiona,” in Belye nochi (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1975), 84.
32
Libretto by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky, 1958.
33
Directed by Herbert Rappaport, Lenfilm, 1962.
34
E.A. Levinson and I.I. Fomin, “Zhilye kvartaly na vnov’ osvaivaemykh terrritoriiakh Leningrada,” Arkhitektura Leningrada, no. 2 (1936): 26.
35
See “Itogi Vsesoiuznogo konkursa na tipovie proekty zhilykh domov,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 7 (1956): 1–3.
36
Y. Shass, “Kvartaly krupnopanel’nykh domov v Leningrade,” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 1 (1958): 30.
37
Ibid., 37.
38
V.A. Bystrov, et al., “Proidennyi put’,” Lenproekt. Biulleten’ tekhnicheskoi informatsii, no. 3 (1957): 8.
39
D.A. Chagin, “Zhilye doma v Leningrade s malometrazhnymi kvartirami dlia posmeinogo zaseleniia,” Lenproekt. Biulleten’ tekhnicheskoi informatsii, no. 3 (1957): 11–12.
40
E.A. Levinson and D.S. Goldgor, “Palitra arkhitektora stanovitsia bogache,” AiSL, no. 3 (1959): 23.
41
V.F. Tvelkmeier, “Synov svoikh Rodina ne zabudet, vragov ne prostit,” AiSL, June 1946, 17.
42
See S. Yarov, Blokadnaia etika. Predstavlenie o morali v Leningrade v 1941–1942 (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2021), 184–192.
43
G.F. Petrov, Pamiatnik skorbi i slavy. Piskarёvskoe memorial’noe kladbishche (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1986), 27.
44
G.A. Vasiliev, “Aleksandr Vasil’ev,” in Arkhitektory ob arhkitektorakh. Leningrad – Peterburg. XX vek, ed. V.G. Isachenko (St. Petersburg: Ivan Fedorov, 1999), 400.
45
Ibid., 402.
46
G.A. Ol and E.E. Levinson, Evgenii Levinson (Leningrad: Stroyizdat, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1976), 76.
47
Tvelkmeier, op. cit., 17.
48
I.D. Sablin, “Pamiat’. Smert’. Arkhitektura,” www.art1.ru, October 16, 2013.
49
Vasiliev, op. cit., 402.
50
Petrov, op. cit., 30.
51
Sablin, op. cit.
52
See M.S. Uvarov, “Metafizika smerti v obrazakh Peterburga,” in Metafizika Peterburga (St. Petersburg: Eidos, 1993), 113–129.
53
“Prospekt Nepokorennykh,” SiAL, no. 6 (1966).
54
Petrov, op. cit., 47.
55
Ibid., 38.
56
P. Barskova, “Blokada – neotrefleksirovannaia gumanitarnaia katastrofa,” Colta, September 8, 2021.
57
A. Bitov, Pushkinskii dom (Moscow: Vagrius, 2007), 58.
58
A. Bitov, Pushkinskii dom (Moscow: Vagrius, 2007), 96.
59
S. Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim (Moscow: Nezavisimaia Gazeta 1998), 28.
60
B.M. Kirikov and M.S. Shtiglits, Arkhitektura leningradskogo avangarda. Putevoditel’ (St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2008), 34.
61
A. Strugach, “Kommentarii arkhitektora,” The Village, May 16, 2016.
62
Y.E. Shass, “O tvorcheskoi napravlennosti v zastroike zhilykh kvartalov Leningrada,” AiSL, no. 4 (1959): 18.
63
Y.E. Shass, “O tvorcheskoi napravlennosti v zastroike zhilykh kvartalov Leningrada,” AiSL, no. 4 (1959): 18.
64
Y.E. Shass, “O tvorcheskoi napravlennosti v zastroike zhilykh kvartalov Leningrada,” AiSL, no. 4 (1959): 20.
65
E.M. Poltoratsky, “I planirovka-tvorchestvo,” SiAL, no. 11 (1977): 5–6.
66
E.A. Levinson and D.S. Goldgor, “Palitra arkhitektora stanovitsia bogache,” AiSL, no. 3 (1959): 23.
