Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Architecture and Counter-revolution: The Ideology of the Historiography of the Soviet "Avant-garde" Thesis How to cite: Ruivo Pereira, Ricardo (2018). Architecture and Counter-revolution: The Ideology of the Historiography of the Soviet "Avant-garde". PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2017 The Author https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.0000d226 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk Architecture and Counter-revolution The ideology of the historiography of the Soviet “avant-garde” PhD Thesis Ricardo Ruivo Architectural Association Graduate School of Architecture Director of Studies: Mark Cousins Supervisor: Pier Vittorio Aureli 1 2 Acknowledgements This thesis has been made possible only through the extensive sacrifice of my parents, who funded my work and stay in London these past four years. To my father, I must here thank for the continuous intellectual complicity and comraderie he has invested in me for all my adult life, and especially through my post-graduate studies. To my mother, I forever owe an unpayable debt of love and thorough admiration for her continuing struggle on her noblest of professions, which has become simultaneously the financial base of my studies and an increasingly nightmarish environment to work in in the face of the effects of neo-liberal austerity. I wish that her all-consuming dedication and sacrifice, which continue to leave scars, to me and the family as a whole, will soon be made more compatible with personal happiness. To my extended family I also owe a great debt, especially to my grandparents, whose savings from times when such were possible to professionals have secured the outrageous tuition of first-World graduate studies. It is impossible to finish the thesis and not have on my mind the grandfather and grandmother I recently lost, and the grandmother and grandfather who are still with me. Apart from general thank-yous of encouragement and friendship that I could address at several people, with particular revelance to my sister who I love more than anyone else on this earth, I feel I should give a special thank-you to my best of friends and partner-in-crime Will, who made crucial direct and indirect contributions to my ongoing work. I hope the reverse is true as well. To Pier Vittorio, who has been much more important to this thesis than he probably himself suspects, I thank for his optimist engagement, and the contributions he has made throughout the process. Finally, to Mark, I must send my biggest love, for his support, intellectual complicity, and friendship. Nowhere would I have found a supervisor with whom a more fulfilling and warm relationship could emerge. 3 Table of Contents Part One: Stories of “the Avant-garde” 1 – “The Historiographical Link” Redemptory “modernism” 8 The western heirs 20 Part Two: “The Project” of “the Avant-garde” 1 – “The Link” and “the Project” The revolution in London 30 Architecture “in the middle” 35 “Negative” in form, “positive” in content 50 2 – The Word and the Thing Theories of “the avant-garde” 58 “The avant-garde” and politics 67 3 – Operative Criticism and “the Historiographical Link” “The project” and history 76 “The project” of “operative criticism” 80 4 – “The Historiographical Link” and Conceptual History Objects and categories 92 4 Part Three: The Historiographical Construction of “the Avant-garde” 1 – When Categories Melt: Debating the Thaw Defrosting “modernism” 102 The reform of categories in the Khrushchovite thaw 106 2 – Two “Constructivisms” The historical split 115 Historiographical splits 122 “Linking” the split 130 3 – Drawing Lines I: The Problem of Origin Stories: Art v Politics Splitting lines 136 Anglo-American art-history 139 Continental politics 144 4 – Drawing Lines II: Internal Divisions: “The Avant-garde” v Politics The cultural revolution: why “constructivism” is objectively Trotskyite 150 The actual revolution: the “really existing plan” 157 The historiographical survival of “the project” 166 5 – Drawing Lines III: The Finishing Line of “the Avant-garde”: Engagement without Politics “The project” in real planning 169 “The avant-garde” in scholarship 173 “The avant-garde” in practice 180 “The avant-garde” reborn 189 Part Four: Epilogue 1 – Positive in Form, Negative in Content, and the Meaning of Contemporary Formalism The really-existing conditions 200 Formalisms 205 Bibliography 220 5 6 Part One Stories of “the Avant-garde” 7 1 – “The Historiographical Link” Redemptory “modernism” Let us start with two pieces of historical fiction. In 2012 the novel The Architects, by Stefan Heym, was published in English for the first time by Daunt Books. Heym, an important, liberal oppositionist, East German writer whose workings are by now mostly available to the English-speaking public, had seen his first attempt to publish this volume in the UK, sometime in the mid-70s, refused.1 The novel had been written originally in English, as Heym frequently did, since he was aware that much of his work was unsuitable for publication in the GDR. This particular work was especially delicate. Heym’s first foray into a direct critique of Stalinism, written between 1963 and 1965, The Architects would become his last published work. It was published in Germany only in 2000, one year before his death, and would wait another twelve years to be published in the language it was originally written in. In the same year of 2012 a book on the work of an internationally successful London- based architect, Zaha Hadid, was published, in both German and English, by Zurich's Galerie Gmurzynska. One might ask why this book is counted here as a piece of historical fiction, but it is a peculiar book. Somewhere in-between the self-aggrandizing expensive hard-cover volume on the work of a successful contemporary architect, and a book collecting together contributions on respected art and architecture from a past age, Zaha Hadid and Suprematism presents the work of Zaha Hadid through the eyes of the Soviet "avant-garde". Inevitably, it also presents the Soviet "avant-garde" through the filter of Zaha Hadid's work. 1 It was refused by his own friend Desmond Flower, director of the publishing house Cassell and his usual publisher in London, to whom he had sent a manuscript. Peter Hutchinson’s research suggests it may have been rejected out of personal concern for Heym’s safety given the sensitive subject of the novel, which embraced a critique of Stalinism in a period when the GDR government was not keen on embracing Khrushtchevite reformism. For this, and other details surrounding the long-winded history of this novel’s publishing, see: Peter HUTCHINSON, Stefan Heym: The Perpetual Dissident , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006 As well as his afterword for the 2012 Daunt Books edition of The Architects : Peter HUTCHINSON , “Afterword”, in Stefan HEYM, The Architects , Daunt Books, London, 2012 8 These two books tell us two different stories in two different ways, but both of them revolve around one central idea – A particular architectural heritage, imbued with an inherently revolutionary character, returns from the past and redeems us. Of the two books, The Architects is the more aggressive in presenting this narrative of redemption. It takes place in an unnamed city in the GDR, and centres on the character of Julia Sundstrom, and her growth as an independent woman and an architect. Julia, having lost her parents (both of them BAUHAUS architects) in the Soviet Union during their exile from Germany in the 30s, was adopted by one of their friends, Arnold Sundstrom (also a BAUHAUS architect), raised by him and eventually married him. Sundstrom had survived the period of exile and had come to embrace what came to be called “socialist-realism” – indeed we are prompted to believe that he survived because he embraced it. He becomes the chief architect in this East German town, with Julia and several others working under him, and they have just completed the first phase of an undertaking called the World Peace Road, which functions as an obvious metaphor for the Stalinallee in Berlin. When the novel starts, in 1956, the design for the second phase of the road is entering an open competition. 2 As part of the Khrushtchev reforms, which among other things involved a relaxation of the labour-camp penal system, another, fourth, BAUHAUS architect, Daniel Wollin, who had joined Sundstrom and Julia’s parents in exile, and who, like Julia’s parents, did not go through the period unscathed, yet managed to survive, is released and returns to their home town, and 2 The Stalinallee too is a monumental avenue, in the centre of East Berlin, which served as a model for period urban reconstruction in the GDR, and, like the World Peace Road, built in two phases. The first phase, launched in 1949 and built from 51 onwards in the monumental sort-of-classicist style typically associated with “Stalinism”, was followed by a new development towards the city centre after 61 built of modernist housing blocks perpendicular to the street. With this new development came the rechristening of the street to its contemporary name, Karl-Marx- Allee. For more on its history, which we don’t need in detail here, see: Friedrich FÜRLINGER, “City Planning in Divided Berlin”, in Charles B.