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Housing and Revolution: from the Dom-Kommuna to the Transitional Type of Experimental House (1926–30)

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Housing and Revolution: from the Dom-Kommuna to the Transitional Type of Experimental House (1926–30) $UFKLWHFWXUDO Movilla Vega, D. 2020. Housing and Revolution: From the Dom-Kommuna to the Transitional Type of Experimental House (1926–30). Architectural +LVWRULHV Histories, 8(1): 2, pp. 1–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.264 RESEARCH ARTICLE Housing and Revolution: From the Dom-Kommuna to the Transitional Type of Experimental House (1926–30) Daniel Movilla Vega In the USSR, against the backdrop of political change and social instability in the 1920s, the issue of housing for the masses was addressed by the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA), under the leadership of Moisey Ginzburg. Their mission was not only to provide a solution to the lack of accom- modation in the major cities of the country, but to redefine housing as a framework suited to a soci- ety transitioning towards a fully socialised life. The response was developed in three stages of design research, over a period of five years. The initial conceptual phase was formally presented by members of the OSA at the 1926 Comradely Competition, and focused on the housing question, with specific designs for communal houses. The second stage revolved around the scientific and methodological research of the Stroykom, developed in parallel with the designs for the new communal living units. The final stage took material form in six specific buildings, known as transitional-type experimental houses. One of these, the Narkomfin, gained worldwide recognition as a modern prototype of Soviet avant-garde housing, and has been widely researched as a result. However, to date no study has approached all three phases with equal scrutiny and methodology. This article offers a detailed account of the OSA’s experimental design strategies for collective workers’ housing between 1926 and 1930 under Ginzburg’s leadership by examin- ing original sources, as well as analysing and restoring the individual projects at each stage. It provides a new interpretation of the famous Narkomfin House and ideas on the first Soviet avant-garde housing project by reconstructing the complex research context in which the building, in tandem with other projects, was developed. Introduction Policy (1921–28) were actually implemented.1 Lacking In 1926, the leading theorists of the Association of both the economic and technical means for new con- Contemporary Architects (OSA) announced a ‘Comradely struction in the immediate aftermath of World War I and Competition for Preliminary Design of Housing for Work- the revolution in 1918, workers and their families were ers’. The competition brief, published in the third issue of initially re-housed in existing dwellings that, until then, the association’s journal Sovremennaya Arkhitektura (SA), had been single-family bourgeois homes.2 However, this called for the development of new residential typologies. measure of turning private into communal apartments — The stated goal was not merely to resolve the shortage of a result of the nationalisation of land and the abolition of workers’ housing in the Soviet Union, but, most impor- property — could at best provide a temporary fix to work- tant, to facilitate ‘new relations falling under the notion ers’ precarious living conditions in cities like Moscow or of community’ (Ginzburg et al. 1926a; translation by Saint Petersburg, where industrial enterprises were typi- the author). There had, of course, been earlier efforts to cally concentrated.3 address the pressing housing question. But the Comradely During the first half of the 1920s, Soviet planners Competition was the first to systematically develop inno- and architects began to develop new habitat models. vative solutions at both the scale of the individual living The earliest of these models featured low-density sin- unit and the residential building scale in a deliberate gle-family homes built close to the new factories and attempt to assist women’s emancipation. Its intent was to industrial enterprises. An example of this type of settle- redefine not only the nature of the ‘socialist family’, but ment is the Sokol cooperative on the industrial outskirts also the relationship between individual and collective, of Moscow, designed by Nikolay Markovnikov in 1923 more broadly. (Khan-Magomedov 1987: 345). As the decade went on, Only a few of the avant-garde projects that sought to the more economical solution of multi-family blocks address the migration of rural populations to the rapidly proliferated and soon became the norm for newly built expanding cities during the years of the New Economic workers’ housing. Aleksandr Gegello, Aleksandr Nikol’skiy and Grigoriy Simonov’s three- and four-storey buildings on Traktorskaya Ulitsa in Leningrad, built between 1925 Umeå School of Architecture, Umeå, SE and 1927, are prime examples of this second approach [email protected] (1987: 275–76). Art. 2, page 2 of 16 Movilla Vega: Housing and Revolution While these first two models are rather conventional, between the range of proposals while also highlighting the third habitat model, developed by Soviet avant-garde continuities in spatial arrangements throughout the theoreticians and architects, entailed experimental pro- three stages of the design process. Revisiting theoretical jects for communal housing, called domma-kommuny debates among the authors in relation to their designs, (singular: dom-kommuna). It is with the domma-kommuny the article builds on and expands previous studies on that this article’s research into experimental design strat- the Narkomfin Communal House (Buchli 1998, 1999; egies for collective workers’ housing really begins. By Cramer and Zalivako 2013; Pasini 1980; Udovički-Selb introducing a range of additional programmes into these 2016). At the same time, and more importantly, it offers dwellings, the avant-garde’s intention was to transform new insights into the collective genesis of Ginzburg’s workers’ consciousness and induce collective behav- theories concerning standardisation and typification in ioural patterns — a process of socialisation of daily life residential design. (byt)4 deemed consistent with the objectives of socialist politics. First Stage, Conceptual Approach: The 1926 A series of architectural competitions initiated by local Comradely Competition authorities — those by the Soviet of the City of Moscow The OSA brigade’s initial attempts to define the dom- (Mossovet) in particular — tried to stimulate the develop- kommuna emphasised quick and easy construction in ment of these communal housing types. For example, a an effort to provide inexpensive housing for individual 1922 competition for the design of two exemplary work- working-class families. One of the main goals of the Com- ers’ housing schemes in Moscow asked for the provision radely Competition, launched in 1926 among OSA mem- of social infrastructures such as clubs, kindergartens and bers in their journal Sovremennaya Arkhitektura, was ‘the playgrounds, communal kitchens and dining rooms, wash- creation of a house-organism to facilitate novel produc- rooms and showers, laundries, doctors’ surgeries, garages tive and domestic relations between workers, leading to and storage facilities (Bliznakov 1993: 93). And in 1925, the notion of community.’5 The design proposals were for the first time a competition brief for communal hous- not only to strike a balance between social and economic ing explicitly stated as its goal the liberation of women requirements. They were also expected to lay the ground- through the promotion of communal amenities and work for optimally meeting housing needs. To establish the encouragement of new and improved relationships the programme and its basic parameters for the design among family members and residents (Kopp 1970: 145). brief, two surveys, one assessing workers’ demands and Few proposals were submitted to this 1925 Mossovet the other collecting recommendations from construc- competition, and none came from members of the OSA. tion experts in the USSR, were published in the following However, it helped fuel the debate among architects on issue (Ginzburg et al. 1926b: 109). communal forms of housing for workers, prompting Aimed at ordinary citizens, the first of these surveys reconsideration of hierarchies of class and gender. Just included six questions about the conditions for a tran- one year later, the young group of Constructivists, who sition to the new byt, as well as about any past petit openly opposed political interference in design work bourgeois residue that ought to be rejected. The second (Hudson 1986: 559–560), began their own research on survey, geared towards specialists, focused on build- the issue of workers’ housing. Led by Moisey Ginzburg, ing technologies and raised questions about construc- the OSA architects embarked on a five-year investigation tion materials and methods, occupation, the advisable of experimental housing models, taking technical pro- number of floors, minimum space standards and other gress, economic constraints and the Soviet leadership’s building requirements. Only five responses were pub- goal to establish new social relationships as their point lished in the journal (Otvety na anketu SA 1927). Four of of departure. them addressed the problem of byt reform from differ- Drawing from a wide range of primary sources from ent perspectives: defending art as the main driving force archives and personal collections in Moscow, Rotterdam, in the transition to a new way of life, denouncing newly Cambridge, Dessau, New York and New Jersey, the pre- built apartments that reproduced earlier
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