The Dark Ecology of Magnitogorsk

LYDIA XYNOGALA The Cooper Union

MAGNITOGORSK, SOUTH URALS, . of Magnitaya dreamed, was, to put it mildly, potentials. Magnitogorsk - because of the Rich in various ores, the South Urals region never realized3.” As history would show later, extremity of its degradation juxtaposed of the Russian Federation has been exploited the forest proved inadequate to stop the with its architectural promise in the indus- through mining and industrialization over the colossal amount of pollution from seeping trial age - becomes the testing ground for past century. Magnitogorsk represents the through the water, air and soil. As a new city Dark Ecology. promise of social transformation ushered though Magnitogorsk represented for archi- in by the October Revolution that this rich tects and urbanists of the time the promise of would spark a new powerful indus- a social and technological utopia. try and create a new city. It was euphoria of DARK ECOLOGY possibilities. The urban vision embodied the Mining and industrial production have dream that science could develop a better degraded eleven percent of the earth’s soil1. model for society. By the end of the 1930’s Dark Ecology explores an alternative landscape Magnitogorsk Works was producing 10% of for the post-industrial wasteland. Wasteland is the country’s steel1 . ’s vision a territorial concept that typically conveys the of the most technologically advanced steel unwanted, exhausted and useless. This project plant in the world came at the heels of the aims to rethink emerging ecologic strategies Soviet Union’s rapid transformation from an in remediation, the act of cleaning, and often agrarian society to a modern, industrialized the attempt (and anxiety) to erase the mate- country. It was also the moment of the Soviet rial traces of production. In his lecture titled avant-garde, when Constructivists advocated “Ecology without Nature in Athens Slavoj for new radical principles in construction. El Žižek defines the ecological problem of the Lissitzky, Leonidov and the OSA team from the concept of “nature”, “The big Other doesn’t Soviet Union alongside an international group exist.”... Nature has already accepted our pol- of architects like Ernst May participated in the lution.” This project investigates the creative competition for the urban planning of this new potential in the processes, topographies and city2 . material derivatives that constitute degraded Magnitogorsk lies beyond a giant lake that terrains. Dark Ecology can be embraced as a was created by damming the River—the design methodology; one that acknowledges steel factory would be surrounded by forest. that not all human damage is reversible. As a The new socialist city, or Sotsgorod, separated project it relies on the terrain of ambiguity; industrial zones from residential ones with natural/man-made, clean/dirty, unwanted/ greenbelts that purportedly kept toxins from desired are rejected polarities. This “messy intermingling with domestic life. But accord- whole” and its material, chemical and “nat- ing to Vilii Bogun, the city’s primary architect, ural” manifestations is embraced, revealing “The garden city, about which the first settlers surprising architectural, urban and landscape

72 OPEN CITIES: The New Post-Industrial World Order International Project Proceedings 73