Architecture, experimental psychology and the techniques of subjectivity in Soviet Russia, 1919-1935

Thesis: Ph. D. in Architecture in the History and Theory of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2014.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "September 2014."Includes bibliographical references (pages 377-405).This dissertation examines how Soviet architecture employed the achievements of experimental psychology in order to transform human subjectivity during the Interwar period, particularly in the years defined by the First Five-Year Plan of Economic Development (1928-1932). In this program of forced modernization, every resource-including human muscular, intellectual, and emotional energy-had to be channeled into the construction of an industrialized economy. Inspired by studies of unconscious, physiological responses to visual stimuli and by an accompanying turn to psychologism in the philosophy of science, Soviet architects, artists, and bureaucrats reinterpreted architectural work as the design of subjective perception, the purpose of which was to produce an energetic subject who would actively and efficiently participate in the implementation of the Plan. The dissertation examines three episodes in which Soviet architecture and design aspired to control the unconscious in order produce a new energetic subject. The first part explores the theoretical research on unconscious perception conducted by Nikolai Ladovskii's Rationalist architectural movement, which, following the philosophy of empiriocriticism, strove to economize the energy of perception. The second illustrates how the theory of the unconscious was tested and developed experimentally, assessing the program of wallpainting developed by architect Moisei Ginzburg, Bauhaus designer Hinnerk Scheper, and others as an artistic and architectural discipline that aspired to produce working energy. The third and final episode exemplifies how unconscious perception was put to practical use in the Moscow Central Park of Culture and Leisure under Betti Glan, where creative energy was evoked by material objects and the spatial environment.by Alla G. Vronskaya.Ph. D. in Architecture in the History and Theory of Architectur

Modernism and Mobilization: From Viktor Sokolsky’s Economic Principle to Interwar Architectural Planning

Influential before the revolution of 1917, the work of the now-forgotten Russian imperial military architect Viktor Sokolsky (1869–1913) on the efficiency of construction continued to be studied in the aftermath of the revolution. An analysis of its influence reveals how modern architecture converged with military history, blurring the established historiographic boundaries between the radical and the regressive. Among the projects that developed Sokolsky’s intentions is Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow (1928–1930). The genealogy of this modernist icon reveals its roots in a typology well developed in imperial military architecture: barracks. This example demonstrates that the emergence of modern, mass, warfare led to an elaboration of the principles of modernist, mass architecture with its ethos of hygiene, efficiency, and economy

The Utopia of Personality: Moisei Ginzburg’s Project for the Moscow Park of Culture and Leisure

This article focuses on Moisei Ginzburg’s competition entry for the Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Moscow (1931), assessing its nature as a utopian landscape. It demonstrates how the program of the project emerged from the debates on modernist town planning as an attempt to adapt ideas developed in the course of these debates to existing urban context. Emerging prior to the rest of the modernist urban environment, the park assumed the role of representing the settlement of the future within the city of the past, while simultaneously forming a part and parcel of the urban system to come. It was both inscribed into the modernist system of the zonal division of the city as the recreation zone and itself divided into separate zones, becoming a miniature model of an ideal modernist city of the future. The project was based on the principles of “disurbanism,” an approach to town planning, which Ginzburg earlier developed in his project of the Green City near Moscow (1930). Following the theoretician of disurbanism Mikhail Okhitovich, Ginzburg declared the individual (rather than the family or the group) the basic unit of society, and consequently, personal development became the major mission that his park was to perform. As a result, the Park of Culture and Leisure became not a site, but a mechanism of personal and urban transformation.Статья посвящена заявке Моисея Гинзбурга на конкурс проектов Центрального парка культуры и отдыха в Москве (1931), рассматривавшей природу как утопический ландшафт. Автор показывает, каким образом программа проекта возникла в дебатах о современном планировании городов в качестве попытки применить идеи, развитые в ходе этих дебатов, к существующему городскому контексту. Возникнув прежде окружающей современной городской среды, парк принимал роль представителя поселения будущего внутри города прошлого, одновременно формируя частицу грядущей городской системы. Он вписывался в рамки модернистской системы зонирования города как рекреационная зона и одновременно сам дробился на меньшие зоны, сделавшись миниатюрной моделью идеального модернистского города будущего. Проект опирался на принципы дезурбанизма – подхода к планированию городов, который Гинзбург ранее применил в проекте Зеленого Города под Москвой (1930). Следуя теории дезурбанизма Михаила Охитовича, Гинзбург провозгласил индивида (но не семью или группу) базовой единицей общества, и, следовательно, развитие личности сделалось основной миссией, которую парк должен был исполнить. В результате парк культуры и отдыха должен был стать не местом, но механизмом персонального и городского преображения

Architecture and the Environment:Field Notes

These Field Notes, on the topic of Architecture and the Environment, elucidate how problems raised in the environmental humanities have informed architectural history, and in turn, what architectural history has to contribute to this emerging field. The short essays explore specific \u27positions\u27 in the overarching debate, identifying a radical return to critical theory and the embrace of the fundamentally transdisciplinary nature of environmental humanities and architectural history. While the positions advocate for a serious investigation of architects\u27 texts and ideas on environmental issues, the collection also champions a broader engagement with Anthropocene questions and proposes to adopt the environment as an intellectual perspective from which to look upon the world