An Uneasy Metamorphosis: The Afterlife of Constructivism in Stalinist Gardens

Abstract

If a failed hope could still have an afterlife, then what happened to the people who believed in constructivism? For these architects, professional survival was top priority. Many—like Moisei Ginzburg, Ivan Leonidov, and Mikhaïl Korjev—tried to find a specialized niche wherein they could work according to their artistic convictions and become specialists in designing gardens. The abstract geometry of the Le Nôtre gardening school was for them a source of inspiration between the use of history and the modernization of that legacy. Strangely enough, the absolute Sun King gardener became in the USSR a model, organizing nature like a suprematist abstraction. Imitating Versailles became a way to satisfy the Stalinist USSR’s need for magnificence. Through gardens, the constructivists were still given a chance to experiment, changing the meanings of places. Meanwhile, they invented a daring aesthetic afterlife for constructivism, enabling a singular conceptual and political creation.

Key Words:

• Gorki Park
• Landscape Architecture
• Landscape Design
• Russian Constructivism
• Stalinist Landscapes

Notes

1 All quotations in the essay were translated by the author.

2 The imperial palaces and gardens like Peterhof or Tsarskoie Selo were mostly used by the Romanov family, not open to the public (unlike Versailles, even in the seventeenth century), except for rare special occasions. So these majestic places had only a scarce influence on the creation of public parks in prerevolutionary Russia. Few town parks were created before 1917; an example is the Hermitage Garden in Moscow, opened in 1894. See Kolosova (2012, 25–8).

3 So the professionals first discussed the topic well ahead of the Central Committee's decision the following year, a clue showing that the power structure was following some of the late urban debates.

4 As shown in fig. 1, the landscape is treated only as a secondary part of the project.

5 For a larger reflection on Magnitogorsk, see Kotkin (1997). I also focus on some lesser-known aspects of the city's first years in Bellat (2015).

6 As fig. 2 shows, the drawing tries to isolate the main lines of the classical garden, creating a kind of abstraction.

7 Fig. 3 uses a bird's-eye view to show clearly the organization of the gardened space in this facility.

8 The Organization of Proletarian Architects; see Khan-Magomedov (2011a).

9 As fig. 4 shows, the architect reworked the urban space as an abstract leisure ground.

10 In fig. 5, the use of a world map in the center of the project insists on the idea of world revolution.

11 I did much research between 2010 and 2015 to discover the fate of Kalinine. He was still alive during the 1970s, but I could not discover anything on him after the 1980s. He probably died in the 1990s in a period when many elderly artists died without being noticed—not surprising in these chaotic years for the country—but there is a lack of information about this point.

12 Such as Ivan Fomine (1872–1936), Vladimir Chtchouko (1878–1939), Ivan Zholtovski, and Nikolaï Lanceray (1879–1942), though Ilya Golossov (1883–1945) sent a proposal more marked by the new experimental spirit.

13 Fig. 6 expresses the search for a geometric way to handle the urban landscape.

14 Fig. 7 uses the same method as previously shown in Fig. 6.

15 As figs. 8–9 show, the projects become more ambitious, summoning a world heritage to serve new aspirations for grandeur in the USSR.

16 In fig. 11, the architect is attempting a last use of modern landscape ideas.

17 The magnificent fig. 12 shows the progress of the architect in his creative adaptation of seventeenth-century design methods.

18 In fig. 13, this use of the French formal garden is now perfectly obvious.