The Journal of Architecture ISSN: 1360-2365 (Print) 1466-4410 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjar20 Free communication: from Soviet future cities to kitchen conversations Andres Kurg To cite this article: Andres Kurg (2019) Free communication: from Soviet future cities to kitchen conversations, The Journal of Architecture, 24:5, 676-698 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2019.1670230 Published online: 18 Oct 2019. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjar20 676 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg Free communication: from Soviet future cities to kitchen conversations Andres Kurg Institute of Art History and Visual Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, Estonia andres.kurg@artun.ee This article looks at discussions of communist urban planning in relation to both the Marxist theory of ideology and communication theory in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, and the ways in which these discussions were continued in the so-called paper architecture of the 1980s. The central keyword in these discussions is the Russian term obshchenie, referring simultaneously to intercommunication, conversation, and communality. Central to investigations of informal life practices in the late Soviet context, obshchenie has been described as a means of creating a distance from the official world, a way to reach distinct interiority and a sense of authenticity that has generally been associated with the domestic and the private sphere. I will juxtapose this anthropological viewpoint of obshchenie with the way this term was used in the 1960s in the works on the future communist city by the NER group in Moscow. Finally, I will bring this trajectory together with discussions through the paper architecture of the 1980s and ask if we could view these works as sites of struggle over the meaning of obshchenie on the eve of Perestroika. Introduction In 1988, in a catalogue accompanying the exhibition Paper Architecture at the Architectural Association gallery in London, architecture critic Brian Hatton discussed the works of a younger generation of Russian architects who had been successful in international competitions with their conceptual and narrative projects: For many years in Russia architecture must have seemed no more than a conversation: whispers in a courtyard, recollections and travellers’ tales at the table, the equivalent of that Russian literary tradition of writing done ‘for the drawer’, privately, for circulation among friends.1 Writing in the context of Perestroika and addressing authors as diverse as Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Yuri Avvakumov and Andrei Savin, Hatton underlined the inward-looking character of the projects, their turn away from the public concerns that had defined Soviet architectural doctrine throughout the previous decades: the sheer intensity of subjective life represented here indicates a flight from the objective imperatives of Soviet urbanism since Khrushchev’s launch of mass building production, towards an idea of a city motivated by points of desire, of dream and of reverie.2 Hatton’s description of architecture as a ‘conversation […] whispers in a courtyard’, conceived ‘for circulation among friends’, was in tune with other accounts of late Soviet culture given during Perestroika, highlighting the role of informal # 2019 RIBA Enterprises 1360-2365 https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2019.1670230 677 social practices and spending time among the circle of friends as the true site for independent cultural practices and artistic work. The term that was often used in Russian for these practices was obshchenie, simultaneously denoting inter-communication, communality, and spending time together. Literary scholars Petr Vail and Alexandr Genis wrote about obshchenie in the 1960s, relating it to practices on the margins of the official public sphere.3 In other accounts from the 1980s, obshchenie was described as a substitute for religion and portrayed as the only valuable way of existence that defined all other spheres and meanings.4 Several authors writing retrospectively about the late Soviet period have emphasised the correlation of domestic interiors and the personal interiority that was communicated to the circle of friends. For example, Svetlana Boym wrote about alternative communality (kommunalnoe obshchenie) that was established in shared apartments in the post-Stalin years.5 She further described a specific culture emerging from the 1960s onwards in the tiny kitchens of the newly erected mass housing, that provided places for the most confidential or unrestricted conversations: ‘The most important issues were discussed in the overcrowded kitchen, where people “really talked” […] The kitchen provided a perfect informal setting for the subtle, casual but friendly intimacy that became a signature of that generation.’6 From here anthropologist Alexei Yurhak described obshchenie as a characteristic trait of a late Soviet spatiality that he called a ‘deterritorialised milieu’, existing neither inside nor outside the dominant system while reinterpreting and appropriating the official language and culture. Indeed, for Yurchak, the intimate commonality and intersubjectivity of obshchenie was a performative genre that continuously reproduced this milieu: The noun obshchenie has the same root as obshchii (common) and obshchina (commune), stressing in the process of interaction not the exchange between individuals but the communal space where everyone’s personhood was dialogized to produce a common intersubjective sociality. Obshchenie, therefore, is both a process and a sociality that emerges in that process, and both an exchange of ideas and information as well as a space of affect and togetherness.7 Obshchenie was thus a general name that could characterise a relaxed chatting with friends, an intense exchange of nonconformist ideas among writers or artists, or sitting around a table in a good company and freely exchanging thoughts without the pressure of fitting to the dominant ideological doctrine. In recent years authors have also spoken of nostalgia for obshchenie in the postSoviet situation in Russia. Overlooking the social difficulties of the late Soviet period, fans of the rock music of that period look for rare recordings and reconstruct the hangouts of the time ‘as if trying to regain obshchenie’.8 In this article I want to juxtapose this anthropological view of obshchenie with the way the same term emerged in the 1960s in discussions of (communist) urban planning in relation to the Marxist theory of ideology and emerging communication theory. If obshchenie had already emerged as a special term for communication in Soviet linguistics and literary studies in the 1920s,9 it The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 678 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg gained new interest and use during the changes of the Khruschev thaw and its aftermath, thanks to an introduction of new sciences like cybernetics, information theory, and the rediscovery of sociology. In several accounts in the social sciences and humanities, this use of the term obshchenie was brought together with the ways in which intercommunication was described in the Marxist theory of ideology.10 According to this schema, kitchen conversations or ‘whispers in a courtyard’ would be situated in a broader system of communication that the sociologists and planners from the 1960s onwards aimed to map and control. Indeed, as noted by Susan Reid in a different context, if we adopt the more general perspective of modernisation for the analysis of the post-Stalin years, we would see the same historical forces that provided the possibility of the intimate private spaces emerge (i.e. mass housing under Khruschev) also transgressing its thresholds by tying the home to structures lying outside it (through means of communication, media, housing regulations and standards, among others).11 Anthropologist Caroline Humphrey has described the resilience of ideology in the Soviet Union in terms of material structures and the built environment that contributed actively to the ways in which people conceptualised their life. Among other examples, she analysed literary accounts of everyday life in communal dormitories. Rather than negating prescribed ideological ideas, such accounts demonstrated these ideas to be more excessive than initially envisioned. Yet, as she puts it, ‘the process was not straightforward, for the structures and surfaces of the infrastructure acted not as templates for generating the designated idea but like reflectors that deflected it and made it swerve aside.’12 In what follows, I will bring the discussions regarding obshchenie and communality in the post-Stalin years to bear on works of experimental planning and architecture in the mid-1960s, as seen in the theories for the future communist city by the architecture group NER. I then proceed to look at the long afterlife of the concept in the 1980s, in the way it re-appeared in the conceptual practices of some of the above-mentioned ‘paper architects’. If the NER project embodied the optimism of reforming socialism during the thaw and its aftermath—including a new kind of emphasis on individual development in the new urban society—then the paper projects that emerged during the so-called social stagnation of the Brezhnev years represented a subject dividing itself between official and informal worlds. Rather than understanding the paper architects’ work solely as a withdrawal from late Soviet society, I want to use the term obshchenie to show it to be related to, and in dialogue with, several of its concerns. As explained by Humphrey, this kind of dialogue between the official and the subjective was never straightforward and sometimes different ideological ideas were folded together in intricate ways. More broadly, I want to argue that obshchenie could be seen as an ‘emic’ or ‘vernacular’ concept13 that would in this specific spatial setting be used to explain the transformations in the Socialist built environment vis-à-vis the combined and uneven modernity of the second half of the twentieth century. 679 NER—towards the new city In 1966, in a book entitled The New Unit of Settlement: Towards the New City, members of the Moscow architecture group NER (Alexei Gutnov, Ilya Lezhava, Andrei Baburov, Stanislav Sadovsky, Zoia Kharitonova, Georgi Dyumenton) outlined a theory of settlement for the new communist society.14 Relying on the Marxist idea of the social progression of history, they critiqued existing forms of settlement that did not distinguish themselves in their organisation and structure from the social relations of previous epochs, and launched a search for new principles of design and planning. The NER group—abbreviated from Novyi Element Rasseleniya (New Unit of Settlement)—originated from the Moscow Architecture Institute, where in the late 1950s a company of students (Gutnov, Baburov, Lezhava, Kharitonova, Sadovsky, Andrei Zvezdin, Nikolai Kostrikin, Elena Sukhanova and Natalia Gladkova) had collaborated on a diploma project seeking solutions to problems of growth and overpopulation in cities. Following their graduation, the project led to a conceptual proposal for a new communist settlement. They proposed that the settlement be developed alongside wide, linear transportation channels—‘riverbeds of settlement’—containing factories, science centres and research institutes, from which would branch circular residential areas for 100,000 people, including housing, educational and leisure facilities (these units were considered ‘elements’ of the highway, or NERs). When an NER became full to capacity, another would be constructed elsewhere according to the same model. The residential units were to be oriented for pedestrians and were intended to be a zone of peaceful living, learning, growth and quietude, in contrast to the active and fast-paced ‘riverbed’.15 The NER group represented the optimistic moment of the Khruschev thaw, with its doctrine of ‘full-blown construction of communism’ and simultaneous opening up to Western technological influences. As many of the NER group’s members came from architectural families (including Baburov, Lezhava, Zvezdin),16 they had better access to architectural information from abroad. At the same time, foreign examples were combined with early-Soviet ideas of dis-urbanist planning schemes that proposed undoing the differentiation between town and country, opposing in this way contemporary Soviet urbanplanning practice.17 NER drew upon the so-called scientific technological revolution initiated in the early 1960s—the development of atomic power and cosmic exploration, of new materials, and use of computation and automation in science and industry18— and were also influenced by demand for progress by widespread sociological research and forecasting studies. During their studies, the members of the NER group had already collaborated with the philosopher and sociologist Georgi Dyumenton, who was employed at the Architecture Institute in the department of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and history, and who provided the group with the theoretical background for their architectural research. After graduation, while continuing work on the project, Dyumenton became a permanent member of the group, contributing to the The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 680 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg book in 1966 and using the same research in his own candidate dissertation (equivalent to a PhD) on ‘Communication and Settlement in the Transition to Communism’ at the Institute of People’s Economy in Moscow (1965).19 In architecture and planning, the growing role of sociology and statistics was emphasised from the mid-1960s onwards, especially after the 23rd Party congress in 1966 underlined the role of sociological studies as instruments in helping solve the questions of production and everyday life. This resulted in several meetings between scientists and architects at the Union of Architects, as well as funding for research projects at the Scientific Institutes relating planning and design to scientific principles of sociology and forecasting.20 In May 1966 the ‘theory club’ of the Union of Architects and the Soviet Sociological Association organised a joint meeting in Moscow that was dedicated to the sociological study of urbanism and architecture and emphasised the role of statistics and sociology in the research of large social processes of the city affecting its planning and structure.21 In 1967, following a harsh critique by the State Building Committee, the Scientific Research Institute for the Theory, History and Prospective Problems (i.e future studies) of Soviet Architecture, in Moscow, organised a seminar and exhibition ‘Social Model of the Future City’, gathering together presenters from architecture, sociology, and scientific forecasting.22 The participants included Alexei Gutnov and Ilya Lezhava from NER, as well as Konstantin Pchelnikov, Vyacheslav Loktev and Andrei Bokov. The subsequent publication of exhibition materials, combined with the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, which sought to show the communist future over the next 50 years, created a small boom in articles on future cities among the popular press at the end of the 1960s. Beginning in 1967, the same Institute also hosted a separate research group, led by Zoia Yargina and including several NER architects among its members, for the ‘sociological study of prospective problems in architecture’ that was engaged in the research of future architecture.23 Obshchenie—Verkehr—Intercourse In the 1966 book, the starting point for the authors’ analysis of communist urban life and for the construction of a ‘general functional model’ of the future city was the role of interpersonal relationships in everyday life. In order to define a relationship that could be ‘objectively measured in time and space’ they turned to Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology (1846): Thus, it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a ‘history’.24 Marx and Engels called this kind of connection—obshchenie in the Russian translation—‘intercourse’ (Verkehr). The term, which in German could also be translated as ‘traffic’, appeared often in The German Ideology, but disappeared in Marx’s later writings. It was used in a broad sense in The German Ideology, 681 signifying material relations of exchange or commerce (similar to ‘barter’), but also spiritual relations and relations between countries, which could include war. As the main emphasis of the book (first published in manuscript form in 1932 in Moscow) was to show the dependence of consciousness on material circumstances, the authors also showed Verkehr (intercourse) to be reliant on material practices: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. […] Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms.25 Later commentators have emphasised that the complexity of the term was demonstrated by its reference to commerce or exchange, how it referred both to the productive and the communicative elements of the relation: ‘what is at stake in Marx’s discussion is how to keep both aspects together, showing how the social nexus takes form, rather than reducing it to the strictly economic realm.’26 The German Ideology also spelled out ideas on the future communist society, which was seen as ‘the production of the form of intercourse itself’. In the communist society the basis of all previous relations of production and communication (intercourse) would be inverted and demystified: ‘the real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections’.27 Famously, it was also a society where the division of labour would be undone and nobody would have an ‘exclusive sphere of activity’: society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.28 Marxism and information theory This meaning of intercourse (obshchenie) as a material process was developed further by NER in a chapter based on the work by Dyumenton, who aimed to link humanist Marxism with contemporary achievements in cybernetics and information theory. As he stated, this combination ‘allows [one] not only to state the facts of behaviour and movement of people (this is given by statistics), but also to model social processes.’29 Dyumenton theorised this link most openly at a meeting of architects and sociologists in 1966, within the framework of the Union of Architects’ ‘theory club’. He stated that intercourse allowed one to describe ‘the social sphere’ in metric units (units of distance, of time, and of data), but also to work out a unified approach to all sides of social life (as forms of intercourse), thereby opening up a path to its qualitative measurement.30 Dyumenton proposed updating the methods of Claude Shannon (who studied information processes The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 682 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg mathematically) and Norbert Wiener (who studied the communication mechanisms of different systems, equating humans and machine systems) by taking into account the relationships between people entering into the informational network. To this end, he combined the informational model of communication, allowing exact measurement (that could determine the efficiency of built structures) with what he called the ‘general functional model of reproduction of human beings in the system of forms of communication’ to determine the structural units of society (‘the specific connection between its parts’).31 These units consisted of ‘stereotypical’ stages of human life in a society: youth, communication with relatives, communication between children, education, work, leisure time, consumption, and communication between genders. The way these models would be fed into spatial planning was further clarified by three diagrams in the NER book. The first model—which bore similarities to the Shannon-Weaver communication diagram—showed a communicative process, with a sender, receiver, channel, and feedback loop, whereby the optimal organisation of the environment (as the channel) would take into account the specific features of the intercourse, leading to a decrease in the loss of information. Intercourse was then studied as a measurable informational process but also as a material process that took place in a particular location, ‘a material channel of connection’.32 This projection had similarities to studies in design ergonomics at the time, where work environments and machine interfaces were designed according to human movements and physiological needs, leading to a movement from separate objects to unified surroundings. The second diagram illustrated the ways in which forms of intercourse were historically related to forms of settlement: polis in slave society, agglomeration in monopoly capitalism, etc. For the coming communist society, the dominant form of communication was proposed to be creative communication (‘the harmonic principles of developing one’s talents and applying it in creative work’33) with the linear ‘dissolved’ city as its corresponding form of settlement. Finally, the third diagram explained how the chosen forms of communication under communism were related to specific spatial settings, e.g. communication between mother and child taking place at home and in the kindergarten; consumption taking place at home and in the urban and agricultural service centres; or more amusingly, communication between sexes taking place at home, in nature and in the park. Each form was shown to belong to one of three general types of unit in the future project: a production complex, a scientific complex, and a housing complex (Fig. 1). NER maintained that the latter, being the site for ‘free communication’ (svobodnoe obshchenie), was the most important aspect of human and social development, and this principle was followed in the design of residential units, educational centres, research centres, and places of work.34 According to the NER group’s predictions, the active time of work would be reduced over the coming years to five or six hours a day and eventually to just four hours, correspondingly increasing leisure time, which in the communist society was intended for self-development and other activities according to people’s 683 various interests (perhaps, as seen in Marx, doing one thing today and another tomorrow, without having the need to specialise).35 Centres for free communication To achieve this ideal of self-development, life in the circular residential complex was to be organised around the centre for free communication: a three-storey rectangular building, consisting of two parallel strips of spaces on all sides, the outer strip housing double-height exhibition halls, classrooms and ‘activity rooms’, and the inner strip designated for reading rooms, ‘storage of information’, and laboratories. Between the two volumes were separate sculptural auditoria, a planetarium, a sports hall, and a swimming pool. The first floor, with its vestibules and entrance space, was raised on posts. In the authors’ words this kind of club would allow one to pursue specific cultural interests: ‘seminars on chosen topics, conferences, debates, discussions and free conversations. […] There can be informative exhibits showing the results of any particular inquiry or reflecting the activities of its members.’36 There was also to be a large rectangular plaza in the middle, a place of ‘free communication of The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 Figure 1. New Unit of Settlement (NER), diagram of stereotypical relationships of communication and their spatial localisation. Figures 1, 2 and 3 are from: Alexei Gutnov, Ilya Lezhava, Andrei Baburov, Stanislav Sadovsky, Zoia Kharitonova, Georgi Dyumenton, Novyi element rasseleniya: na puti k novomu gorodu [NER—Towards the New City] (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1966) 684 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg Figure 2. New Unit of Settlement (NER), centre of communication free citizens’, in its layout not unlike a Greek market-place or agora, but removed from the function of commercial exchange37 (Fig. 2). It is perhaps difficult to understand the novelty of the NER project in its original circumstances from today’s viewpoint. Rather than reflecting a formal aesthetic of a potential ‘future’, the architectural language of the new city outlined in the speculative schema of the communication centre reflected the building technologies and possibilities of the given moment: ‘we have tried to show how a new functional structure for the urban environment is already possible’, wrote the authors.38 Low modernist volumes of public buildings with large glass walls undoing the separation between the inside and the outside became emblematic of new architecture in the early Khruschev years, through works like the Moscow Pioneer Palace in the Lenin hills. The configuration of the centre of communication, with its rectangular courtyard and separate large meeting spaces housed in monumental freeform volumes, also came close to another iconic post-war monument, Le Corbusier’s Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh, where the typology of the space combined classical Western and local traditions. (Taking this parallel further, it is interesting to note a shift in function from the palace of assembly to the centre of free communication, in a project where any reference to power structures was repressed, if not absent altogether.) 685 Although the diagrams in the book emphasised the social character of communication and drew from information theory, their functional setup was conspicuously neutral and lacked references to the relationship between the built environment and existing power relations. This was different from the applications of cybernetics among the avant-garde in the West. If applied to architecture, as in the works of Constant, Cedric Price, or Archigram, cybernetics emphasised the principle of feedback and adaptation by users, often aiming to undo existing spatial relations (and thereby the hegemonic power relations) through adaptability and flexibility. Feedback that was enacted through a technical interface served to empower and activate the user, turning architecture into a machine for popular democracy. In the NER book, however, the relationship to the user was hard to place and could seem to get lost in the scientism of the schemas. Thus, when in 1968 the NER book was translated through Italian into English (titled, rather pretentiously, The Ideal Communist City), leading Western critic Kenneth Frampton was overly dismissive of the work, seeing it as: ‘formalistic in theoretical terms and pathetically empty and assiduously noncommittal in respect of a true revolutionary tradition.’39 Frampton’s expectations of Soviet architecture were related to the rediscovery of the heritage of 1920s constructivism, especially of Moisei Ginzburg and Nikolay Miliutin’s disurbanism (a theory promoting urban settlement that instead of concentration would be dispersed across the Soviet territory), but none of the avant-garde predecessors were mentioned explicitly in the book. However, the authors were well aware of this work, which was actively being rediscovered at that time at the above mentioned Scientific Research Institute for the Theory, History and Prospective Problems of Soviet Architecture in Moscow, primarily by architectural historian Selim Khan-Magomedov.40 It would be possible to see parallels between the proposed centres of free communication by NER and the workers’ clubs of Ivan Leonidov or ‘social condensers’ of Ginzburg from the 1920s and 1930s.41 Containing a multifunctional programme with auditoria, libraries and reading rooms, play rooms, and rooms for various hobbies, the aim of these clubs was to engage Soviet workers in their free time and shape them as new kind of subjects. As Anna Bokov has recently pointed out, situating the clubs next to housing and workplaces was of great importance in creating a closed daily circuit, but this arrangement also functioned ‘as an autonomous settlement unit, similar to a Russian obshchina (a traditional tightly-knit village community)’.42 A direct reference to workers’ clubs and houses of culture from the 1920s appeared in a dissertation that Ilya Lezhava wrote in 1970 on the centres of free time. Mentioning the importance of the Constructivist heritage in devising the leisure centres, he devoted a longer section to Ivan Leonidov’s ‘Club of a New Social Type’ from 1929. Organised similarly to the NER’s communication centre—that is, according to users’ interests—it was meant to a appear in Lezhava’s words as a ‘truly democratic club, intended for free communication of people in a broad program of topics.’43 The organisation of this club was devoted to educating a ‘highly cultivated individual’ who would visit the club The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 686 Figure 3. New Unit of Settlement (NER), interior view of an apartment Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg every day. As Richard Anderson has pointed out, Leonidov’s project was unusual in the context of other Constructivist practices: programmatically, it rejected the theatre hall as the focal point of the club, replacing it with a planetarium. But it was also architecturally unconventional, combining two unequally sized parabolic domes with a series of small cubic volumes and making ‘the organisation of media infrastructures a fundamental concern of the architect’.44 As a result, architectural form was subordinated to a social programme and to what Leonidov called ‘cultural organisation’.45 In this framework, the unconventional—and I want to argue, anti-authoritarian—outlook of the NER project would open up, if we regard the place and the freedom of the user against the overall background of the communication system (obshchenie) of the new settlement. In one image of the book we see a man sitting alone in the large open space of his apartment, which stretches through the whole depth of the building (to provide spaces with equal amount of sunlight throughout the day), enjoying the view that extends from the all-glass walls of his home (Fig. 3). If this image of solitude in one’s apartment can be understood as withdrawal from the collective spaces of the centre of communication, it was nonetheless related dialectically to the unified space of the city. As the book explained earlier, withdrawal was a form of free communication, organically related to ‘work and study during free time, to contemplation and evaluation of any phenomenon, assignment or act of a concerned person.’46 For a member of NER who participated in the activities of the centre through free communication, contemplative withdrawal was an extension of the feedback loop of discussion and self-development. In this way, free communication tied the community together not only through common activities but also common concerns. Even more, the idea of universal communication could be seen to correspond here to the ideology of unobstructed transparent vision dominant in post-war humanist discourse. As the caption to the photograph explained: 687 The eye of the individual takes in the whole NER, its centre, its rational network of streets and buildings, and going beyond these limits, passes over the immense surrounding spaces until it finally rests on the distant horizon, where the outlines of mountains, woods, and land are lost in mist.47 In the post-war humanistic idiom, this was a person distanced from the view, yet in control of it, in which, as art historian Margaret Iversen has put it in a different context, ‘measured distance, fixity, monocularity and mastery define the spectator who looks out on a space/object which is rectilinear, abstract and uniform.’48 Taking free communication as their starting point, the NER model presented a comprehensive social programme that assigned a central place to this kind of free individual, in the system of a dispersed urban network. Withdrawal then functioned in the cybernetic diagram of obshchenie as feedback, providing the individual with space for contemplation and allowing at the same time participation in common discussions. This was a vision of unalienated socialist space in the context of de-Stalinisation, where on the one hand reifying separations between spheres of life would be undone, while on the other hand, there was a search for a balance for individual development in discrete spaces of the apartment.49 This social programme worked out in the book in 1966 was taken further and given a different architectural form in several exhibition projects and presentations by the NER group over the following years. In 1968 an extended version of the project was shown at the 14th Milan Triennale,50 and in 1970 the so-called NER 2 was shown at the Osaka World Expo in the Soviet pavilion. As outlined earlier, Ilya Lezhava developed the idea of free communication further in his dissertation on the design of leisure centres.51 Alexey Gutnov defended his dissertation ‘The Impact of Convertibility of the Urban Environment on the Method of Urban Design’ in 1970, which informed design proposals for the reconstruction of several central areas of Moscow, including Arbat Street, Stoleshnikov Pereulok, and Solianka Street.52 Then in 1977 Gutnov and Lezhava introduced the projects of Milan and Osaka in the book Budushee goroda. I will turn from here to the 1980s to bring the discussion on obshchenie together with discussions on the context of so-called paper architecture that emerged in Moscow during that decade. In contrast to the optimism of reforming Socialism in the 1960s, the 1980s has been seen as a withdrawal and ironic distancing from active political discussions (characterising a dissident obschenie). The promise of longer leisure hours that set the ground for free communication in NER failed to come into being, everyday life continued to be alienated in the Soviet version of consumer society and the public sphere was increasingly taken over by a discourse that Alexei Yurchak has characterised as ‘hypernormalisation’: ‘fixed and cumbersome forms of language that were often neither interpreted nor easily interpretable at the level of constative meaning.’53 Kitchen conversations became in this context an antidote to the allegedly formal and ritualistic discourse in the public sphere. Yet, I want to argue that in some cases these ‘conversations’ also demonstrated the long afterlife of the term obshchenie as it was used in the works of the NER group. The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 688 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg Arkhitektura SSSR 1983: competition for centres of communication In the mid-1970s, Ilya Lezhava supervised for the Moscow Architecture Institute (MARkHI) a series of student entries to competitions that were theoretically inspired by his recent candidate dissertation on the organisation of ‘complex centres for free communication’: in 1976 Mikhail Khazanov, Mikhail Belov, and Vladimir Lomakin’s Theatre of the Future Generations won the first prize in the International Organisation of Scenographers and Theatre Technicians (OISTT) competition;54 in 1978 Mikhail Belov, Valery Khodzhikov, and Sergei Chuklov were involved in a project for Town Hall for the International Architects‘ Union (UIA) student competition;55 and in the 1976 OISTT Competition the second prize was also won by a student team from MARkHI, comprising Georgi Solopov, Alexander Brodsky, and Ilya Utkin.56 These projects gradually inaugurated a new genre of competition architecture during the following years. The genre was characterised by unexpected juxtapositions of Soviet reality with fantastic architectural solutions, through an emphasis on the narrative content of the design and architecture that references flexibility and change over time. The design of Belov and Khazanov’s Town Hall competition entry included a redefined social programme instead of a specific structure: a covered square in front of the city’s central Soviet civic hall was turned into a meadow for public meetings and ceremonies, allowing the citizens themselves to determine the precise locations of these functions. ‘In the evening, after closing of the institutions, the new centre can become an urban garden for communication and entertainment.’57 Brodsky and Utkin’s project for a theatre space, in the courtyard near Kuznetsky Most metro station in Moscow, proposed a flexible theatre structure which could be redesigned for each performance: ‘during the play, the spectators can move around and take part in the action. The main idea of this project consists of a “construction game” type process.’58 In the following years, these principles found their way into works sent to conceptual competitions sponsored by journals like Japan Architect (JA) or Architectural Design (AD), where no restrictions in terms of budget, site or building systems could limit the architects’ fantasies. As the system of industrial housing production appeared to be beyond the control of the architects, there was a growing separation between the daily work of large, state architecture offices (like Mosproekt) and the detailed and fantastical work produced specifically for competition entries. In 1981, the Architects’ Union began to approve its members’ participation in international conceptual competitions, making it easier to send works abroad (previously this had only been done illicitly). In the same year, Mikhail Belov and Max Kharitonov won first prize in the JA residential design competition, giving rise to a sudden increase in entries from the Soviet Union and teams who concentrated solely on ‘paper’ projects. These paper projects attracted attention due to their specific, detailed, and time-consuming graphic style: they displayed on a single sheet of paper scenarios for the future use of buildings and comic strips showing surprising and irrational solutions. 689 Recognising that the phenomenon of paper projects had gained significant following, and that this trend was threatening to slip under the institutional radars of the Architects’ Union, the Union’s Group for the Study of Prospective Problems (i.e. the future) of Soviet Architecture, led by Gutnov, supported the launch of a similar conceptual competition at the all-Soviet journal Arkhitektura SSSR in December 1983. This first competition was dedicated to ‘centres of communication and leisure in living areas’ (Tsentr obshcheniya i dosuga zhilogo kompleksa) and required participants to propose a centre in the context of a contemporary micro-district, or housing quarter, for the social activity, hobbies, and needs of all age groups. The construction details had to be comparatively simple, oriented for mass production and also for self-build. As in the international competitions, the proposal was required to fit on a single sheet of paper. The main aim was to redirect the energy of a younger generation toward projects that would benefit Soviet society: whereas the international competitions featured abstract themes and ‘siteless’ theoretical narratives, the competition of Arkhitektura SSSR was aimed at local issues and at gathering proposals that could eventually be implemented in reality.59 The competition achieved its goals, receiving 351 entries from 60 cities across the Soviet Union. Jury representative and former NER member Zoia Kharitonova commented: ‘It is a pleasure that the journal came up with this initiative, rightly predicting the feelings of its many readers that have an active need for a creative competition and in communication (obshchenie).’60 Arkhitektura SSSR published overviews of the competition entries in two consecutive issues in 1984 and 1985. The first was devoted to the winning projects and honorary mentions, the second featured a selection by the magazine’s editors, accompanying a longer feature by architect and critic Evgeny Ass.61 The majority of the winning proposals aimed at increasing the variety and density of functions of the courtyards of mikroraion houses, introducing small pavilions for conversation and interconnected plazas providing ‘human scale’ and space for activities. In some works (such as Oleg Grigoriev and Sergei Mihailov’s second place entry), the standard courtyard of the mikroraion district was transformed into a lively and active environment, with small pavilions for meetings, smoking corners, stages for performances and dances, and children’s playgrounds. In other entries (such as that by Dmitri Shelest and Mikhail Tyumarkin) the articulation of the mikroraion into smaller micro-squares alongside pedestrian routes was achieved by introducing low brick walls and colonnades that brought spatial variety to the standardised housing district.62 Georgi Shumakov’s work ‘M-Centre’ proposed locating centres of communication next to entrances of underground metro stations, providing citizens with the possibility of participating in creative communication (tvorcheskoe obshchenie) and the ‘development of culture’ after work.63 The text on the display board described a daily routine, including the morning commute to work by train, the evening commute home, and the mechanical repetition and boredom associated with that routine. The work proposed breaking that monotony by providing citizens with ‘an emotional charge, the possibility of participating in creative communication (obshchenie) and the development of culture’ in The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 690 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg centres where one could spend time after work. These centres were to be divided into two interconnected zones by laconic spatial elements. In one zone, the ‘high arts’ were made available for passive enjoyment (looking at painting, design, and theatre decoration), while in the other zone citizens were invited to actively participate in the production of artworks. In so far as the idea of creative communication in the socialist society was still seen as relevant, here it existed only as an accompaniment to the daily grind, something to be enjoyed on the way home from the place of labour (since labour had yet to become un-alienated). These approaches bore formal similarity to developments in postmodern architecture in the West, where there had begun a shift away from the unified spaces of post-war humanism (offering visibility and inter-connectedness) and towards an architecture of the small scale and subdivision. (This approach found support in theories arguing that tangible barriers and clearlydefined public spaces could bring people together and enable greater social interaction.)64 Some works also commented on everyday life in the Soviet Union during that time, pointing to the queues and the frantic search for consumer products, but also emphasising its special sociality and intimate communication—phenomena described in later anthropological discussions as obshchenie: communication as a process and sociality emerging through conversation and shared activity. The attitude of the younger group of architects was exemplified by the critique that followed Arkhitektura SSSR’s competition of 1983. A leading voice of the younger generation, Evgeny Ass, argued that the competition demonstrated the emergence of a new generation of architects ‘with new concepts and a new, professional world-view’.65 He aimed to disassociate the works of his fellow architects from terms that he associated with the worn-out official discourse, words that reminded him of bureaucratic and devalued language: I do not like the term ‘obshchenie’, although one has to use it out of necessity. It has the air of abstraction and cold estrangement. If one speaks of organising communication, then it could be imagined as the activity of an organiser-entertainer (massovik-zateinik)—soulless and formal. The true meaning of the problem is seen in the way that architecture is able to influence the relationships between people, to provoke and sustain these relationships.66 For Ass, the use of obshchenie in architecture was coming close to the ‘hypernormalisation’ of public discourse, where the performative aspect of how and when someone was speaking became more important than the content. Against this, some members of the younger generation developed a style of writing that was free from references to ideological terms but also more poetic and ambiguous, speaking in associations and suggestions rather than direct explanations.67 Redefining Obshchenie I will finally examine two projects which exemplify the way that obshchenie as intercourse (as outlined in the 1960s) was both transformed and sustained by the works of the new generation of critical architects. 691 The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 Figure 4. Mikhail Belov, Andrey Savin, ‘We grow our club ourselves’, 1983. Entry for Arkhitektura SSSR competition ‘Centre of communication and leisure in living areas.’ Courtesy of Andrey Savin In Mikhail Belov and Andrei Savin’s entry for the Arkhitektura SSSR competition, ‘We grow our club ourselves’, the centre of communication was envisioned as a picturesque garden, where different activities were freely distributed about all of its territories (Fig. 4). Echoing Belov’s earlier Ratusha project (supervised by Lezhava), they described communication as always taking place according to one’s interests: ‘in order to organise communication within a neighbourhood, one needs an unusual environment to attract the inhabitants of the area; it could become the reason for communication.’68 Instead of adding more architecture to the already existing areas, they proposed exotic plants and a diverse landscape with a lake, hills, and small pavilions. We see people watching open-air cinema while taking a dip in the lake, following a theatre spectacle on the shores, learning to play musical instruments, painting 692 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg en plein air while listening to music on headphones, or reading a book while lying on the grass (blurring here any possible spatial hierarchies). However, this optimistic, cartoon-like scene had a disturbing frame: a section at the top of the drawing showed the garden to be located inside a huge greenhouse between standard prefabricated housing; the artificial lake inside the centre was supported by a complex system of pipes and ducts underneath; and the whole landscape turned out to be artificial, with controlled climate and infrastructure. The promise of a self-built anti-authoritarian club stretching across a free territory (where the citizens would be able to enjoy ‘hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon or rearing cattle in the evening’), thus turned out to be an illusion. Not only was it separated from the daily life of labour, as it was in the M-Centre, but the controlled atmosphere and supportive machinery further separated it from the reality of its existence. In the same year, Brodsky and Utkin participated in the British magazine AD’s international competition, ‘Dolls’ Houses’, with an entry called ‘Totem’. Combining, as they put it, ‘a Christmas tree, Maypole and the house of Winnie the Pooh inside a hollow tree’, they proposed a complex wooden structure for play at home, which would also provide enchantment and adventure for kids. A spiral staircase ascended to the top of the structure, with access to various fantastic and theatrical elements along the way: ‘Everything that children usually bring from the street will find a worthy place here’.69 They also provided several places to hide and retreat to imaginary worlds—theatrical scenes with flying angels, and historic pirate ships. The structure also had a pedagogical function: ‘All this ought to be profitable to children for developing the different positive qualities so necessary in our life.’70 Indeed, on a preparatory drawing that was not included in the final work (a reproduction of the drawing is held in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) one could see a long-bearded bespectacled man taking notes on a sheet of paper with a feather quill, while various fairy-tale characters, imaginary castles and landscapes are emerging out his beard. As the text explained, this was a person who had become a poet and philosopher because he had a Totem in his childhood71 (Fig. 5). With its style reminiscent of illustrations in children’s books, overabundance of small details drawn from everyday life and an extravagant selection of characters, Brodsky and Utkin’s work represented the intimate domestic spheres portrayed in anthropological discourse through the term obshchenie in the late 1980s. In this way the trajectory, from the use of the concept obshcheine in the 1960s through to the paper projects, was one of withdrawal and disengagement from public concerns. Whereas the 1970s competition projects (Belov’s Ratusha and Brodsky and Utkin’s Theatre) demonstrated the importance and continuing influence of ideas generated by NER in the 1960s—imagining communication as a cybernetic circuit and prioritising social programme over form—by 1983 that earlier concept of obshchenie had been criticised and displaced to an ironic context. The difference from 1960s humanist Marxism also becomes apparent once we look at the place awarded for the subject in these works: Belov and Savin’s Garden provided freedom for the subject without a possibility to inter- 693 (a) The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 (b) vene in the general controlled atmosphere; in Brodsky and Utkin the structures that could be used by the subject were limited to those within her home space. Instead of the fixed universal point of view of the contemplative viewer in the image of the NER apartment described earlier, the viewer presupposed by the Brodsky and Utkin project was a situated one, whose viewpoint, quoting Iversen again, was ‘shifting, tentative and partial’.72 Instead of a universal transparent space apprehended by the fixed viewer, here the space was dynamic and full: apprehending fragments, rather than totality; occupied by memory and fantasy. And yet, these fantasies, emerging themselves from the context of the surrounding everyday life, were not, as Caroline Humphrey reminded us, in plain opposition to ideology. As she argued on the basis of literary accounts of dormitories: ‘the imaginative-fantastic meanings spun off communal places constitute elliptical commentaries on the kernel of the ideology that was the “idea” of the construction in the first place.’73 In the case of Brodsky and Utkin’s project, there was an apparent continuity between the characters drawn to their imaginary worlds and the NER principles of humanist Marxism as demonstrated by Figure 5. Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Totem, 1983. Entry for Architectural Design (AD) international competition ‘Dolls’ Houses’ (preliminary version). Source: Russian State Archives for Art and Literature (RGALI) 694 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg 1960s modernity. If the Totem represented a withdrawal from obshchenie as a bureaucratic term, it was done so for the good of poetic and philosophical improvement. The long-bearded man—and of course the archetypal Soviet philosopher of the time would have been male—appears to be not so far away from the person who, in NER’s project, sits alone in a wide, glazed room and reflects on his place in the unitary urban system. The withdrawal of the poet continued to be that of a concerned citizen, engaged in solitary selfcultivation in order to create a well-rounded individual capable of working in sympathy with the common concerns of contemporary society. Conclusion Following the trajectory of the term communication as obshchenie from NER to the projects by Belov and Savin, and Brodsky and Utkin, there is a reflection of the transformations in late Soviet society and culture over the two decades. But the trajectory also demonstrates a certain ideological closeness between, or even resilience of, the humanist Marxist ideas of individual freedom in the 1960s and the critical representations of a different kind of built environment in the 1980s. In this, the two ideas of obschenie fold into one another in a complicated way, which almost seems to undo their temporal succession. If NER developed a general functional model of the future city together with social scientists—a city that was de-hierarchical, linear, dispersed—it did so by combining the new knowledge from cybernetics and information theory with humanist Marxist social theory. A central place in this was assigned to the system of communication that was elaborated in several diagrams and schemas, where in the centre stood an idea of an unalienated individual who is free to choose her or his activities in the new city. Withdrawal into contemplation was equally part of this diagram of free communication, and functioned as feedback, allowing the individual to participate in public concerns. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the term obshchenie became prominent in circles of younger Moscow architects and found its way into competition projects that prioritised social programme over form and used the cybernetic principle of feedback in the organisation of the buildings. Gradually, however, these practices paved the way for works that turned away from public concerns or saw the alliance of cybernetics and urban planning as bureaucratic, signifying modernist rationalism and repressive technological structures (as in Belov and Savin’s project of a communal garden). In the paper projects that emerged during the early 1980s, the site for the realisation of creative relationships had shifted to domestic interiors and even to fantasy worlds, gradually replacing the communist obshchenie with ones that were (more often retrospectively) called informal or nonconformist practices—whispers in a courtyard and conversations in a kitchen. Yet it could be argued that in some works on the eve of Perestroika (like in Brodsky and Utkin’s doll’s house), we see the persistence of the idea of communication as outlined by NER. This is demonstrated firstly in a common emphasis to aspects of obshchenie that concern individual development and education, as well as in a common 695 understanding of social values and the need to resist bureaucratisation, philistinism, and consumerist attitudes. If works of paper architecture demonstrated the afterlife of 1960s free communication in this way, then NER could also be considered to constitute a pre-history of the obshchenie of kitchen conversations: the post-Stalinist emphasis on free individual and free communication among friends became one of the sources for independent thought in the semipublic and domestic sphere in the 1980s, in the so-called de-territorialised milieus.74 More broadly, recounting this course of obshchenie through two decades contributes to the histories of the ‘postmodern turn’ in architectural studies. Yet, rather than simply adding new material to the already rapidly growing global body of research and bringing it under well-known (Western) analytical categories, it proposes a vernacular term for the analysis of Soviet modernity, one that would allow a registration of the uneven coexistence or integration of local particularities with modernising systems, or resistance to this integration, in unfamiliar ways. Funding This work was supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Estonian Research Council [grant number IUT32-1]. Notes and references 1. Brian Hatton, ‘Voices from the Courtyard’, in Nostalgia of Culture: Contemporary Soviet Visionary Architecture, ed. by Catherine Cooke, Brian Hatton and Alexander G. Rappaport (London: Architectural Association, 1988), p. 28. 2. Ibid. 3. Petr Vail and Alexander Genis, 60-e: Mir sovetskogo cheloveka (Moscow: NLO, 1991), p. 242. 4. Yakov Krotov, ‘Sovetski zhitel kak religioznyi tip’. Novyi Mir, 5 (1992), pp. 246–47. 5. Svetlana Boym, Obshie mesta: mifologija povsednevnoi zhizni (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2002), p. 189. 6. Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 148. See also Dawn Nafus: ‘Kitchens symbolised the kind of intimacy that could be achieved in such a context. Sitting at the table and sharing food were […] embodied ways of opening up to each other’ – Dawn Nafus, ‘Time, Sociability and Postsocialism’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cambridge University, 2003), p. 94. 7. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 148. 8. Polly McMichael, ‘Prehistories and Afterlives: The Packaging and Re-packaging of Soviet Rock’, Popular Music and Society, 32.3 (2009), p. 347. 9. See Moisei Kagan, Mir obshcheniya: Problema mezhsubektnyh otnoshenii (Moscow: Politizdat, 1988), pp. 71–84. 10. See, e.g. Anatolii Dobrovich, Obshchenie: nauka i iskusstvo (Moscow: Znanie, 1978); Problemy obshchenija i psihologii, ed. by Boris Lomov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981); Eduard Burmakin, Obshchenie i kultura lichnosti (Tomsk: Izdatelstvo Tomskogo Universiteta, 1984); Boris The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 696 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Lomov, Aleksandra Belyaeva, Valerii Nosulenko, Psihologicheskie issledovanija obshenija (Moscow: Nauka, 1985). See Susan E. Reid, ‘The Meaning of Home: “The Only Bit of the World You Can Have to Yourself”’ in Borders of Socialism. Private Spheres of Soviet Russia ed. by Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 146. Caroline Humphrey, ‘Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 11.1 (1995), p. 40. See Michał Murawski, ‘Actually-Existing Success: Economic, Aesthetics, and the Specificity of (Still-) Socialist Urbanism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 60.4 (2018), 907–37. Alexei Gutnov, Ilia Lezhava, Andrei Baburov, Stanislav Sadovsky, Zoia Kharitonova, Georgi Dyumenton, Novyi element rasseleniya: na puti k novomu gorodu (Moscow: Stroiizdat, 1966). For a recent account of the project by NER, see Daria Bocharnikova, ‘Inventing Socialist Modern: A History of the Architectural Profession in the USSR, 1954–1971’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, European University Institute, Florence, 2014). For the role of civic centres in projects by NER, see Elke Beyer, ‘From “New Units of Settlement” to the Old Arbat: The Soviet NER Group’s Search for the Spaces of Community’ in Re-Humanizing Architecture: New Forms of Community, 1950–1970, ed. by Ákos Moravánszky and Judith Hopfengärtner (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016). Ilia Lezhava, ‘Istorija gruppy NER’ in Markhi XX vek. Sbornik vospominaniyah v pjati tomah. Tom 3, 1955–1958, ed. by Andrei Nekrasov and Aleksei Shsheglov (Moscow: Salon-press, 2006), p. 93. See Nikolai Miliutin, Problema stroitelstva sotsialisticheskih gorodov: osnovnye voprosy ratsionalnyi planirovki i stroitelstva naselennyh mest SSSR (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1930); Jean-Louis Cohen, ‘Otryvki iz istorii i vospominanii’, in NER: Gorod budushego, ed. by Alexandra Gutnova and Maria Panteleyeva (Moscow: AVC Charity Foundation, 2018), pp. 25–49. Arnold Buchholz, ‘The Role of the Scientific-Technological Revolution in Marxism-Leninism’, Studies in Soviet Thought, 20.2 (1979), 145–64 (p. 151). Georgi Dyumenton, ‘Obshchenie i rasselenie pri perehode k kommunizmu. Avtoreferat dissertacii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata filosofskih nauk’ (Moscow: Institut Narodnogo Hozyaistva im G. V. Plehhanova, 1965). On scientific forecasting, see Eglė Rindzeviciute, ‘A Struggle for the Soviet Future: The Birth of Scientific Forecasting in the Soviet Union’, Slavic Review, 75.1 (2016), 52–76. Gradostroitelstvo i Sociologia. Materialy zasedanija teoreticheskogo kluba sojuza arhitektorov SSSR i issledovatelskogo komiteta socialnyh problem gradotroitelstva i arhitektury sovetskoi sociologicheskoi associacii, ed. by Vladimir Belousov (Moscow: Izdatelstvo literatury po stroitelstvu, 1968). Socialnye predposylki formirovaniya goroda budushhego, I (Moscow: Tsentr nauchno-tekhnicheskoi informatsii po grazhdanskomu stroitelstvu i arkhitekture, 1967). See Zoia Yargina, Gorod budushego (Moscow: Znanie, 1968). Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 154. Gutnov et al., Novyi element rasseleniya, p. 16. The book refers to the collected writings of Marx and Engels and does not name German Ideology as a separate title. Current English translation taken from: Karl Marx, Selected Writings, p. 154. Luca Basso, Marx and Singularity: From the Early Writings to the Grundrisse (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014), p. 76. Marx, Selected Writings, p. 163. Ibid., p. 160. 697 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. Gutnov et al., Novyi element rasseleniya, p. 16. Gradostroitelstvo i Sociologia, p. 34. Ibid., p. 33. Gutnov et al., Novyi element rasseleniya, p. 16. Ibid., p. 22. Beyer, ‘From “New Units of Settlement” to the Old Arbat’, p. 219. As Daria Bocharnikova has further indicated, this emphasis on solving the question of increasing leisure time in the future related NER’s project to the discussions of post-industrial urbanity of the period in the West. Daria Bocharnikova, ‘The NER Group: Designing for Post-Industrial Urbanity in Post-Stalin Russia’, Journal of Architecture, in this issue. Gutnov et al., Novyi element rasseleniya, p. 92. This reference to historic spatial forms of communication was not accidental and stemmed from the architects’ theories on historic continuity. The new forms that referenced historic typologies were intended pedagogically, to demonstrate the accumulated history of the previous activities and social interactions and also to teach communication. See Alexei Gutnov, ‘Funktsionalnaya struktura I prostranstvennaya organizatsiya rasseleniya’, in Socialnye predposylki formirovaniya goroda budushhego, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Tsentr nauchno-tekhnicheskoi informatsii po grazhdanskomu stroitelstvu I arkhitekture, 1967), pp. 55–60. Gutnov et al., Novyi element rasseleniya, p. 116. Kenneth Frampton, review of Baburov et al., The Ideal Communist City, Architectural Forum, March (1972), p. 13. See Selim Khan-Magomedov, ‘M. Ginzburg (k 70-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya)’, Arkhitektura SSSR, 10 (1962); Selim Khan-Magomedov, ‘Traditsii i uroki konstruktivizma’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, 9 (1964); Selim Khan-Magomedov, ‘Ivan Leonidov’, Sovetskaya arkhitektura, 17 (1965); Selim Khan-Magomedov, ‘Kluby segodnya i vchera’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, 9 (1966); Selim Khan-Magomedov, Kluby Leonidova, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, 11 (1967). In his article on workers’ clubs Khan-Magomedov outlined a shift in the late 1920s from organising the clubs on the basis of workplace to organising them on the basis of common interests. The latter approach was exemplified by the works of Ivan Leonidov. Khan-Magomedov, ‘Kluby segodnya i vchera’, p. 6; On ‘social condensers’, see Michał Murawski, ‘Introduction: Crystallising the Social Condenser’, Journal of Architecture, 22.3 (2017), 372–86. Anna Bokov, ‘Soviet Workers’ Clubs: Lessons from the Social Condensers’, The Journal of Architecture, 22.3 (2017), 403–36 (p. 418). Ilia Lezhava, ‘Problemy Formirovania i Prostranstvennoi Organizatsii Tsentrov Dosuga v Sovremennom Gorode’, Avtoreferat Dissertatsii Na Soiskanie Uchenoi Stepeni Kandidata Arkhitektury (Moscow: Moskovskii Arhitekturnyi Institut, 1970), p. 17. Richard Anderson, ‘A Screen that Receives Images by Radio’, AA Files, 67 (2013), p. 4. Ibid. Gutnov et al., Novyi element rasseleniya, p. 61. Unfortunately, this quote has been mistranslated in the English translation of the book, reversing its meaning: ‘Friendship, too, can be viewed as a form of free relationship and can be related to work and study, since it involves meditating and evaluating in communication whatever problems and interests arise for an individual in his development.’: Baburov et al., The Ideal Communist City (New York: George Braziller, 1968). Gutnov et al., Novyi element rasseleniya, p. 121. Margaret Iversen, ‘Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition’, Art History, 16.4 (1993), 541–53 (p. 548). Daria Bocharnikova has related this approach to the individual to the influence of disurbanist visions, especially Mikhail Ochitovich, who ‘upheld the right of individual for solitude as The Journal of Architecture Volume 24 Number 5 698 Free Communication: From Soviet Future Cities to Kitchen Conversations Andres Kurg 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. opposed to the idea of maximal collectivisation’: Bocharnikova, ‘Inventing Socialist Modern’, p 226. See Andrei Ikonnikov, ‘Budet ili ne budet’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, 9 (1967), pp. 18–25. For the Milan Triennale project, see Alexei Gutnov and Ilia Lezhava, ‘Formirovanie strukturnoi edinicy v sisteme rasseleniya’, Arkhitektura SSSR, 11 (1970), pp. 42–47. Ilia Lezhava, ‘Problemy’. Alexei Gutnov, Vlianie Izmeniaemosti Gorosdkoi Sredy Na Printsipy Ee Proiektirovaniia (Moscow: NII teorii, istorii i perspektivnykh problem sovetskoi arkhitektury, 1970). Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, p. 50. Grigory Revzin, Mikhail Belov. Spetsialnyi proekt zhurnala ‘Proekt Klassika’ (Moscow: 2006), p. 20. Ibid. ‘La Technique au Service du Théâtre. Concours d’Architecture Théâtrale’, AS: Actualité de la scénographie, (February1978), p. 11. Mikhail Belov, ‘Rassuzhdenija molodogo cheloveka po povodu arhitektury’. Junost, 8 (1981), p. 83. ‘La Technique au Service du Théâtre. Concours d’Architecture Théâtrale’, AS: Actualité de la scénographie, (February 1978), p. 11. The explanatory text was published in the magazine alongside the project. This could be seen in parallel with attempts to re-route the Western postmodernist discussions that had gathered interests in the Soviet Union, to comply with the ideology of the socialist country. See Alexandr Ryabushin and Vladimir Hait, ‘Posle sovremennosti. Priznanija postmodernizma’ Stroitelnaja Gazeta: Prilozhenie Arkhitektura 3, 1979. Zoia Kharitonova, ‘Centr dosuga i obshcheniya zhilogo kompleksa’, Arkhitektura SSSR, 6 (1984), p. 48. ‘Tsentr dosuga i obshcheniya zhilogo kompleksa’, Arhitektura SSSR, (November–December 1984), pp. 48–57; Evgeny Ass, ‘Parad kontseptsii’, Arkhitektura SSSR, 1 (1985), pp. 56–66. The following reading of the projects relies on the projects printed in the two magazine issues. ‘Tsentr dosuga i obshcheniya zhilogo kompleksa’, pp. 48–57. See Ibid. Richard Sennett, The Fall of the Public Man (London: Penguin, 2003 [1974]). Ass, ‘Parad kontseptsii’, p. 56. Ibid. See ‘Panorama molodyh: 12 novyh imen’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, 12 (1987), pp. 6–13. This understanding from half word was also that characterised the associations in the so-called deterritorialised milieus: Boym, Obshie mesta, p. 9. Quoted text is from the project image. Reproduction of the image in Andrey Savin’s personal collection. RGALI (Russian State Archives of Art and Literature), f. 674/8/466, pp. 27–28. Ibid. Ibid., p. 28. Iversen, ‘Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition’, p. 548. Humphrey, ‘Ideology in Infrastructure’, p. 43. Vail and Genis, 60-e, p. 70.