Història en Obres - a portal on history of modern architecture

interpretative model

plans

Building for the Leningradskja Pravda, plans

analysis

In 1924 a competition was held to build the new headquarters tower for the Leningrádskaya Pravda (The Truth of Leningrad—today’s Saint Petersburg) in the Soviet Union’s capital. The available ground space was minimum: a 6 x 6 meters (19.6 x 19.6 ft) square located on the Strastnaya Square—today’s Pushkin Square—over Strastnoy Boulevard, which limited the second and third rings of Moscow. The building was also meant to be next to one of the radial streets that lead to the Kremlin. The privileged location of the tower is similar to those chosen by Lissitsky for his horizontal skyscrapers and commemorative structures, revealing a propagandistic intent in occupying the main city squares with revolutionary art displays. It is therefore not surprising that such outstanding constructivist architects as the Vesnin brothers, Golosov, Guinsburg and Melnikov himself entered the competition. Rephrasing formalist critic Victor Sklovsky, we should then see “the dissimilarity of the similar” to bring out the assets of this particular project among those others; all of them willing to express revolutionary symbols, the new rhythm of the city, the modernizing clamour.

Melnikov’s project starts out from a concrete cylindrical core that contained a spiral stairwell and an elevator. Four modules made of steel and glass rotated around this nucleus suspended in cantilever by guides and metallic profiles. He repeated this idea in the drawings for the 1925 Paris Pavilion competition. His proposal seemed to mix some ideas that were also present in the Vesnin brothers’—the competition winners— and in Golosov’s, these were the integration of movement—time—as a new material for architecture, the effects of transparency and the use of reinforced concrete. But while the Vesnin brothers focused on the vision of vertical movement of the elevator and the building sign at the top of the tower, Melnikov seemed more interested in searching a wider variety of positions for the mobile modules and, consequently, in an infinite profusion of lighting and volume effects through the whole building. Moreover, while Golosov also proposed a concrete structure, forcing the material to adopt complicated star like and cylindrical forms, Melnikov chose to interpret the core as a nucleus deeply rooted to the ground to compensate the structure’s stresses caused by the rotation of the floors.

From that point, the technical comprehension of the building’s performance becomes more complex. Melnikov left behind a small amount of documents which only allow us to speculate about form and performance of its basic components: the lower cantilevered beams and each module’s configuration. The model and the drawings shown in this article are the result of a careful view of the project and its most remarkable interpretations (O. Mácel-R. Nottrot’s, and E. Steiner’s). It is possible to verify in these visions certain complementary aspects such as the module’s trapezoidal form (with a right side and a curved one), and the articulations between the terraces and exterior stairs.

(F.A.P.)