Building a new "New World": Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture

Until now, few studies have undertaken a comprehensive analysis of “Amerikanizm” in Russian architecture, which has mostly been limited to the high- rise buildings erected in the late Stalinist era. Through this first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia, curator Jean-Louis Cohen provides a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics by analyzing discourse, designs, and buildings, as well as politics, art, literature, cinema and technology.

The exhibition—which will be accompanied by a book and public programs—is the result of decades of dedicated research through which Cohen illustrates how Amerikanizm spanned all Russian political regimes through the long 20th century, from the Czarist reformers to the Bolshevik revolutionaries, and was much more acute than other similar phenomena that were crucial to the modernization of Western Europe.

CCA Director Mirko Zardini sees this project as one that upholds the institution’s curatorial vision thanks to its research-based thematic approach.

On view within Building a new New World is a wide-ranging succession of images and objects in which architecture serves as the unifying thread, including photographs, books, maps, drawings, magazines, portraits, models, postcards, and film excerpts. Throughout the exhibition and the book, which will be published in early 2020, manifold networks are explored: recurring investigative journeys undertaken by Russian explorers, political leaders, and architects; the multitude of Russian publications devoted to the United States, from technical reports to poetry and novels; and imagined forms and buildings inspired by American sources.

By analyzing buildings, factories, industrial infrastructure, urban planning and product design, Building a new New World rewrites the history of Russian architecture and urban design in light of this enduring Amerikanizm. The narrative is underlined by an expanded definition of architecture and culture that encompasses industrial and graphic design, music, photography, film, and literature.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture is the result of extensive research by curator Jean-Louis Cohen and features drawings, photographs, posters, books, publications, models, historical documents, and films from both Russia and the USA. The decades-long dialogue between Russia and the USA is reflected in the materials on display, which include rarely seen Russian holdings from the CCA’s own collection—including rare books and magazines, evocative drawings, and important photographs—shown alongside loans from important international institutions and lenders including, among others, the Alex Lachmann collection, with 33 objects on view in the exhibition; an emblematic and rare illustration from the MOMus - Museum of Modern Art - Costakis Collection in Thessaloniki, Greece; the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation in Vienna; the Library of Congress; posters and key visuals from the Collection Merrill C. Berman; and works on loan from the Albert Kahn records at the Bentley Historical Library of University of Michigan and Albert Kahn Associates, Inc.

The exhibition content is structured along specific themes including America and the Modernization of Czarist Russia; American Industries for Russia: Taylor, Ford, and Kahn; Amerikanizms of the Avant-Gardes; Amerikanizm in Stalinist Architecture and Culture; From War to Triumph; and The Post-Stalinist USSR: Reaching and Surpassing America. Throughout the succession of images and projects on display, architecture embodies the phenomenon of Amerikanizm that was also apparent in literature and film. Indeed, throughout the exhibition, film remains an important leitmotif, with excerpts from works by Sergey Eisenstein and Grigory Alexandrov, Mikhail Chiaureli, Esfir Shub, Frank & Lillian Gilbreth, Lev Kuleshov, Sergey Komarov, Alexander Medvedkin, Mikhail Kalatozov, and Charles & Ray Eames on display in key locations within and between galleries.

The exhibition opens with a detailed and comprehensive map created by Milan- based agency for visual research Studio Folder to illustrate key journeys undertaken by certain protagonists between Russia and the USA to project sites, World Fairs, and cities that played a crucial role in the mutual exchange between the two countries.. Visitors are then greeted by the striking figures of The Two Superman, a pop-art-like illustration by Roman Cieslewicz from 1967 that takes as its inspiration the seemingly symmetrical confrontation between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America. Arresting images of a futuristic Russia inspired by an imagined America also help to illustrate the imbalance of influence between the two countries that threads its way through the whole of the exhibition and is also seen in the references to Russian musicals produced in a decisively American style.

The exhibition then displays Russia’s pre-1917 modernization towards a “New America,” a period during which Russian scholars and engineers like Vladimir Shukhov and Dmitri Mendeleev visited the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia, gathering useful knowledge for the modernization of Russia, made possible as of 1861 by the abolition of serfdom. Though few travellers physically crossed the Atlantic at that time (an interesting exception examined in the exhibition being Pavel Svinin who, as secretary to the Russian diplomatic representative in the early 1810s, painted a number of watercolours of life in America), print publications, including translations of literary, philosophical, and political texts from America were widely disseminated in Russia.

Architects soon began publishing articles on skyscraper construction and the erection of other American high-rise buildings. These edifices, however, remained out of reach for Russian builders, and visions of cities strewn with towers, their skies filled with flying machines, fed into an imagination stimulated by futuristic views of New York.

The exhibition’s next turn is towards the Russian discovery of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific organization of labour expressed in American industries, which spread to all sectors of the young Soviet society, from manufacturing to culture and architecture. This is exemplified in the exhibition by case studies of Henry Ford and the Fordson Tractor.

More popular in rural Russia than Stalin himself, Henry Ford was celebrated in dozens of literary works, and the tractor that came out of his factories became an essential tool in Soviet farming, portrayed in novels and films. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of copies of Ford’s two books, My Life and Work and Today and Tomorrow, were sold in Russia, along with brochures and reports written by successive delegations of Soviet workers who had been trained in Detroit. At the same time, the Fordson tractor, launched in 1916, was imported as of 1919, and replicas were manufactured by the Putilov plant in Leningrad. These, however, were so flawed that the Soviets had to resort to inviting Ford engineers as consultants before mass production eliminated the need to import the machines. When the collectivization of agriculture was launched, the tractor became its emblem, appearing on mass-produced plates and materials.

Next, Building a new New World interrogates the “Americanisms of the avant-gardes,” which came about in the absence of direct contact with the United States from December 1917 to November 1933—a period of mutual hostility spurred by the Russian Civil War. During these sixteen years, avant-garde movements transformed artistic means of expression, while a new mass culture spread across the performing arts stage. Both the radical propositions of the former and the products of the latter were defined through an identification with America.

Aside from engineers seeking out the latest technologies, few Soviet citizens were able to cross the Atlantic. The most fruitful points of contact were in films and architecture, as demonstrated in the exhibition. Because Russian screens were widely receptive to Hollywood movies, Soviet directors drew inspiration from comedies with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, as well as from David W. Griffith’s montages. Meanwhile, the groups vying for supremacy in the field of architecture, turned to American methods and buildings despite the knowledge gap in the Russian construction industry, namely through illustrations discovered in books by Erich Mendelsohn and Richard Neutra. While the rationalists of ASNOVA (The Association of New Architects) were inspired by the shapes and loftiness of skyscrapers, the constructivists, led by Moisey Ginzburg, based their functional theories on devices similar to those developed by Taylor before converting to deurbanism upon discovering Ford’s writings.

Jean-Louis Cohen then takes the viewer back to a more grounded reality as he examines Amerikanizm in Stalinist Architecture and Culture, a point at which American models continued to be replicated in architecture and urban planning, as well as in the sectors of mass leisure and food supply, owing to increasing overseas travels.

The United States remained a significant source of inspiration under Stalin’s rule throughout the 1930s, despite the stock market crash of 1929, described by Russian publicists in apocalyptic terms. This is demonstrated in the exhibition through examples including Russia’s entry into the worldwide competition for the memorial for Christopher Columbus, the fantastic Amerikanizm demonstrated in the work of constructivist architect and graphic designer Yakov Chernikhov; Frank Lloyd Wright’s presence in Moscow and declarations of support of the USSR during the first Congress of Architects; Boris Iofan’s design for the Palace of the Soviets; and the intriguing case of Anastas Mikoyan in New York and the americanization of Russian food, among others.

In the exhibition’s penultimate chapter, we travel through war to triumph with the advent of World War II, which created an unprecedented influx of American products into the Soviet Union as part of the lend-lease program, allowing planes and trucks as well as basic commodities to be distributed to Russian soldiers and civilians. This was followed by the deliberation of strategies through the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship to compensate for the destruction left in the wake of combat, through which simultaneously advanced construction techniques from America were conveyed to Moscow.

Anti-Americanism is in evidence in this section of the exhibition in the form of a campaign against modern intellectuals and artists as the Iron Curtain descended upon Eastern Europe, coinciding with Stalin’s decision to create a set of buildings in Moscow meant to rival with the United States and lend a monumental expression to the victory against Nazism. Presented as stemming exclusively from the Russian tradition, this ring of high-rises scattered across the city borrowed several components from their New York precedents, given that the architects developing the project were inspired by Manhattan structures.

Building a new New World concludes with the theme of Post-Stalinist USSR: Reaching and Surpassing America, interrogating one of the first political acts of Nikita Khrushchev, who questioned Stalin’s architectural policy one year after his death by denouncing the decorative “excesses” of the high-rise buildings built under him. As the Cold War persisted, the observation of America thawed, then resumed at full throttle through travels (such as Khrushchev’s visit to the USA in 1959, when he became the first leader in Russian history to personally visit the United States), publications, and unprecedented public events such as the American National Exhibition in Moscow, which featured the “kitchen debate” between Khrushchev and Nixon, and the spectacular multi-screen show put on by Charles and Ray Eames, displaying alluring images of America.

At its close, Building a new New World shows the westward shift of Amerikanizm, as Los Angeles replaced New York as a model city to be emulated with its highways and shopping malls, despite the caveats expressed by the Western urban planners called upon as advisers. These attempts waned along with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Partly vanishing with communism, the idealization of America nevertheless acquired more familiar forms, subsisting to this day in a country dominated by capitalist oligopolies.