| Significant Projects: | Tsentrosoyuz building, Palace of the Soviets |
Le Corbusier had a short relationship with the Soviet Union, starting with his first trip to Moscow in 1928, and ending with the rejection of his proposal for the Palace of the Soviets in 1932. Nevertheless, the short-lived relationship had consequences that went beyond Le Corbusier's time in the USSR. Before his trip to Moscow, Le Corbusier was already an influential figure within the Soviet architecture profession. In 1922, Moisei Ginzburg, founder of the Constructivist movement, published materials from Le Corbusier's “Towards a New Architecture.” Corbusier's projects were frequently published and analyzed as examples for young Soviet architects.[1] When Le Corbusier died in 1965, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union, Pravda, stated in its obituary, “Modern architecture has lost its greatest master.”[2]
In 1928, Le Corbusier was invited to participate in a closed competition, which included Peter Behrens, Max Taut, and the Vesnin brothers, for the new headquarters of the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives in Moscow. After winning the competition, Le Corbusier in October 1928 traveled to the Soviet Union to inspect the site for the Tsentrosoyuz building. Before his trip, Le Corbusie frequented the “Amis de Spartacus” film club, which projected banned Soviet avant-garde films, like Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.[3] When he arrived, Pravda heralded his arrival on its front page.[4] It announced, “To Moscow has come Le Corbusier, the most brilliant representative of today’s advanced architectural thought in Europe.”[5] In Moscow, Le Corbusier gave a lecture at the Polytechnic Museum. He would later write of his trip in his diary, “My works have passed the blockade. I am very well known, very popular. My lectures are held before a packed assembly."[6]
While in the USSR, Le Corbusier had a young Moscow architecture student named Sergei Kozhin, a former assistant to Ivan Zholtovsky, as his official guide. Besides assisting the Swiss architect with the work for the commission of the Tsentrosoyuz, Kozhin would also introduce Le Corbusier to Russian society. Kozhin took Le Corbusier to the Russian countryside, to a village sixty-five kilometers from Moscow, where Le Corbusier had a first hand account of the conditions of the peripheries of Soviet society as well as traditional Russian wooden architecture. This face-to-face contact would later allow him to write off Soviet society as incapable and unprepared to appreciate modern architecture when his design for the Palace of the Soviets was rejected in 1932.[7]
Le Corbusier left Moscow in 1928 with a positive view of the Soviet Union. Indeed, his time there would prove influential in the development of his own theories on architecture and urban planning. In 1930, in his Precisions on the Present: State of Architecture and City Planning, Le Corbusier included a report on his observations of Moscow, written en route back to Paris from Moscow. In this report, Le Corbusier reflects on the Five Year Plan and the “green city” plan that the Constructivist architects had developed.
The Five Year Plan required the development of many industrializing projects. Le Corbusier stated that it presented a battery firing modern technology. Moscow, as he saw it, was a factor for making plans. In his eyes, the development of plans for new buildings in the Soviet Union were being done through whatever means brought progress. Reflecting on the difference between the profession of architecture in Paris and Moscow, Le Corbusier highlights the superfluous involvement of the youth in the Soviet Union, while in France and other parts of Europe, academicism prohibited the youthful from the competitiveness of invention.
With such youthful, inventive spirit, as Le Corbusier analyzes, the constructivist developed innovative planning schemes. The “green town,” as he analyzes in “Atmosphere of Moscow,” was born out of the necessity of a rest period, introduced by the USSR as a response to the constant labor. The rest period would come on the fifth day of the week, in this way suppressing Sunday's traditional role.[8] The green town was then created to provide the space in which such rest would be carried out. Capable of housing 100,000 people at once, the green town would in 15 days provide rest for the entire population of Moscow, (1.5 million), in accordance with the rotation of the rest period every 5 days. Additionally, the town would also house for periods of two weeks to a month city officials or workers taking their annual vacation. The city would also be a space for the ill “from work” to find sanatoria. Beyond this, Le Corbusier also elaborates on the collaborative living that such a city requires: a collective farm would provide food for the entire city; people would live in hostel-type program with common rooms; people would be separated by age, providing different recreational programs for each group. These observations would later serve as the basis for his “Response to Moscow,” as well as his elaboration of the Radiant City.
In 1931, Soviet officials inquired Le Corbusier's opinion on the reconstruction of the city of Moscow. While in Moscow in 1928, he had taken some quick, hidden (it was prohibited to draw in the streets for fear of espionage) sketches on the city and noted that its plan was “that of the age of the horse.”