M.Y.Ginzburg
Moisei Ginzburg was born on the 4th June according to the new calendar, 1892 in Minsk. His father Yakov Ginzburg was an architect and developer, successful enough to send his son to study abroad after finishing his education at a trade school. After a brief stint at the Paris Academy of Fine Arts and the Toulouse Architecture School, Moisei Ginzburg became a student of the Milan Academy of Arts. In 1914 Ginzburg returned to Russia and until 1917 continued his education in the architecture faculty of the Rizhsky Polytechnic which had moved to Moscow during the First World War.
Ginzburg spent the years of the civil war in the Crimea where his first independent project was constructed – a Neoclassical villa in Evpatoria. During this Crimean interlude the architect went through an internal struggle with the classical canons that had been implanted in him in Italy.
In 1921 the young architect arrives in Moscow and immediately finds himself in the epicentre of the architectural avant garde, becoming a teacher (and from 1923 a professor) at the Higher Artistic Studios – the legendary VKhUTEMAS. At this time of economic breakdown and radical social renewal, architects absorbed themselves in theoretical explorations and the reconstruction of the architectural education system.
VKhUTEMAS educated artists, architects and industrial designers on an equal level. It was involved in an intensive exchange of ideas not only with their closest partners – the German school of architecture and design, the Bauhaus, but also with most of the avant garde architects of Europe. It is clear from Ginzburg’s texts that he was very well informed about the explorations of his foreign colleagues. At the same time he managed to maintain his own clear and individual approach. The central issue that interested him was the functional basis of architectural form.
Throughout the twenties, Ginzburg regularly took part in architectural competitions and created designs for many public buildings: The Palace of Labour (1922), The House of Textiles, a covered market, The House of Orgmetall, The House of Rusgertorg, The House of Soviets in Makhachkala, and The House of Parliament in Alma-Ata, which was constructed. However due to shortages there were huge limitations on construction and a large part of the architect’s time was taken up with teaching (in VKhUTEMAS and in the Bauman Higher Technical College) and in research.
Ginzburg developed his own course on architectural composition and in a short period published a series of core articles and two scholarly works. In the book “Rhythm and Architecture” (1923) he analysed world architecture from the point of view of general rhythmical patterns. The book “Style and Epoch” (1924) is an attempt to formulate a new architectural language, adequate to the new social reality in which the basic consumer of architecture is the labouring class. In the mid twenties, Ginzburg earned the reputation of being a leading architectural theorist.
To a large extent, his ideas formed the theoretical basis of Constructivism – the movement within the soviet avant garde that insisted on the primary importance of function in architecture and the common principles of architectural and industrial design. In 1926 the Constructivists founded the United Contemporary Architects (OSA). Besides Ginzburg, members of this organisation included Alexandr, Viktor and Leonid Vesnin, Mikhail Barshch, Ilya Golosov, Ivan Leonidov and others. Ginzburg was the chief editor of the mouthpiece of OSA – the journal “Contemporary Architectural” (CA) which was to become hugely influential.
In the second half of the 1920s, Ginzburg mostly worked on the problem of housing, unlike the Vesnin brothers, the other leaders of the Constructivists, who mostly designed industrial and public buildings. The chaos of the post revolutionary years and the population migration into the cities meant people were being crammed into overcrowded old apartments with lots of other families, or into barracks without any facilities. The buoyancy of the New Economic Policy gave new hope for an end to the housing crisis. Architects faced the task of not only finding new forms of architecture for housing but in essence to design a new way of life, in step with the changing social reality.
In the debates raging at that time it was suggested that the builders of communism should live in house-communes, where all areas, sometimes including the place for sleep, should be communal, and the daily routine of life timetabled down to the last minute. This approach was brought to fruition in OSA member Ivan Nikolaev’s House Commune for students (1929-1930). However Ginzburg was convinced that every person had to have their own individual space where he could spend time alone or with people close to him, and not be in forced proximity with strangers. The question was how to make housing modern, cheap and easy to maintain.
In 1926 Ginzburg designed the housing block for Gosstrakh on Malaya Bronnaya Street, together with his comrade from OSA Vladimir Vladimirov. Three floors of the house –the first to the third, were made up of economic 2-4 room apartments, and on the fourth floor was a hostel with 12 rooms, a communal kitchen and two bathrooms. On the flat roof was a solarium (later destroyed when another floor was added). On the ground floor was a shop and in the cellar a laundry and storage for all the apartments. It was soon clear that this kind of planning, despite its good sense, was unsuitable for the realities of soviet life – the apartments were quickly divided up into bedsits. And the layout of the house on Malaya Bronnaya did not help fulfil the task set by the state of educating the new man in new soviet ways.
His experience with the Gosstrakh building turned Ginzburg towards the concept of “the communal house” in which isolated living space was conserved with minimal services and all other facilities were communalised. In 1927 the journal CA announced a non-commercial competition for a project for a communal house. Ginzburg’s entry, “Communal House A” shows his interest in Le Corbusier’s architectural ideas and can be seen as a direct predecessor of Narkomfin.
Between 1928-1932 Ginzburg was commissioned by the government to develop a new type of housing. He was appointed the director of the Section for standardisation for Stroikom. Work on the design of rationally planned housing units, housing complexes, entire regions and cities was conducted “together with social, technical and artistic problems.” This was Ginzburg’s transformation of Vitruvius’s classical triad: “durable, useful and beautiful.” Engineers, economists, hygienists and architects worked under Ginzburg’s directorship, uniting their efforts in the search of a means to provide the labouring class with cheap, comfortable, hygienic and aesthetically pleasing housing.
In November 1928 Ginzburg presented the first results of the work of the Section to the plenum of Stroikom. In his report he said that the Section intentionally focussed not on the creation of standard designs for housing blocks that would unavoidably lead to monotonous cityscapes (which is what later happened) but on the development of standard elements which could be combined in a great number of different ways. The norm for the individual living space was defined as 9 square metres per person, but it had to be supported with spacious communal areas: kitchens, refectories, kindergartens and other components of public service. As a result, Stroikom recommended some of the living units for mass construction, and to begin with decreed that six experimental transitional communal houses be built in Moscow, Sverdlovsk and Saratov. Ginzburg took part in the design of three of these buildings but only in Narkomfin, thanks to the support of Nikolai Milyutin, was he able to realise his ideas in full.
The construction of Narkomfin should have been the start of an important new stage in Ginzburg’s architectural career, but in fact it was its zenith. His book, “Housing” (1932) summarized the rich findings of the Section for Standardisation, but was already out of date when it was published two years later, as was noted in the foreword.
In 1933 the attacks on «Formalism» and on Constructivism in particular, were accompanied by a radical change in state housing policy. In the place of economical, rationally organised housing complexes they began to build imposing houses containing traditional apartments. These apartments, comfortable in themselves, were in most cases allotted to several families, creating cramped conditions and condemning yet another soviet generation to «domestic hell», as Ginzburg put it. His discoveries were fast forgotten. And in the second half of the 1950s when the problem of cheap mass housing was tackled once again, foreign examples of industrial house construction were looked to.
In the1930s, like other architects, Ginzburg was forced to go through an internal transformation, the reverse of what he went through after the revolution. It is possible that it was easier for him to work with classical forms thanks to his understanding of the laws behind them, explored in his book «Rhythm in architecture». He preserved his authority and professional status – in 1939 along with 20 other leading architects he was chosen as a member of the newly formed Academy of Architecture of the USSR. Within the Academy he became the chief editor and author of the volume of a General History of Architecture dedicated to the architecture of the ancient world.
Ginzburg didn't win any of the many competitions in which he participated in the 1930s. In the field of design he switched from tackling major housing problems to a more marginal, although fascinating task – that of planning the southern coast of the Crimea. He headed a group of architects, whose work was later to have great influence on soviet town-planning. Resort architecture became a niche for Ginzburg in which he was able to apply some of the deurbanisation theories he had been so interested by in the twenties. His Ordzhonikize Sanitorium in Kislovodsk (1935-1937) has entered the history of architecture, not only because of masterfully executed composition and use of classical architectural language, but also because here he gave Ivan Leonidov the opportunity to create his only realised work – a monumental staircase on the side of a mountain.
During the war Ginzburg was able to return to the creation of permanent, rather than temporary housing. He headed the Standardised Section of construction and in 1943 designed and built a mining village in the Podmoskovny coal-basin. From 1944 onwards he worked on a project for the restoration of Sevastopol that had been largely destroyed in the war.
Moisei Ginzburg died on the 7th January 1946 at the age of 1953.
Moisei Ginzburg was one of the most important architects of the Soviet avant garde. Although he was destined to be unable to realise many of his projects, Narkomfin and other of his buildings, together with his books and articles, represent a huge body of knowledge and milestone in the history of modern architecture.
Clementine Cecil