Culture Two by Ivan Leonidov. About Artek, the House of the Moscow Pioneers and other projects and achievements of the Thiries

This paper focuses on the relationship between Russian avant-garde architecture and the media. In spite of the great influence of the media on architecture during the first half of the 20th century, studies on Soviet architectural history have paid very little attention to the relationship between Soviet architecture and the media than that given to modern architecture in Western Europe. However, it has been found that the appearance of new media such as architectural photos, journals, and films dramatically changed Soviet architects’ approach to architectural expression. Also, new media devices such as aerial photos, cameras with telephoto lenses, and planetariums gave architects a new perspective not only on architecture, but also on the entire world. The implementation of a media network, which was expected to cover the entire territory of the USSR, brought new possibilities to plan cities based on completely new assumptions. Therefore, this paper highlights Russian avantgarde architects’ attempts to apply media and media technology to architectural designs, particularly Ivan Leonidov’s early works during his constructivist period. Although Leonidov was regarded as a star of constructivism, the biggest avant-garde architectural movement in Russia, he was criticized because of his unrealistic, abstract designs, most of which were not actually realized during his lifetime. Furthermore, his name was forgotten as a result of Stalinist oppression from the 1930s until the 1960s. Nevertheless, Leonidov can be regarded as an exceptional architect who inspired a fundamental change in the notion of the spaces and places influenced by media. In this paper, I will first analyze Leonidov’s attitude toward the media, especially to publications. He was a member of the editorial committee of the architectural journal Contemporary Architecture (SA), which served as a virtual bulletin board for a constructivist group, Organization of Contemporary Architects (OSA). The majority of Leonidov’s works in the 1920s were published in this journal. Of these, I will focus on his architectural drawings and scale-model photos, particularly their unfamiliar representations. Leonidov occasionally drew buildings using white lines on black papers, depicting the buildings from a bird’s-eye view. Accordingly, these images resembled objects floating in space or the projected images in a planetarium. Why did he depict buildings in such an unrealistic manner? Secondly, I will discuss his attitude toward the cinema. When he designed his labor clubs and cultural facilities, he insisted on the importance of cinema (featuring non-fiction movies) over the theater, which was considered to be the most significant propaganda tool for the various cultural activities pursued by the clubs. Particularly Leonidov evaluated the possibilities of implementing mass media’s reproduction techniques. He believed that such techniques would make it possible to provide unified and high-quality content for the masses. In addition, Leonidov expected that not only this content but also forms of mass communication would transform consumers, i.e., ordinary workers and farmers, into unified mass or ideal members of the socialist collective. Furthermore, he dreamed of creating a network of cultural facilities and even expanding this network to a cosmic scale. In other words, Leonidov’s new socialized community would be based on a media network more than physical structure. Overlooking his works during the constructivist period, we will elucidate on his ideal design of a new socialized society and its residents.