Moisei Ginzburg
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Moisei Ginzburg (Russian: Моисей Яковлевич Гинзбург) (June 4, 1892 [O.S. May 23],Minsk – January 7, 1946, Moscow) was a Soviet constructivist architect, best known for his 1929 Narkomfin 'Communal House' in Moscow.
The founder of the group OSA (Organisation of Contemporary Architects), who had links with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Brik's LEF Group, he published the book Style and Epoch in 1924, an influential work of architectural theory with similarities to Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture'. It was effectively the manifesto of Constructivist Architecture, a style which combined an interest in advanced technology and engineering with socialist ideals. The OSA experimented with forms of Communal apartments to provide for the new Communist way of life.
[edit] The Narkomfin Building
The first of these was the Gosstrakh apartments, one of which was rented by Sergei Tretyakov. This was followed by the Narkomfin, a 'social condenser' which tried to embody socialist and feminist principles in its structure. The Narkomfin's collective facilities, roof gardens and parkland setting were acknowledged by Le Corbusier as an influence on his Unité d'Habitation. Ginzburg fell out of favour in the 1930s as, under Stalinism the USSR pursued a neo-classical direction in architecture. His most famous work, the Narkomfin Apartments, are in a delapidated state, having been without maintenance for decades, and the Narkomfin is on UNESCO's endangered buildings list. It is the subject of Victor Buchli's study of Soviet material culture, Archaeology of Socialism (Berg, 2002).
[edit] See also
- Constructivist architecture
- El Lissitzky
- Le Corbusier
- Konstantin Melnikov
- Hannes Meyer
- Vladimir Tatlin
- Bruno Taut
- Alexander Vesnin
