Moisei Ginzburg
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Moisei Ginzburg (Russian: Моисей Яковлевич Гинзбург) (June 4 [O.S. May 23] 1892,Minsk – January 7, 1946, Moscow) was a Soviet constructivist architect, best known for his 1929 Narkomfin Building 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. Its magazine SA (Sovrennaya Arkitektura, or Contemporary Architecture) featured discussions of city planning and communal living, as well as the futuristic projects of Ivan Leonidov. The group was dissolved in the early 1930s into an 'All-Union Association of Architects', along with the competing Modernist group ASNOVA, led by Nikolai Ladovsky, and the proto-Stalinist VOPRA. Also in 1929-31 Ginzburg's House of Government was built in Almaty.
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[edit] Communal Houses
The first of these was the Gosstrakh apartments, designed in 1926, one of which was rented by Sergei Tretyakov: these flats were the first employment of Le Corbusier's 'Five Points of Modern Architecture' in the USSR. This was followed three years later by the Narkomfin Building, a 'social condenser' which tried to embody socialist and feminist principles in its structure. The apartment blocks were built for employees of the Commissariat of Finance (or 'Narkomfin'), and featured collective facilities, roof gardens and a parkland setting. The Narkomfin building was acknowledged by Le Corbusier as an influence on his Unité d'Habitation, while the layout of its duplex apartments have been copied by Moshe Safdie in his Expo 70 flats, as well as by Denys Lasdun in his luxury flats at St James', London.
[edit] Dilapidation of Narkomfin Building
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 Building, is in a dilapidated state, having been without maintenance for decades, and the is on UNESCO's endangered buildings list. It is the subject of Victor Buchli's study of Soviet material culture, Archaeology of Socialism(Berg, 2000), which traces the building's history from early Utopianism to the harshness of the Stalinist era, up to its current ruined state.
[edit] See also
- Constructivist architecture
- El Lissitzky
- Le Corbusier
- Konstantin Melnikov
- Hannes Meyer
- Vladimir Tatlin
- Bruno Taut
- Alexander Vesnin
