“New Line” Ordered From Soviet Architects

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27912, 8 March 1956, Page 9

“New Line” Ordered From Soviet Architects

(From a Reuter Correspondent)

MOSCOW. Economy and efficiency rather than beauty and style are behind the Soviet Communist Party's order to architects io stop designing grandiose and grotesquely ornate buildings. The “new line” in architecture may lead to the appearance of some buildings reflecting the simplicity of design of modern architecture in Western Europe, America and elsewhere. A recent party decree on architecture and building, as \vpll as many speakers at an All-Union congress of architects in Moscow, emphasised the need to learn from the best designs and techniques abroad. But although there was talk of some architects having a “distorted idea of beauty,” it was the wastefulness and inefficiency of present building that bore the main brunt of the attack. There are signs, too, that the craze for “ornamentation.” which has been sc roundly condemned, will die hard. For one thing, it had to be condemned twice within a year from the highest possible source.

At a Kremlin conference of builders in December 1954, six weeks before Mr Georgi Malenkov resigned from the post of Prime Minister, the style and design of Moscow’s seven skyscrapers <the highest is 32 storeys) came under fire from no less a person than Mr Nikita Khrushchev, the party leader, These skyscrapers embody almost every conceivable form of excessive ornamentation in their design and are topped by spires and towers. But although no more . skyscrapers were planned in 1955, the ornamental style remained predominant all through the year. It was heavily influenced by the classical church architecture of Tsarist times. It took a decree from the party’s Central Committee and the Government. nearly a year after Mr Khrushchev's attack, to deal it a mortal blow.

Nevertheless, nearly a month after the decree, and after all that was said at the Architects’ Congress, some architects were still stubbornly refusing to have the “ornamentation” shorn from their designs. The newspaper. “Evening Moscow,” reported that one building organisation in Moscow had saved 1.770.000 roubles by revising the designs of buildings under conslruction since the Congress. But not all architects were prepared “to obey the voice of criticism.” the newspaper said. “Some - of them, acting against common sense, obstinately defended their aesthetic theories.”

Further simplification of current building could bring hundreds of thousands of roubles in economy, it said. But excesses had been found, for instance, even in a building designed by the Moscow Board of Architecture and Planning for its own designers. “The struggle against excesses in architecture and building must be carried on insistently and decisively, as Party and Government decisions demand.” the newspaper said. It could hardly be expected that architects would willingly give up a style in which they have such a strong vested interest. For years, they have been taught to believe that the style represented by Moscow skyscrapers is “genuine Soviet architecture, inspired by the high principles of socialist realism.”

Proud of Skyscrapers Generally speaking, Russians seem pleased, even proud, of their skyscrapers, which resemble the rising tiers of a wedding cake and which they call “multi-storeyed buildings” to distinguish them from American skyscrapers. o . T^cy were . originally planned by Stalin to fit in with the prewar plan for a gigantic “Palace of the Soviets” which, sited in the middle of Moscow, was to be the biggest building in the world.

The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia says; “A new stage in the history of multistoreyed buildings was opened by the decree of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union on the construction in Moscow of eight such buildings, adopted (1947) on the proposal of J. V.. Stalin.”

Only seven skyscrapers have been built in Moscow. Preliminary work on the eighth was stopped in 1953 and the scaffolding dismantled. Only one other was built, in Warsaw, as a “gift” from the Soviet Union to Poland. But pamphlets and books published almost up to the eve of the recent decree continued to heap praise on the skyscrapers in unrestrained terms.

The Moscow underground. and particularly the Volga-Oon canal, as well as the skyscrapers, have been subject to sharp criticism for wasteful embellishments, while the Palace of the Soviets project has been modified and scaled down.

One of the main lines of the latest criticism of these “muti-storeyed buildings,” however, was that th? architects who designed them had been “carried away by showiness.” Even appreciation of America’s skyscrapers seems to be growing in the new atmosphere. A group of Soviet newspapermen who visited the United States recently said bluntly afterwards: “We liked New York’s skyscrapers.” Previously, this would have been heresy.