Filippo Lambertucci1

RHETORIC OF ANTI-RHETORIC EGALITARIANISM AS A FORMAL FEATURE OF (POST-) SOVIET CITIES

Abstract | After WWII, housing became a mass problem that was increasingly dealt with in terms of industrial and logistical productivity. As part of the frantic process of standardisation, production itself would gain ground as an aesthetic category; as such, the face of the Soviet city would take on those precise and extensively recurring traits of uniformity that would become the symbol of the city itself. In particular, with the decree of the Central Committee and Council Minister “On the removal of excesses in design and construction”, which sanctioned the ideological elimination of the “decaying” criteria of ornamentation that dated back to the Stalinist period, Khrushchev formally banished the formalism and the model of the typical Stalinist city, and focused on productive optimisation by implementing a functionalist approach to building and town planning The issue of housing was tackled from a merely numerical perspective; accommodations were coded according to minimum size alternatives and to a zero aggregative range. Once ratified on the basis of a new approach implemented by Brezhnev in the mid-1960s, the figure of micro-rayon became the main feature of Soviet cities; the poverty of aggregative variants, both at the building and town-planning level, excluded any variation of urban design and the specificity of place never represented an element of concern for designers. The utopia of regulated, bright and open city, shared by several avant-gardes, found there its strictest implementation; in this case, however, openness mainly translated into dispersion and disorientation; the egalitarian utopia could not deal with the need for ‘places’ or acknowledge that a place is bound up with the notions of identity and individualism. Post-Soviet cities have inherited this crystallised urban tradition and, in a different guise, the problem of mass housing has reappeared, specifically for a mass of potential consumers, with the kinds of personal, spatial needs that decades of standardisation had rejected.

Keywords | post-Soviet city, egalitarianism, density, functionalism, context

1. INTRODUCTION Generally, the expression of ideology in the context of architecture and urban design tends to build up a formal system whose features are evident and easily recognisable.

1 Ph.D, Associate Professor, DIAP, Dipartimento Architettura e Progetto, Università degli

Studi di Roma «Sapienza», filippo.lambertucci@uniroma1.it

This is the case of architectural expressions produced by the ideological needs of most of the totalitarian systems in the 20th century in search of a monumental and celebratory emphasis given not only to public buildings, but also to housing, as well as to urban design: the more architectural and urban features are subjected to the expression of a totalitarian political power, the most they tend to be simple, assertive and easily readable by the people. On the other hand, many modern avant-gardes between the 1920s and 1930s, in search of a purified figurative synthesis, promoted a number of formal codes free from decorative burdens and relatively easy to reproduce; they looked at the industrialized production as a form of "democratic" way to provide people with houses and buildings freed by useless decorations but they only succeeded in clearing the way to monotony and repetitiveness. The “house for all” ideal gave rise, in turn, to an ideological conflict, that would trigger practical experiments and many unfinished manifestos that nonetheless would not be significant until after WWII, when housing would become an urgent mass question. Many countries had to face this issue but the most emblematic case concerns the Post-Soviet countries, where the mass housing problem was tackled in such a way as to permanently establish the patterns of an urban design that still persists today.

2. DENSITY Post-Soviet cities, in fact, inherit a crystallised tradition of urban design: between WWII and the 1980s Soviet cities have been uniformed by the common features of a severely standardised architecture, whose patterns are still determining nowadays the figurative traits of contemporary peripheries. In the meantime the obsolescence of the industrialised building systems adopted, and the opening up of the former Soviet republics to the logic of a liberalised housing market meant that cities faced a pressing need for urban renovation. As usual in the USSR, the problem exists at the level of mass housing, since the large waves of buildings erected in the past decades with poor qualitative characteristics and without (or with limited) maintenance, now show at the same time the need for radical improvements. The problem of mass housing therefore reappears, in relation to potential consumers with the variety of personal and spatial needs that decades of standardisation had rejected in favour of the more urgent need to house newly urbanised crowds that had been moved from one corner of the Union to another.

Fig. 1. Left:, Housing landscape in Moscow, late ‘60’s. Right, Khrushchevky under construction Density represents a relatively new topic in most Post-Soviet countries, especially if we think that in 1917 only 18% of the Russian population was gathered in very few cities, only two or three of which exceeded one million inhabitants.

However, the significant element is represented rather by the huge growth in the percentage of urbanised population that in 1939 had already reached 33% and at the end of the 1970s reached 67%, of the entire USSR; in the same period, more than 1100 new cities were founded in the USSR, with standardisation and industrialisation needs that can be easily imagined. (French) Thus, housing became a mass problem and would have to be increasingly faced in terms of industrial and logistical productivity; in the frantic process of the improvement of standardisation, production itself would gain ground as an aesthetic category and the face of the Post-Soviet city would take on those precise and extensively recurring traits of uniformity that would become the symbol of the city itself. The research projects carried out by the modern avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s tried to develop new uniformity’s paradigms, but they were superseded by the Stalinist historicism without having affected significantly the forms of urban design of Soviet cities. It should be also added that, if on the one hand, the Stalinist stylistic reaction completely got rid of genuinely modern inspiration, on the other hand it is necessary to acknowledge its attempt to plan the city not exclusively according to the principles of architectural standardisation. These awkward monumental exercises were sufficiently stigmatised by the critic. However, despite being only the expression of a retrograde 19th century view, they still tried to face the problems of the urban figure and of the site-specificity. Through the permanence of the block pattern the Stalinist city perpetuated the concept of compact city in planning housing, giving room, in the meantime, to the possibility of ornamentations and variations interesting, sometimes, even for topological values, such as in the reconstruction plan for Minsk. Post-war reconstruction however, entailed urgently the need to house 25 million people after the disruption of over 1700 cities and villages so requiring objectively rapid and cheap solutions suitable for the building industry.

Fig. 2. Prefab housing models: Left: K-7, Right, I-464-A2

3. WE ARE NOT AGAINST BEAUTY Khrushchev, who rose to power after the death of Stalin, gave, in 1954, his famous speech ‘On the extensive introduction of industrial methods, improving the quality and reducing the cost of construction’: "We are not against beauty, but we are against superfluity. The facades of buildings should be of beautiful and attractive appearance, and this should be achieved as a result of the entire

edifice having good proportions, well-proportioned window and door apertures, well-positioned balconies, correct use of the texture and colour of facing materials, and a proper presentation of wall parts and structures in buildings made from large sections and panels." (Goldhoorn) Housing policies, and city policies in particular, completely changed their approach in 1955, after the decree of the Central Committee and Council Minister “On the removal of excesses in design and a construction”, which sanctioned the ideological elimination of the “decaying” criteria of ornamentations dating back to the Stalinist era. In this way, Khrushchev formally banished both the formalism and the model itself of a typical Stalinist city, and focused on productive optimisation, by implementing a thorough functionalist approach from the building and town planning viewpoint.

Fig. 3. Volgograd But the issue of housing was tackled from a merely numerical perspective; accommodations are coded according to minimum range of alternatives in size and aggregative patterns. For example, the K-7 model (subsequently called “khrushcheva”) was developed, a building with a 5 storeys, to avoid lifts, and made up of 3-4 aligned blocks characterised by a basic prismatic volume deprived of any formal feature other than the grid of the facade panels. The problem of housing is here reduced to an issue of dislocation: the khrushcheva blocks are standardised containers which arithmetically distribute the population throughout the territory. Density thus becomes a problem of logistics that is not intended to take into consideration the quality of urban relations but, rather, considers those relations in purely mechanistic terms. The poverty of aggregative variants, both at the level of building and town-planning, excludes any variation of urban design that does not respect the rigid regime of separation between buildings and the very few non residential facilities, that consisted mostly of schools and sports fields. Already, at the end of the 1950s, the repetitiveness of schemes and the lack of attention paid to the quality of spaces and to the endowment of services started to divert Khrushchev’s attention, as well as that of institutes and planning cooperatives, towards more complex solutions.

Fig. 4. Playing in the areas. A caricature by Eduard Javorskiy, 1969

As such, the “Rules and Regulations for planning and development of cities” by Institut Gradostroitel’stva and the “Guidelines for planning and building of housing estates”, published in 1959, introduced and defined integrated planning schemes for both housing and public facilities according to a “Russian doll” pattern called Microrayon. According to this pattern neighborhoods became larger and larger and proportionally to their extension kindergartens, playgrounds, sports, collective markets, were distributed uniformly and invariably. The microrayon scheme therefore appears, that is to say urban residential units of nearly 30/40 ha for a population of 10/12,000 inhabitants, endowed with primary essentials (nursery schools, schools, “shops”, sports and healthcare facilities), surrounded by large relief roads in order to avoid carriageable roads inside of this area. High-scale services (hospitals, theatres, cinemas) would be provided with a similar criterion serving several microrayons.

4. MICRORAYON AS A PATTERN OF EGALITARIAN URBANISM Once ratified on the basis of the new approach implemented by Brezhnev in the mid-1960s, the figure of the microrayon became the main feature of Soviet cities, as we can observe in Samarkand, Siberia, and Moscow, but also in many countries and cities within Soviet Union’s sphere of influence: Cuba, East Berlin, etc.; issues like respect of landscape or site-specificity had no room in town planning, not even in the presence of exceptional landscapes or historical sites.

Fig. 5. Left: Alamar, Cuba. Right, Samarkand, microrayon encrusted in traditional houses fabric

Fig. 6. Left, Sankt-Petersburg, Russia. Right, S.Adylov, I.Koptelova and G.Korobovtsev, Blocks of Flats in Residential Area C 27, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1973 Although based on a free plan criteria, it only originated identical approaches in the entire USSR; a wider range would be offered through the introduction of buildings (brezhnevki) with 9/14 storeys, whereas the definition of public spaces and aggregations was still anchored to pseudo-functionalist standardisation criteria.

The characteristics of places never represented an element of concern for designers; the basic plan could undergo slight changes, but it fundamentally proposed detachment and dislocation factors that hardly produced places rich of comfort and identity. On the other hand, the process of standardisation of houses and their aggregation proceeded towards forms of inexpressive repetition; there is a slight increase of per head reference surfaces of accommodations, whereas as far as the aggregation of houses is concerned, the line-shaped layout with single-fronted apartments prevails. Paradoxically, collective spaces between buildings were designed more by the mechanics of the regulations on fire security and solar orientation than by the concern for the quality of social relationships and of formal values, to such an extent that the urban patterns are fine-tuned for a universal orientation. The position of buildings in the microrayon is mostly regulated by a strict orthogonal grid; in the same way the entire microrayon generally adopts orientations N-S and E-W, with rare concession to 45° rotations. The quality of public spaces might be considered as the point of strength in a system in which the public property of the soil allows a total control over the design; however, as a matter of fact, this is only the guarantee that public spaces might be relieved from the degradation of the systems in which “public” means belonging to nobody and not to all. Microrayon represents an open system, in which the availability of public spaces is even excessive, especially if we consider that it is represented more by green spaces than by facilities, since, as it can be easily imagined, there are no private commercial facilities characterising the spaces of western “capitalist” cities. In this way, the utopia of the regulated, bright and open city, shared by several avant-gardes, is implemented; in this case, however, openness mainly translates into dispersion, disorientation; the egalitarian utopia does not deal with the need for places or, better, well knows that a place is, after all, identity, and identity is individualism.

Fig. 7. Microrayons in Soviet cities: same orientation, same dimensions, same spaces. Left: Chelyabinsk. Centre: Ekaterinburg. Right, Minsk In this way, the ground floors of building blocks will never host business activities overlooking the street, also because inside of the microrayon, streets are not destined to float, but rather to walk to one’s homes, and services as well are made according to rigidly coded models. In this way, it’s green areas that represent the connective system, with a potentially high level of quality but often needing to deal with incomplete implementation; what remains is therefore the images of a dispersed and dilated space, whereas the inside of residential blocks density takes on the shape of the compressed and all equal spaces of accommodations, whose quality can only be measured in relation to the creation of the prefabricated systems with which they were made. As a matter of fact, the history of prefabricated systems will define the history of housing not only in Soviet Union but also, in the subsequent years, in the various republics.

The problem of quickly housing masses of people, in fact, is not limited to the post-war emergency; conversely, it continues with different motivations and conditions – for instance, the amnesty that between 1953 and 1960 released 2 million people from the Gulags and 3 million people called back home from exile – still long fuelled by the huge flow of urbanisation of rural masses and by the continuous foundation of new industrial or mining cities (monogoroda). The K-7 model of khrushcheva therefore underwent several changes, but also many subsequent generations, each one updated according to the standards introduced from time to time, both from the dimensional and distributive, and from the technical viewpoint. In this way, if on the one hand the industrialisation of housing brings the net living space from 4.67 m2 per head to a National average for every inhabitant of 5.30 m2 in 1957 and 7,4m2 in 1969 (U.S. NBS report 1969), on the other hand prefabricated systems do not allow any significant variations in terms of typological variety. A delegation of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, when visiting Moscow in 1969, recorded that: “under the press of economic efficiency, the large majority of Soviet housing systems are closed; there is little or no component interchange from one system to another. Standard design series are simplified to the point of eliminating planning options and systems interchangeability. (…) there are but twelve basic designs for apartment houses in all of the USSR. Typically a combine will be charged with a “turnkey” responsibility for the production and erection of a single apartment series model for maximum industrial effectiveness. It is a stock plan: the height is fixed, the plan is fixed, and the exterior appearance is fixed. The one variation is the incremental length determined by the number of elevator stairs modules”. (Wright)

Fig. 8. DSK-3 Panel Factory Since 1969 the situation has not changed that much, the history of Soviet and Post-Soviet housing can be summed up in four generations, starting from the second half of the ‘50s, after the shift promoted by Khrushchev. The first generation begins with the K-7 model and with II-35 and II-32; the second generation is developed in the second half of the ‘60s with models II-49, II-57, 1-605, 1-515; the third generation after 1972 develops models as P-44, P-3, P-55, KOPE, which, with very few variations, and together with some of the previous generations, are still produced nowadays, since the fourth generation is mostly made up of further variations that started to be produced in the second half of the ‘90s, called P-44-T, KOPE-M, P-3-M, P-46-M, P-55-M, etc., sold through on-line catalogues, where people can buy the apartment they like from the same companies that in the past were centralised factories of systems – such as DSK – and today operate as private developers. The changes that characterise the latest generations mostly consist in the development in height, reaching 17/22 storeys, and in a slight enrichment at the formal level, always however burdened by repetitions.

Fig. 9. Minsk, old (left) and recent (right) housing

5. CONCLUSIONS The introduction of colours and of some more valuable coatings, as well as the extensive use among the last generations of bow-windows and semi-personalised solutions for the coping and the roofing, do not improve a building and town-planning offer that remained rather homogeneous also after 1992, and the passage to a free market economy. On the contrary, the opening to the market has generated a new wave of demand that led to confirm the resort to industrialised systems, whereas designers and new customers struggled to develop alternative solutions. The new residential microrayon considerably increased in size, but the urban design did not register any notable difference from Soviet times; density increased, but the space between buildings remains uncertain, in spite of the attempts to introduce variations. Today we thus observe a new form of egalitarianism, produced by other relentless rules, those of the market, aimed at optimising the aspects of production – speed and repetition – to the detriment of solutions that would rather promote the construction of public and collective spaces in order to offer some identity elements to their inhabitants, say, the real challenge for Post-Soviet towns. The deep rooting of the approach of design in the ways and traits of standardisation makes the process of revision of building industry and urban culture in the former Soviet republics slow and problematic; undoubtedly, it has to pass through a new awareness of both topological and cultural consistency factors with social and housing models that must be entirely reorganised.

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