Russia has been architecturally challenged since its very inception. Indeed, its visual art in general has been feeble in comparison with that of other European nations and with its own paramount achievements in literature and music.

Certainly its premodern icons are lovely, but not as lovely as those of Greece, which they studiously imitate. And with the exception of a few striking, if eccentric monuments such Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square (c. 1560), such architectural achievements as Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s Peterhof (c. 1730) outside of St. Petersburg, and Alexander Pomerantsev’s GUM Department Store (1893) in Moscow are pale imitations of contemporary European models.

In the entire sweep of this nation’s visual art, the one unavoidable exception to this derivative status was the Russian avant-garde, roughly between 1915 and 1935. For one all-too-brief moment, painters such as Kazimir Malevich and sculptors such as Vladimir Tatlin and Naum Gabo displayed a frantic originality, engendering an unprecedented vocabulary of forms that still exert their fascination on artists of today.

But what about the architecture associated with that movement? A rare chance to assess it is provided by a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32.” Among the Russian architects featured, the best known are Vladimir Shukhov and Konstantin Melnikov, and even they are hardly household names. Far more familiar, and far more interesting, are Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn, Swiss and German respectively, whose works in Russia are treated in MoMA’s show. So it is that, once again, despite Russia’s astounding achievements in painting and sculpture in the first decades of the 20th century, its architecture slumps back into the familiar pattern of derivation on the one hand and, on the other, a somewhat clumsy attempt to keep up with Western European models. The rare exceptions, such as Shukhov’s Shabolovka Radio Tower (1922) or Tatlin’s never-realized Monument to the Third International (1920), are really sculptures rather than inhabitable structures.

The evidence for this rather stark assessment comes from Richard Pare’s photographs, which make up the bulk of MoMA’s exhibition and are even more abundant in a book of the same title, published by Monacelli Press. A case in point is Mosselprom, designed by David Kogan in 1923, with a color scheme and graphics (now in replica) by Alexander Rodchenko. As with Rastrelli’s rococo fopperies of two centuries earlier, one senses here the same structural banality, the same inability to think in truly volumetric and architectonic terms. At the same time, the cloying prettiness of the sky-blue accents along the white facade suggest, like similar chromatic interventions in Rastrelli and his contemporaries, a fundamental mistrust in the ability of built structure, by itself, to generate visual power and meaning. But let it be said that the revolutionary ethos of the early Soviet regime resulted in a greater abundance of such modernist architecture than you find in Europe or America during this period.

Granted, there was a time, three-quarters of a century past, when the strip windows along the turret of Moscow’s Narkomzem Building (Alexei Shchusev, 1933) would have seemed more dramatic than they do today. Likewise the stilted water tower that Moisei Reisher designed in Ekaterinburg in 1929 or the lozenge-shaped windows at the back of the house that Konstantin Melnikov designed for himself in 1927. But by now, most of the reinforced concrete buildings on display (which seem to owe an unacknowledged debt to the noble Parisian architect Auguste Perret, 1874–1954) seem to epitomize the soul-stifling drabness of the modern movement at its unimaginative worst.

Only a few, such as Kharkov’s Gosprom Building (Sergei Serafimov et al, 1929), with its bridges suspended in midair, and the grandiose protuberances of Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers Club (1927), exhibit, if not exactly tact, then at least an initiative and an inventiveness that the other entries lack.

With all the weakness of the architecture on view, however, why is this show as fascinating as it is? I submit that the fascination has little to do with the structures as such, except in the negative sense of their being wrecked or abandoned.

As Phyllis Lambert, the wellknown architectural historian, writes in the book that accompanies this exhibition, Mr. Pare’s photographs “make us aware of the perilous condition of the buildings, due to disregard and neglect and alert us the threat posed by the economic boom [in today’s Russia] (a phenomenon that is never kind to architecture of the past).” Surely she is not understating her case: It would be hard to find a larger or more evocative collection of rotting concrete facades, graffiti-ridden back-stairs, or interiors pocked and pitted beyond all recognition than those that litter the countryside of the former Soviet Union.

The real reason for this fascination, I suspect, is that there is a relatively new aesthetic response abroad in the world today, and it is the pleasure taken in the dystopian ruins that so many of the built artifacts of the modern world have become, three generations on. This visual reflex has lodged itself with such invincible force in the eyes of so many artists, photographers, and architects at this time that they see, or think they see, a supreme grace and poetry in these decaying modernist artifacts. The implicit message of this show is the curatorial urgency of our saving these neglected structures. But one strongly suspects that, restored to pristineness and liberated from their resonant decay, the buildings on view at the Modern would have little left to offer to the world.

jgardner@nysun.com

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