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www.nytimes.com/2005/05/1...OSCOW.html
May 15, 2005
Russian Icons
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
A short walk from the Kremlin, the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture is a haunted place. Paint is peeling off the once-elegant neo-Classical facade. An entire wing of the complex of 17th- and 18th-century buildings is partly abandoned -- because they're too expensive to heat during the long Russian winter. Yet the museum contains one of the world's best collections of architectural artifacts: everything from an elaborate model of a palace once planned for Catherine the Great to Ivan Leonidov's mythic drawings for the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry. (Had the latter been built, it would have towered above Red Square.) In many ways, these archives represent the city's architectural conscience, a treasury of what Moscow lost and what it could have been during one of the more violent centuries in Russian history.
For the past five years, the keeper of that conscience has been David Sarkisyan, a former pharmacology researcher and documentary filmmaker. When I saw him this spring, he was in his second-story office meeting with Natalia Dushkina, the granddaughter of a well-known Stalin-era architect, Aleksei Dushkin. Dushkina, a petite 50-year-old professor at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, looked as if she might soon be swallowed up by the piles of books and knickknacks- old issues of Russian magazines, photos of forgotten architects, a porcelain bust of Napoleon -that cluttered the room.
Dushkina was outlining her plan for an international preservation conference to be held next year. In the past few years, the city has demolished a number of landmark buildings, including an Art Deco department store, the 1970's-era Intourist Hotel and the Moscow Hotel, built in 1936 at the height of Stalin's dictatorship. Moscow's outspoken mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, has spearheaded the city's transformation, knocking down buildings to make way for an ancient, fairy-tale version of Russia.
Dushkina was concerned about the legacy of the Soviet avant-garde, the buildings designed in the 15 or so years following the 1917 October revolution, perhaps the most fertile period in Russian architectural history. These buildings range from the expressionistic forms of architects like Konstantin Melnikov to the machine-inspired, functionalist structures of the Constructivists. They are stunning for their eclecticism, yet they were united by an unfaltering optimism. The goal was to overthrow centuries of cultural history and to replace that past with an architectural order that would embody the values of a new, modern society.
As I spoke with Sarkisyan, the granddaughter of Konstantin Melnikov, Ekaterina Melnikov, a stout 64-year-old with a mop of gray hair, waited just outside his office. She had come to try to persuade Sarkisyan to intervene in a family dispute over her grandfather's landmark house, completed in 1929. The house, with its twin concrete cylinders, pierced by rows of hexagonal windows, evokes both a medieval monastery and the grain silos of the American Midwest -- a favorite theme of European Modernists, who celebrated silos as the great cathedrals of the industrial age.
Melnikov's 90-year-old son, Viktor, who still lives there, wants to donate the house to the state and preserve it as a museum. Viktor's daughter Ekaterina was there to plead her father's case. Her sister Elena claims that the property legally belongs to her. Sarkisyan worries that she might eventually sell it and that a new owner could tear it down.
Both Viktor and Ekaterina have suggested that the museum could be operated as a branch of the Shchusev, which controls a large portion of the architect's archives. Sarkisyan is obviously intrigued by the idea -- the house is one of Melnikov's most beloved buildings. But given that Moscow's various landmark groups are essentially powerless, the fate of this 1929 masterpiece will be decided simply as a matter of property law.
For Sarkisyan, a stocky, animated man who at one point gestured so wildly that a cigarette flew out of his hand, the story of Melnikov's house is simply part of a longer cycle of destruction, one set in motion, in part, by the very architects of the Soviet avant-garde, who had little use for the past. Their vision, in turn, was stamped out after a little more than a decade by Stalin, who saw in their creative fervor a threat to state authority. Moscow has been a city trapped in an endless process of historical revisionism. Since the fall of Communism, things have only become worse.
Consider, for example, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Built to commemorate Alexander I's victory over Napoleon, the original cathedral was demolished by Stalin in the early 1930's to make room for the Palace of Soviets. Some of the world's most celebrated architects -- from Le Corbusier to Walter Gropius, a founder of the Bauhaus -- competed for the commission, which would house the new Soviet government. Stalin's selection, an ornate monumental tower by Boris Iofan, sounded the final unavoidable death knell for the Soviet avant-garde. Its gargantuan form, capped by a 200-foot-high statue of Lenin, would have been the tallest structure in the world, casting a shadow across much of the city.
Yet not even Stalin could control history completely, and his megalomaniac architectural dream was soon derailed by the onset of World War II. The site lay barren until the late 1950's, when Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of a vast outdoor swimming pool. A full 200 meters in diameter, the pool was heated year round and as perfect an emblem of the progressive values of the cold-war era as Iofan's design had been of authoritarian power. Its towering diving platforms and sparkling water -- shown in an old Soviet promotional film with a ring of synchronized swimmers -- evoke a patch of postwar suburbia as imagined by the Kremlin.
That pool, too, was ripped out during the waves of nationalism and nostalgia that followed the collapse of Communism -- to make room for a new version of the cathedral. ''When they wanted to rebuild the cathedral,'' Sarkisyan said, ''the architects from Mikhail Posokhin's office came to us. We had all the drawings in our archives. They used the exact plan, but all of the details are wrong: they put the church in the wrong spot, it is clad in a veneer of marble instead of limestone, the reliefs are in fake bronze instead of plaster. It could not be more tasteless.'' Capped by a fake gold dome, it would look at home on the Vegas strip.
''This is the most dangerous tendency in Moscow,'' Dushkina says. ''They have created this cycle between destruction and reconstruction and restoration. We are losing the authentic quality of the city. And the worst part is that these are professional architects. They don't want to lose work.''
On a chilly morning a few days after my visit to Sarkisyan's office, I joined Maxim Kourennoi at Moisei Ginzburg's famed Narkomfin housing block. Kourennoi, a lanky 30-year-old architect, became obsessed with the works of the Constructivists as a young graduate student. In the early 1970's, buildings like Narkomfin became pilgrimage sites for many young European architects who came of age in the shadow of the radical student uprisings of 1968 -- the Rem Koolhaases and Zaha Hadids of the world. Part of the pull of the Soviet avant-garde lay in its romantic appeal. Crushed by Stalin in its infancy, this architecture represented a dream that was never fulfilled and provided a convenient way to rebel against European Modernism without abandoning all its tenets. But the works' hold on the contemporary imagination runs deeper than that. It has to do with the scale of its ambitions. In the early years of the Soviet Union, many believed that architecture could function as a tool of social transformation. It was a time when architecture -- and the ideas it expressed -- still felt dangerous.
Ginzburg was one of Modernism's most expansive thinkers, and Narkomfin, built for the Soviet ministry of finance at the end of the 1920's, was his first major experiment in communal living. The main facade's long horizontal bands of glass and concrete were an early expression of Modernism's faith in the emerging machine age. Inside, the building had wide corridors, a shared dining area and a vast gymnasium -- all designed to encourage social interaction.
Today the building is a wreck. Many of the windows are boarded up; birds nest between the exposed concrete bricks where large chunks of the facade have fallen off. Only about 20 families live there now; most of the apartments are either abandoned or used for storage. In the corridors, the water pipes leak and some of the electrical wiring is exposed. Even so, you can detect the delicacy of Ginzburg's vision. The building is arranged as a complex system of interlocking apartments, in contrast to the uniformity of the facade. And despite the communal dining area, most apartments are equipped with a small kitchen to provide a bit of privacy.
Nor was Ginzburg naive about the limits of the revolution's social rhetoric. Most high-level officials lived in the building's upper floors. One of the movement's most important patrons, Nikolai Miliutin, the minister of finance and an architectural theorist in his own right, had the penthouse. Yet even this is a modest space. The care with which Ginzburg balanced utopian idealism and human reality makes this one of his most compelling works. It is a vision that is as perfect an expression of Constructivism's ideals, say, as Palladio's Villa Rotonda was of the values of 16th-century humanism.
Kourennoi, who has made saving the landmark his own personal crusade, is one of several young architects trying to interest either a preservation group or a private patron in restoring the building, so far with no luck. At one point, government officials -- probably sniffing out a way to profit from the site -- suggested tearing the building down and rebuilding it with additional floors. More recently, these same officials claimed that the government lacks the money to do anything at all. Meanwhile, they are essentially allowing the building to rot away.
If Ginzburg was the Soviet avant-garde's most potent intellectual voice, Melnikov was the opposite: a lone wolf known for the originality of his designs, whose dynamic forms were packed with emotion. Colleagues often condemned this approach as bourgeois formalism. Internationally, he was a star by the mid-1920's. He is now most celebrated for the half-dozen workers' clubs he designed in a sudden creative outburst at the end of the decade.
Of those that survived, the most evocative is his 1927 Rusakov Club. Seen from across Strominka Street, its cantilevered concrete bays jut out above the entry. Though workers were applying a coat of paint when I was there, the repairs were merely superficial. The club has been completely gutted, and inside it is virtually impossible to make out the configuration of the original theater. Across town, Melnikov's 1927 Kauchuk club has been redecorated in a grotesque pastiche of neo-Classical pilasters and granite staircases that suggest a Stalin-era bordello, and his 1929 Burevestnik factory club is now a private health club with a Zen fountain.
Only Melnikov's own house has so far survived relatively intact. The house was renovated by the city in the mid-1990's, but there are already cracks in the walls and, since it was improperly sealed, water leaks into the basement. Melnikov's spartan concrete bed platforms, which once gave the master bedroom the look of a monastic cell, were torn out decades ago -- not even 90-year-old Viktor seems to remember exactly when. Today Viktor's oil paintings adorn most of the walls. A black-and-white photo of his father is propped in an armchair in the dining room. The photo depicts Melnikov in a white skullcap, his small face above an emaciated frame set in monastic reverie.
In February, Viktor, frail, thin and nearly blind, gave a news conference sitting next to his father's portrait and made a plea for the government to intervene on his behalf. He said he hoped the house would be preserved virtually as it is now -- with his paintings on the wall -- as a monument to his relationship with his father. The announcement garnered brief attention in the local press but was otherwise ignored.
Just as Stalin loved to rewrite history, few of his architectural achievements have been spared. Last year, it was the Moscow Hotel, a landmark of Stalinist architecture designed by Aleksei Shchusev, who was also the director of the state architecture museum in the 40's. (The museum was renamed after him soon after his death.)
Shchusev was to Moscow what Philip Johnson was to New York: an aesthete who had little interest in architecture's symbolic meaning or social mission -- he once said he was as comfortable working for Bolsheviks as he had been for Orthodox priests. Like Johnson, Shchusev dabbled in virtually every style of his epoch, designing traditional Orthodox churches, a neo-Classical train station and Constructivist monuments like Lenin's granite Mausoleum.
Built between 1934 and 1936, at the height of Stalin's murderous purges, the Moscow Hotel did not rank among Shchusev's best works. Even so, it occupied a significant place in the city's history. Its brooding, vaguely Modern form, embellished with classical references, ornate columns and coffered ceilings, hinted at the struggle of Soviet architects to adapt to Stalin's aesthetic whims. (The hotel's famously mismatched towers were rumored to have been caused by a slip of Stalin's pen, which led him to pick two rival versions of the design.)
In a twist that Stalin might have admired, Luzkhov announced, not long after the demolition was complete, that the hotel would be rebuilt in exactly the same style, only with upgraded facilities and brighter colors. Like the new version of the cathedral, the new version of the hotel would include underground parking -- something that has become an obsession of Moscow's city planners. (Among the few things salvaged from the original hotel were the brass doorknobs, which now adorn the galleries of Sarkisyan's museum.) ''Under Stalin,'' Sarkisyan remarked, ''at least the people who were fulfilling the orders were cultured architects, they had some taste. Their buildings were not so awful as today. But of course it is all a crime.''
The primary motive behind such schemes is money. The privatization efforts of the 90's placed most of the land here in the hands of the city government. The system is now so rife with conflicts of interest that it is virtually impossible to disentangle them. Government architects who have a say in preservation issues are also vying for lucrative government contracts. And Elena Baturina, the billionaire wife of Moscow's mayor, controlled one of the country's largest cement and construction companies. In this climate, saving the city's architectural history is rarely a top priority.
Natalia Dushkina, whose conference will cover this period as well, actually lives in a Stalinist high-rise designed by her grandfather. The rooms are crammed with dark wood furniture and her father's paintings, including historical depictions of various monasteries. At the end of a corridor is a former maid's room -- a reminder that Dushkina was raised as a child of the Soviet elite.
As two dogs lay wheezing in the corner, Dushkina ticked off the number of her grandfather's buildings that are in disrepair. The Mayakovsky Metro Station -- whose vaulted interior is one of the city's most celebrated public spaces -- has been damaged by water leaks. A Stalin-era department store her father designed with Beaux Arts arcades was bought by a Russian development company and, she fears, may soon be gutted.
But generally, the grand monuments of the Stalinist era are both in better shape than their Modernist counterparts and are more highly revered. To the average Muscovite, the wonderfully ornate underground Metro stations, which were stripped of their Stalinist statues under Khrushchev, remain symbols of civic pride. High-rise apartments like Dushkina's are now coveted by Moscow's rising middle class.
The least loved of Moscow's buildings may well be those erected in the 60's and 70's. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, recently announced that the city was planning to demolish the 70's-era Rossiya Hotel. The public response was generally one of relief. A colossal concrete-and-steel structure near Red Square, the hotel was once legendary among foreign tourists for its endless warrens of rooms and infestations of cockroaches and listening devices. Not surprisingly, the city plans to replace it with an equally gargantuan hotel-retail-commercial development in prerevolutionary style.
Grigory Revzin, an architecture critic who writes for the liberal newspaper Kommersant and is one of the city's most vocal preservation advocates, told me that Alexander Kuzmin, Moscow's chief architect, made the announcement on a TV talk show. ''The first question from the audience was when were they going to demolish the 1961 Palace of Congresses inside the Kremlin.''
Dushkina says: ''The hotel is not a masterpiece of architecture. But I prefer to have a monster of the 70's than something badly built by some foreigner in a neo-historical style. . . . In the same way, there is no plan to destroy the Palace of Congresses, but I think this is the dream of the general public as well. They have no idea what history is. In the past 10 years, we have built up this strong feeling that life exists only in money. It is the most horrible thing that happens to people.''
In many ways, the planned demolition of the Rossiya is similar to efforts in Berlin to demolish the Palace of the Republic and replace it with a reproduction of the 17th-century Stadtschloss. The buildings conjure associations that many would prefer to erase -- in Berlin, the last remnants of Communism, in Moscow a cold-war era that ended in national humiliation. But in Berlin, the government spent a decade wringing its hands over the place of the Palace in the country's collective memory. After years of heated public debate, the building is still standing. In Moscow, the government acts with unchallenged speed and brutality. There is little public outcry. The monuments of the 60's and 70's -- designed in a mix of Modern and classical styles -- are dismissed, fairly or not, as experiments in bad taste. But the importance of a city's architectural legacy goes beyond aesthetics. Preserving it is a way of preserving collective memory.
Among the most famous urban development projects in Moscow is the Khrushchev-era Kalinin Prospekt, a late Modernist thoroughfare that carves through the city's southern sector. Designed by Mikhail Posokhin, who was then Moscow's chief architect, the avenue's rows of concrete-and-glass towers, which rise out of a seemingly endless base of commercial shops and restaurants, were built during the height of the cold war. Their sleek, uniform facades were meant to evoke the era's progressive values as well as the potency of Russia's military-industrial complex.
Today, Kalinin Prospekt is regarded by many as an urban planning failure. Only a few years ago, Posokhin's own son, Mikhail, now a powerful architect in his own right, unveiled a proposal to renovate the entire strip. The plan, which was never approved, would have enveloped the towers in a postmodern pastiche of historical decor, winding pedestrian streets and landscaped terraces -- the kind of generic mall that was promoted by American urban planners in the 80's.
Posokhin would not be the first architect to try to exorcise ghosts of the past by obliterating them. But this generation may not have the distance to judge the historical worth of such projects. A growing number of young architects admire Kalinin Prospekt for the confidence it exudes. At night, the shimmering towers have a raw power that is only likely to grow more haunting over time.
The same could be said of the Khrushchev-era housing blocks that sprang up on the outskirts of the city in the early 60's. Built during the height of Khrushchev's reforms, the developments were conceived as a Soviet alternative to the prosperity of postwar suburban America. Eventually they became a standardized model for social housing throughout the East bloc, where thousands of them were built.
Revzin, the architecture critic, took me to the housing complex where he and his younger brother grew up. The sensitivity of the design surprised me. Inspired by the free-floating compositions of early avant-garde artists like El Lissitsky, the narrow five-story buildings were arranged to loosely frame a series of gardens planted with birch trees. The concrete structures, decorated with narrow wooden balconies, rest on the landscape with an unexpected lightness, as if they were floating within a forest in a Russian fairy tale.
Over tea, Revzin's mother, who raised two children in a tiny two-bedroom apartment here, told me that these developments represented a new kind of freedom for her generation. They were the first apartments a young Soviet couple could afford to buy on a worker's yearly salary. Though small, they offered an alternative to the cramped communal living that was a stultifying feature of Soviet life. Today most of these developments, which once encircled much of the city, are being bulldozed to make room for sleek residential high-rises. Revzin says his mother expects she'll have to move out by the end of the year.
When I mentioned the fate of these developments to the city's head of urban planning, Sergei Tkachenko, he dismissed Revzin's misgivings as misplaced nostalgia. ''I understand when people feel sentimental about where they grew up,'' he said. ''But they are backward places. If I can afford a Mercedes and I drive a Lada, it is just hypocrisy. And now I can afford a Mercedes.''
Tkachencko may have a point. Certainly, not all of these developments would be worth preserving. The mechanical systems were poorly designed; the walls -- made of plaster board -- are so thin that they don't afford much privacy. Nor is it possible to freeze an entire era in time. Even Revzin seems, at times, to be resigned to the loss. ''I don't know if you can call this corruption,'' he said later. ''It is the reality of our privatization. It is eating everything.''
Yet the pace of destruction seems to reflect a society that has somehow lost its moorings -- and that may be too exhausted to care. In Moscow, this indifference could soon lead to the loss of one of the richest architectural experiments of the 20th century. What the city may be left with are the haunting monuments of Stalin -- too deeply embedded in its fabric and too lavish to ignore.
Nicolai Ouroussoff is the chief architecture critic for The New York Times.
May 15, 2005
Russian Icons
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
A short walk from the Kremlin, the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture is a haunted place. Paint is peeling off the once-elegant neo-Classical facade. An entire wing of the complex of 17th- and 18th-century buildings is partly abandoned -- because they're too expensive to heat during the long Russian winter. Yet the museum contains one of the world's best collections of architectural artifacts: everything from an elaborate model of a palace once planned for Catherine the Great to Ivan Leonidov's mythic drawings for the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry. (Had the latter been built, it would have towered above Red Square.) In many ways, these archives represent the city's architectural conscience, a treasury of what Moscow lost and what it could have been during one of the more violent centuries in Russian history.
For the past five years, the keeper of that conscience has been David Sarkisyan, a former pharmacology researcher and documentary filmmaker. When I saw him this spring, he was in his second-story office meeting with Natalia Dushkina, the granddaughter of a well-known Stalin-era architect, Aleksei Dushkin. Dushkina, a petite 50-year-old professor at the Moscow Institute of Architecture, looked as if she might soon be swallowed up by the piles of books and knickknacks- old issues of Russian magazines, photos of forgotten architects, a porcelain bust of Napoleon -that cluttered the room.
Dushkina was outlining her plan for an international preservation conference to be held next year. In the past few years, the city has demolished a number of landmark buildings, including an Art Deco department store, the 1970's-era Intourist Hotel and the Moscow Hotel, built in 1936 at the height of Stalin's dictatorship. Moscow's outspoken mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, has spearheaded the city's transformation, knocking down buildings to make way for an ancient, fairy-tale version of Russia.
Dushkina was concerned about the legacy of the Soviet avant-garde, the buildings designed in the 15 or so years following the 1917 October revolution, perhaps the most fertile period in Russian architectural history. These buildings range from the expressionistic forms of architects like Konstantin Melnikov to the machine-inspired, functionalist structures of the Constructivists. They are stunning for their eclecticism, yet they were united by an unfaltering optimism. The goal was to overthrow centuries of cultural history and to replace that past with an architectural order that would embody the values of a new, modern society.
As I spoke with Sarkisyan, the granddaughter of Konstantin Melnikov, Ekaterina Melnikov, a stout 64-year-old with a mop of gray hair, waited just outside his office. She had come to try to persuade Sarkisyan to intervene in a family dispute over her grandfather's landmark house, completed in 1929. The house, with its twin concrete cylinders, pierced by rows of hexagonal windows, evokes both a medieval monastery and the grain silos of the American Midwest -- a favorite theme of European Modernists, who celebrated silos as the great cathedrals of the industrial age.
Melnikov's 90-year-old son, Viktor, who still lives there, wants to donate the house to the state and preserve it as a museum. Viktor's daughter Ekaterina was there to plead her father's case. Her sister Elena claims that the property legally belongs to her. Sarkisyan worries that she might eventually sell it and that a new owner could tear it down.
Both Viktor and Ekaterina have suggested that the museum could be operated as a branch of the Shchusev, which controls a large portion of the architect's archives. Sarkisyan is obviously intrigued by the idea -- the house is one of Melnikov's most beloved buildings. But given that Moscow's various landmark groups are essentially powerless, the fate of this 1929 masterpiece will be decided simply as a matter of property law.
For Sarkisyan, a stocky, animated man who at one point gestured so wildly that a cigarette flew out of his hand, the story of Melnikov's house is simply part of a longer cycle of destruction, one set in motion, in part, by the very architects of the Soviet avant-garde, who had little use for the past. Their vision, in turn, was stamped out after a little more than a decade by Stalin, who saw in their creative fervor a threat to state authority. Moscow has been a city trapped in an endless process of historical revisionism. Since the fall of Communism, things have only become worse.
Consider, for example, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Built to commemorate Alexander I's victory over Napoleon, the original cathedral was demolished by Stalin in the early 1930's to make room for the Palace of Soviets. Some of the world's most celebrated architects -- from Le Corbusier to Walter Gropius, a founder of the Bauhaus -- competed for the commission, which would house the new Soviet government. Stalin's selection, an ornate monumental tower by Boris Iofan, sounded the final unavoidable death knell for the Soviet avant-garde. Its gargantuan form, capped by a 200-foot-high statue of Lenin, would have been the tallest structure in the world, casting a shadow across much of the city.
Yet not even Stalin could control history completely, and his megalomaniac architectural dream was soon derailed by the onset of World War II. The site lay barren until the late 1950's, when Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of a vast outdoor swimming pool. A full 200 meters in diameter, the pool was heated year round and as perfect an emblem of the progressive values of the cold-war era as Iofan's design had been of authoritarian power. Its towering diving platforms and sparkling water -- shown in an old Soviet promotional film with a ring of synchronized swimmers -- evoke a patch of postwar suburbia as imagined by the Kremlin.
That pool, too, was ripped out during the waves of nationalism and nostalgia that followed the collapse of Communism -- to make room for a new version of the cathedral. ''When they wanted to rebuild the cathedral,'' Sarkisyan said, ''the architects from Mikhail Posokhin's office came to us. We had all the drawings in our archives. They used the exact plan, but all of the details are wrong: they put the church in the wrong spot, it is clad in a veneer of marble instead of limestone, the reliefs are in fake bronze instead of plaster. It could not be more tasteless.'' Capped by a fake gold dome, it would look at home on the Vegas strip.
''This is the most dangerous tendency in Moscow,'' Dushkina says. ''They have created this cycle between destruction and reconstruction and restoration. We are losing the authentic quality of the city. And the worst part is that these are professional architects. They don't want to lose work.''
On a chilly morning a few days after my visit to Sarkisyan's office, I joined Maxim Kourennoi at Moisei Ginzburg's famed Narkomfin housing block. Kourennoi, a lanky 30-year-old architect, became obsessed with the works of the Constructivists as a young graduate student. In the early 1970's, buildings like Narkomfin became pilgrimage sites for many young European architects who came of age in the shadow of the radical student uprisings of 1968 -- the Rem Koolhaases and Zaha Hadids of the world. Part of the pull of the Soviet avant-garde lay in its romantic appeal. Crushed by Stalin in its infancy, this architecture represented a dream that was never fulfilled and provided a convenient way to rebel against European Modernism without abandoning all its tenets. But the works' hold on the contemporary imagination runs deeper than that. It has to do with the scale of its ambitions. In the early years of the Soviet Union, many believed that architecture could function as a tool of social transformation. It was a time when architecture -- and the ideas it expressed -- still felt dangerous.
Ginzburg was one of Modernism's most expansive thinkers, and Narkomfin, built for the Soviet ministry of finance at the end of the 1920's, was his first major experiment in communal living. The main facade's long horizontal bands of glass and concrete were an early expression of Modernism's faith in the emerging machine age. Inside, the building had wide corridors, a shared dining area and a vast gymnasium -- all designed to encourage social interaction.
Today the building is a wreck. Many of the windows are boarded up; birds nest between the exposed concrete bricks where large chunks of the facade have fallen off. Only about 20 families live there now; most of the apartments are either abandoned or used for storage. In the corridors, the water pipes leak and some of the electrical wiring is exposed. Even so, you can detect the delicacy of Ginzburg's vision. The building is arranged as a complex system of interlocking apartments, in contrast to the uniformity of the facade. And despite the communal dining area, most apartments are equipped with a small kitchen to provide a bit of privacy.
Nor was Ginzburg naive about the limits of the revolution's social rhetoric. Most high-level officials lived in the building's upper floors. One of the movement's most important patrons, Nikolai Miliutin, the minister of finance and an architectural theorist in his own right, had the penthouse. Yet even this is a modest space. The care with which Ginzburg balanced utopian idealism and human reality makes this one of his most compelling works. It is a vision that is as perfect an expression of Constructivism's ideals, say, as Palladio's Villa Rotonda was of the values of 16th-century humanism.
Kourennoi, who has made saving the landmark his own personal crusade, is one of several young architects trying to interest either a preservation group or a private patron in restoring the building, so far with no luck. At one point, government officials -- probably sniffing out a way to profit from the site -- suggested tearing the building down and rebuilding it with additional floors. More recently, these same officials claimed that the government lacks the money to do anything at all. Meanwhile, they are essentially allowing the building to rot away.
If Ginzburg was the Soviet avant-garde's most potent intellectual voice, Melnikov was the opposite: a lone wolf known for the originality of his designs, whose dynamic forms were packed with emotion. Colleagues often condemned this approach as bourgeois formalism. Internationally, he was a star by the mid-1920's. He is now most celebrated for the half-dozen workers' clubs he designed in a sudden creative outburst at the end of the decade.
Of those that survived, the most evocative is his 1927 Rusakov Club. Seen from across Strominka Street, its cantilevered concrete bays jut out above the entry. Though workers were applying a coat of paint when I was there, the repairs were merely superficial. The club has been completely gutted, and inside it is virtually impossible to make out the configuration of the original theater. Across town, Melnikov's 1927 Kauchuk club has been redecorated in a grotesque pastiche of neo-Classical pilasters and granite staircases that suggest a Stalin-era bordello, and his 1929 Burevestnik factory club is now a private health club with a Zen fountain.
Only Melnikov's own house has so far survived relatively intact. The house was renovated by the city in the mid-1990's, but there are already cracks in the walls and, since it was improperly sealed, water leaks into the basement. Melnikov's spartan concrete bed platforms, which once gave the master bedroom the look of a monastic cell, were torn out decades ago -- not even 90-year-old Viktor seems to remember exactly when. Today Viktor's oil paintings adorn most of the walls. A black-and-white photo of his father is propped in an armchair in the dining room. The photo depicts Melnikov in a white skullcap, his small face above an emaciated frame set in monastic reverie.
In February, Viktor, frail, thin and nearly blind, gave a news conference sitting next to his father's portrait and made a plea for the government to intervene on his behalf. He said he hoped the house would be preserved virtually as it is now -- with his paintings on the wall -- as a monument to his relationship with his father. The announcement garnered brief attention in the local press but was otherwise ignored.
Just as Stalin loved to rewrite history, few of his architectural achievements have been spared. Last year, it was the Moscow Hotel, a landmark of Stalinist architecture designed by Aleksei Shchusev, who was also the director of the state architecture museum in the 40's. (The museum was renamed after him soon after his death.)
Shchusev was to Moscow what Philip Johnson was to New York: an aesthete who had little interest in architecture's symbolic meaning or social mission -- he once said he was as comfortable working for Bolsheviks as he had been for Orthodox priests. Like Johnson, Shchusev dabbled in virtually every style of his epoch, designing traditional Orthodox churches, a neo-Classical train station and Constructivist monuments like Lenin's granite Mausoleum.
Built between 1934 and 1936, at the height of Stalin's murderous purges, the Moscow Hotel did not rank among Shchusev's best works. Even so, it occupied a significant place in the city's history. Its brooding, vaguely Modern form, embellished with classical references, ornate columns and coffered ceilings, hinted at the struggle of Soviet architects to adapt to Stalin's aesthetic whims. (The hotel's famously mismatched towers were rumored to have been caused by a slip of Stalin's pen, which led him to pick two rival versions of the design.)
In a twist that Stalin might have admired, Luzkhov announced, not long after the demolition was complete, that the hotel would be rebuilt in exactly the same style, only with upgraded facilities and brighter colors. Like the new version of the cathedral, the new version of the hotel would include underground parking -- something that has become an obsession of Moscow's city planners. (Among the few things salvaged from the original hotel were the brass doorknobs, which now adorn the galleries of Sarkisyan's museum.) ''Under Stalin,'' Sarkisyan remarked, ''at least the people who were fulfilling the orders were cultured architects, they had some taste. Their buildings were not so awful as today. But of course it is all a crime.''
The primary motive behind such schemes is money. The privatization efforts of the 90's placed most of the land here in the hands of the city government. The system is now so rife with conflicts of interest that it is virtually impossible to disentangle them. Government architects who have a say in preservation issues are also vying for lucrative government contracts. And Elena Baturina, the billionaire wife of Moscow's mayor, controlled one of the country's largest cement and construction companies. In this climate, saving the city's architectural history is rarely a top priority.
Natalia Dushkina, whose conference will cover this period as well, actually lives in a Stalinist high-rise designed by her grandfather. The rooms are crammed with dark wood furniture and her father's paintings, including historical depictions of various monasteries. At the end of a corridor is a former maid's room -- a reminder that Dushkina was raised as a child of the Soviet elite.
As two dogs lay wheezing in the corner, Dushkina ticked off the number of her grandfather's buildings that are in disrepair. The Mayakovsky Metro Station -- whose vaulted interior is one of the city's most celebrated public spaces -- has been damaged by water leaks. A Stalin-era department store her father designed with Beaux Arts arcades was bought by a Russian development company and, she fears, may soon be gutted.
But generally, the grand monuments of the Stalinist era are both in better shape than their Modernist counterparts and are more highly revered. To the average Muscovite, the wonderfully ornate underground Metro stations, which were stripped of their Stalinist statues under Khrushchev, remain symbols of civic pride. High-rise apartments like Dushkina's are now coveted by Moscow's rising middle class.
The least loved of Moscow's buildings may well be those erected in the 60's and 70's. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, recently announced that the city was planning to demolish the 70's-era Rossiya Hotel. The public response was generally one of relief. A colossal concrete-and-steel structure near Red Square, the hotel was once legendary among foreign tourists for its endless warrens of rooms and infestations of cockroaches and listening devices. Not surprisingly, the city plans to replace it with an equally gargantuan hotel-retail-commercial development in prerevolutionary style.
Grigory Revzin, an architecture critic who writes for the liberal newspaper Kommersant and is one of the city's most vocal preservation advocates, told me that Alexander Kuzmin, Moscow's chief architect, made the announcement on a TV talk show. ''The first question from the audience was when were they going to demolish the 1961 Palace of Congresses inside the Kremlin.''
Dushkina says: ''The hotel is not a masterpiece of architecture. But I prefer to have a monster of the 70's than something badly built by some foreigner in a neo-historical style. . . . In the same way, there is no plan to destroy the Palace of Congresses, but I think this is the dream of the general public as well. They have no idea what history is. In the past 10 years, we have built up this strong feeling that life exists only in money. It is the most horrible thing that happens to people.''
In many ways, the planned demolition of the Rossiya is similar to efforts in Berlin to demolish the Palace of the Republic and replace it with a reproduction of the 17th-century Stadtschloss. The buildings conjure associations that many would prefer to erase -- in Berlin, the last remnants of Communism, in Moscow a cold-war era that ended in national humiliation. But in Berlin, the government spent a decade wringing its hands over the place of the Palace in the country's collective memory. After years of heated public debate, the building is still standing. In Moscow, the government acts with unchallenged speed and brutality. There is little public outcry. The monuments of the 60's and 70's -- designed in a mix of Modern and classical styles -- are dismissed, fairly or not, as experiments in bad taste. But the importance of a city's architectural legacy goes beyond aesthetics. Preserving it is a way of preserving collective memory.
Among the most famous urban development projects in Moscow is the Khrushchev-era Kalinin Prospekt, a late Modernist thoroughfare that carves through the city's southern sector. Designed by Mikhail Posokhin, who was then Moscow's chief architect, the avenue's rows of concrete-and-glass towers, which rise out of a seemingly endless base of commercial shops and restaurants, were built during the height of the cold war. Their sleek, uniform facades were meant to evoke the era's progressive values as well as the potency of Russia's military-industrial complex.
Today, Kalinin Prospekt is regarded by many as an urban planning failure. Only a few years ago, Posokhin's own son, Mikhail, now a powerful architect in his own right, unveiled a proposal to renovate the entire strip. The plan, which was never approved, would have enveloped the towers in a postmodern pastiche of historical decor, winding pedestrian streets and landscaped terraces -- the kind of generic mall that was promoted by American urban planners in the 80's.
Posokhin would not be the first architect to try to exorcise ghosts of the past by obliterating them. But this generation may not have the distance to judge the historical worth of such projects. A growing number of young architects admire Kalinin Prospekt for the confidence it exudes. At night, the shimmering towers have a raw power that is only likely to grow more haunting over time.
The same could be said of the Khrushchev-era housing blocks that sprang up on the outskirts of the city in the early 60's. Built during the height of Khrushchev's reforms, the developments were conceived as a Soviet alternative to the prosperity of postwar suburban America. Eventually they became a standardized model for social housing throughout the East bloc, where thousands of them were built.
Revzin, the architecture critic, took me to the housing complex where he and his younger brother grew up. The sensitivity of the design surprised me. Inspired by the free-floating compositions of early avant-garde artists like El Lissitsky, the narrow five-story buildings were arranged to loosely frame a series of gardens planted with birch trees. The concrete structures, decorated with narrow wooden balconies, rest on the landscape with an unexpected lightness, as if they were floating within a forest in a Russian fairy tale.
Over tea, Revzin's mother, who raised two children in a tiny two-bedroom apartment here, told me that these developments represented a new kind of freedom for her generation. They were the first apartments a young Soviet couple could afford to buy on a worker's yearly salary. Though small, they offered an alternative to the cramped communal living that was a stultifying feature of Soviet life. Today most of these developments, which once encircled much of the city, are being bulldozed to make room for sleek residential high-rises. Revzin says his mother expects she'll have to move out by the end of the year.
When I mentioned the fate of these developments to the city's head of urban planning, Sergei Tkachenko, he dismissed Revzin's misgivings as misplaced nostalgia. ''I understand when people feel sentimental about where they grew up,'' he said. ''But they are backward places. If I can afford a Mercedes and I drive a Lada, it is just hypocrisy. And now I can afford a Mercedes.''
Tkachencko may have a point. Certainly, not all of these developments would be worth preserving. The mechanical systems were poorly designed; the walls -- made of plaster board -- are so thin that they don't afford much privacy. Nor is it possible to freeze an entire era in time. Even Revzin seems, at times, to be resigned to the loss. ''I don't know if you can call this corruption,'' he said later. ''It is the reality of our privatization. It is eating everything.''
Yet the pace of destruction seems to reflect a society that has somehow lost its moorings -- and that may be too exhausted to care. In Moscow, this indifference could soon lead to the loss of one of the richest architectural experiments of the 20th century. What the city may be left with are the haunting monuments of Stalin -- too deeply embedded in its fabric and too lavish to ignore.
Nicolai Ouroussoff is the chief architecture critic for The New York Times.
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www.nytimes.com/2005/05/1...5WWLN.html
May 15, 2005
The Towering Problem
By JAMES TRAUB
Things seem to get old a lot faster than they used to. Modernism -- yesterday's holy terror, yesterday's tomorrow -- has already reached senescence, and the preservationist impulse that once protected Victorian and Beaux-Arts monuments from the wrecking ball has now turned to the cause of the modern.
There's an obvious, and perhaps humbling, paradox in shielding from destruction and decay the chief specimens of a movement that presented itself as the expression of irresistible forces of change. It was, after all, the Modernist remaking of cities that obliterated so much of the pre-existing urban landscape. Indeed, for that very reason, few urbanites will mourn the passing of the Modernist moment. Many of the movement's high priests, most famously Le Corbusier, recoiled in horror from the anarchic energies of city life. ''We must kill the street!'' Corbu cried. And he imagined an architecture in which a grid of aerial highways connected high-rise towers surrounded by grass. Cars here, people there; work here, habitat there.
Corbu never got to rebuild Paris, thank God, but his vision of ''the tower in the park'' helped to produce the distinctive urbanism of the second half of the 20th century. In ''The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century,'' the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert praises high Modernist structures like Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building on Park Avenue, but he observes that the developers and architects who reared a double column of mighty steel towers on the Avenue of the Americas took over Mies's ''total disregard of urban form, with none of the virtues of Mies's obsessional care over detail, and between them produced one of the more devastating urban landscapes of the century.''
The prophets of Modernism provided the intellectual and even moral rationale for ''urban renewal,'' the epic campaign of bulldozing that flattened so many crooked old neighborhoods in the name of health and progress. As Marshall Berman writes in ''All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity,'' ''The tragic irony of Modernist urbanism is that its triumph has helped to destroy the very urban life it hoped to set free.''
And so, yes, let's preserve the exemplary buildings, but not the urban principles that lay behind them. We can revitalize Lincoln Center -- as the innovative firm of Diller Scofidio & Renfro is now setting out to do -- but still recognize that if we were starting from scratch today we wouldn't mass a suite of shimmering white buildings on a mighty white plinth. Nor would we clear the space for it by flattening a neighborhood -- even a gamy one -- as Robert Moses, New York's master builder and destroyer, did in the late 50's. It's no coincidence that in the ''cultural district'' now being planned for Fort Greene in Brooklyn, the arts facilities are to be scattered around the neighborhood. In a rebuttal to Modernist practice, the architectural planner Charles Renfro speaks fondly of the project's ''porosity.''
What, then, is the answer to the ''tragic irony''of Modernist urbanism? The mightiest blow ever struck against this doctrine came in Jane Jacobs's ''Death and Life of Great American Cities.'' Jacobs argued that it wasn't green grass, broad vistas and spanking new buildings that urbanites craved; it was, rather, ''the intricate sidewalk ballet'' of her old, warrenlike Greenwich Village neighborhood. Jacobs provided a countervocabulary, a language of authentic urbanism, which preservationists and neighborhood advocates have been wielding against developers and municipal authorities ever since.
But ''Death and Life'' appeared in 1961. Jacobs's image of a city of stable, small-scale enclaves, where everyone knows everyone, may have been romantic even then; now it seems tinged with a hopeless melancholy. It is we, the restless moderns, who untangle the dense weave of these communities by moving into them, and by converting their coffee shops into espresso bars. Marshall Berman cherishes Jacobs's vision and lambastes Moses, but he admits that neither he nor any of his friends would have stayed in their beloved Bronx neighborhood even if Moses hadn't callously destroyed it to build the Cross Bronx Expressway.
The machine-clean and functionally mapped future toward which Modernism once beckoned now strikes us not only as soulless but almost comically archaic as well; and yet the organic and folkloric alternative offers us a city in amber -- the urban equivalent of the retro baseball stadium. What is the proper relationship of the tall building to the street? Today, New York is one of the very few American cities where the street matters enough that the problem bears thinking about. Preservation is well and good; but for New Yorkers -- and urbanites everywhere -- reimagining the street would constitute a greater contribution to 21st-century urbanism than protecting another chaste glass box.
James Traub is a contributing writer for the magazine.
May 15, 2005
The Towering Problem
By JAMES TRAUB
Things seem to get old a lot faster than they used to. Modernism -- yesterday's holy terror, yesterday's tomorrow -- has already reached senescence, and the preservationist impulse that once protected Victorian and Beaux-Arts monuments from the wrecking ball has now turned to the cause of the modern.
There's an obvious, and perhaps humbling, paradox in shielding from destruction and decay the chief specimens of a movement that presented itself as the expression of irresistible forces of change. It was, after all, the Modernist remaking of cities that obliterated so much of the pre-existing urban landscape. Indeed, for that very reason, few urbanites will mourn the passing of the Modernist moment. Many of the movement's high priests, most famously Le Corbusier, recoiled in horror from the anarchic energies of city life. ''We must kill the street!'' Corbu cried. And he imagined an architecture in which a grid of aerial highways connected high-rise towers surrounded by grass. Cars here, people there; work here, habitat there.
Corbu never got to rebuild Paris, thank God, but his vision of ''the tower in the park'' helped to produce the distinctive urbanism of the second half of the 20th century. In ''The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century,'' the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert praises high Modernist structures like Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building on Park Avenue, but he observes that the developers and architects who reared a double column of mighty steel towers on the Avenue of the Americas took over Mies's ''total disregard of urban form, with none of the virtues of Mies's obsessional care over detail, and between them produced one of the more devastating urban landscapes of the century.''
The prophets of Modernism provided the intellectual and even moral rationale for ''urban renewal,'' the epic campaign of bulldozing that flattened so many crooked old neighborhoods in the name of health and progress. As Marshall Berman writes in ''All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity,'' ''The tragic irony of Modernist urbanism is that its triumph has helped to destroy the very urban life it hoped to set free.''
And so, yes, let's preserve the exemplary buildings, but not the urban principles that lay behind them. We can revitalize Lincoln Center -- as the innovative firm of Diller Scofidio & Renfro is now setting out to do -- but still recognize that if we were starting from scratch today we wouldn't mass a suite of shimmering white buildings on a mighty white plinth. Nor would we clear the space for it by flattening a neighborhood -- even a gamy one -- as Robert Moses, New York's master builder and destroyer, did in the late 50's. It's no coincidence that in the ''cultural district'' now being planned for Fort Greene in Brooklyn, the arts facilities are to be scattered around the neighborhood. In a rebuttal to Modernist practice, the architectural planner Charles Renfro speaks fondly of the project's ''porosity.''
What, then, is the answer to the ''tragic irony''of Modernist urbanism? The mightiest blow ever struck against this doctrine came in Jane Jacobs's ''Death and Life of Great American Cities.'' Jacobs argued that it wasn't green grass, broad vistas and spanking new buildings that urbanites craved; it was, rather, ''the intricate sidewalk ballet'' of her old, warrenlike Greenwich Village neighborhood. Jacobs provided a countervocabulary, a language of authentic urbanism, which preservationists and neighborhood advocates have been wielding against developers and municipal authorities ever since.
But ''Death and Life'' appeared in 1961. Jacobs's image of a city of stable, small-scale enclaves, where everyone knows everyone, may have been romantic even then; now it seems tinged with a hopeless melancholy. It is we, the restless moderns, who untangle the dense weave of these communities by moving into them, and by converting their coffee shops into espresso bars. Marshall Berman cherishes Jacobs's vision and lambastes Moses, but he admits that neither he nor any of his friends would have stayed in their beloved Bronx neighborhood even if Moses hadn't callously destroyed it to build the Cross Bronx Expressway.
The machine-clean and functionally mapped future toward which Modernism once beckoned now strikes us not only as soulless but almost comically archaic as well; and yet the organic and folkloric alternative offers us a city in amber -- the urban equivalent of the retro baseball stadium. What is the proper relationship of the tall building to the street? Today, New York is one of the very few American cities where the street matters enough that the problem bears thinking about. Preservation is well and good; but for New Yorkers -- and urbanites everywhere -- reimagining the street would constitute a greater contribution to 21st-century urbanism than protecting another chaste glass box.
James Traub is a contributing writer for the magazine.
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www.nytimes.com/2005/05/1...TRACT.html
May 15, 2005
Saving the Tract House
By KARRIE JACOBS
Frank Nolan, casually dressed in an olive drab polo shirt and blue jeans, occupied a white leather Brno chair set off by the room's gleaming Philippine-mahogany paneling. ''One never wants to come across as a design snob, especially as it pertains to one's neighbors,'' Nolan said gingerly. ''We know that having a good neighbor is so much more important than what color they paint their house or how they choose to landscape. But there just seems to be a great disparity between the potential that we see in this neighborhood and then what you actually do see when you drive down the street.''
Nolan's house was one of 120 built in the 1960's by the developer Joseph Eichler in a San Fernando Valley subdivision called Balboa Highlands, 26 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Nolan and some of his neighbors want to have their neighborhood designated a historic district, which won't quite create an enclave of unsullied 60's modernity but will keep the threat of McMansions at bay.
It may also confuse some of the neighbors, who may not have thought that buying a 60's tract house would entail accepting a small role in Modernist architectural history. Stuart Frolick, who bought a house that had been radically altered by a previous owner, an engineer, told me, unapologetically, that he can't afford to return the house to its original state. Besides, his wife isn't into Modernism. ''She would like to gingerbread the place up,'' Frolick said, ''and I resist.''
"We clocked over 500 people coming through our neighborhood,'' Adriene Biondo said recently. ''We had vintage cars cruising up and down the street that day. People were tuned into the oldies station. It was a really exciting moment.'' Biondo, a short, roundish 49-year-old with the breathy voice of a chanteuse, was talking about the 2000 ''How Modern Was My Valley'' tour as if it happened yesterday. Sponsored by the Modern Committee, which she heads -- a furiously active branch of the city's dominant preservation organization, the Los Angeles Conservancy -- the tour brought a flood of tourists into the neighborhood. It also focused attention on the architecture about which Biondo is most passionate: the homes, including her own, built by Eichler.
Eichler, who was responsible for the construction of some 11,000 homes, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, was the last and most successful of a breed now largely extinct. In the years after World War II, commercial home-builders all over the country, but particularly in the West, began experimenting with new methods of construction and new styles of architecture. Abraham Levitt and his sons applied mass-production methods to building thousands of tiny ranch houses and Cape Cods on Long Island. Other developers, trying to remake the American dream, combined ideas from European Modernists -- simple geometric forms, functionalism, flexible space -- with a New World elan.
Balboa Highlands was constructed as a solidly middle-class neighborhood -- the houses typically had several bedrooms and measured 2,200 square feet -- at a time when some California home-builders believed that buyers craved the drama of L.A.'s experimental Case Study houses, built between 1945 and 1966 under the direction of Arts and Architecture magazine. The most famous Case Study house -- the one made into an icon by Julius Shulman's photo of two young women, seated in an all-glass living room, who appear to be floating above the Hollywood Hills -- was built in 1960 on a budget of $13,500, roughly the price of a standard tract house at the time.
Eichler worked with a handful of prominent California architects, including A. Quincy Jones, who designed a Case Study house. But Eichler's success perhaps owed less to the architects he employed than to his crack publicity photographer, Ernie Braun, who concocted and promoted a sophisticated but casual lifestyle. Braun's photos of the Eichler houses showed families dividing their time between sunny rooms and perfectly groomed backyards, the adults seemingly as likely to skip rope as the children. What Eichler sold from 1948 until the late 1960's wasn't architecture but happiness.
Each housing development Eichler erected represented a variation on the same program for happy family life. In the Balboa Highlands tract, the clean wood-and-concrete-block facades were designed to conceal the interior from the street. But inside, a whole world opens up: behind the front door of each house is an open-air atrium. Frank Nolan and his partner, Jaime Flores, have transformed theirs into a Zen garden carpeted with smooth round stones. A door from the atrium leads into the house itself, and it is easy to grasp the appeal of Eichler's plan: light-flooded rooms, exposed beams that support an elegantly simple roof and floor-to-ceiling glass intended to further the notion that interior and exterior are one and the same, a central tenet of California Modernism. Out back are a verdant yard with a swimming pool, a giant bronze Buddha and, in the distance, the Santa Susanna Mountains, green from months of rain.
Nolan, an elementary-school teacher, and Flores, a graphic designer, so impeccably restored their house that it probably looks better than it did when it was completed in 1964. Biondo's house is equally well preserved, painted pistachio green to match her 1956 Oldsmobile Rocket. But just down the block are Eichlers that have been altered to suit a more conventional suburban aesthetic. At one address, Eichler's A-frame model, distinguished by an unenclosed peaked roof over the front door -- the architects intended it as a car port -- is covered with a new red-clay tile roof and a line of classical columns out front. Another house has been stuccoed over, the roof turned into a giant gable, like the prop from a lesson about the properties of isosceles triangles.
While pitched preservation battles in most cities are usually fought over beloved public buildings, in Southern California they often center on private homes -- especially when those homes were designed by California's great midcentury architects, like Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler and John Lautner. These battles tend to get thorny, pitting as they do the sacred rights of the property owner against equally deep-seated, and often rather abstract, notions of historic value. The city's Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance, which Biondo and Nolan said they hope will protect their neighborhood, tries to split the difference by rewarding, but not demanding, compliance from homeowners.
Enacted in 1979, the H.P.O.Z. ordinance makes it difficult, though not impossible, to alter the facade of a house that is considered a ''contributing'' part of a protected neighborhood; that is, one that preserves the building's original features. But it also allows for the continued existence of ''noncontributing'' buildings in the neighborhood. The owners of ''renovated'' houses don't have to change a thing if they don't want to -- but they get a break on their property taxes if they do.
There are currently 20 H.P.O.Z.'s in Los Angeles County. Some are clusters of Victorian houses or bungalows. Currently, just one consists of postwar architecture: Mar Vista, a tract of 52 modest, rectangular houses just east of Venice Beach, became an H.P.O.Z. in 2003. A 1948 collaboration between the populist architect Gregory Ain and the landscape designer Garrett Eckbo, Mar Vista is a lush oasis of 1,100-square-foot homes laid out as efficiently as cabin cruisers. The little houses originally sold for $12,000 and now fetch as much as $950,000.
The movement to preserve and restore Eichler homes has been going strong for at least a decade in Northern California, nurtured by a San Francisco-based organization known as the Eichler Network. But nationally, postwar tract houses are just beginning to receive the attention of the preservation community. As Ken Bernstein, director of preservation for the Los Angeles Conservancy, pointed out, ''Only about 15 percent of Los Angeles has ever been looked at.'' The Getty Conservation Institute, he said, is now working with the city planning department to survey the remaining 85 percent.
Bernstein said he strongly believes that the conservancy should back the H.P.O.Z. effort in Balboa Highlands, as it did in Mar Vista. ''Both were examples of really bringing the tenets of Modernism to the masses in an affordable manner,'' he explained. ''And both also are uniquely intact, surprisingly intact, given the vagaries of the real-estate market here in L.A. and the pressures that you see upon individual neighborhoods. And we also felt that if steps weren't taken soon, they could become more significantly threatened in the future.''
Some of the early Eichler-home buyers are still in Balboa Highlands. Edgar Law, who earned his degree in architecture, bought his house in 1969 because, he said, ''it has principles that I believe in.'' He was referring to the openness of the design, though he and his wife, Fay, as African-Americans, also benefited from one of Eichler's political principles: he had a nondiscrimination policy, which was not the norm in 1960's suburban Los Angeles. John Hora, a cinematographer, bought his house in 1966. ''It was so weird-looking that I wasn't going to get out of the car,'' he told me, taking a break from his yard work. ''But I walked in, and I was converted.''
Balboa Highlands was one of the last projects Eichler completed before his foray into urban development in the mid-60's nearly bankrupted him. Within a decade, the neighborhood he had envisioned had begun to change. The Valley's citrus groves gave way to ever more houses. By the 80's, the real money was in newer homes, mostly Mediterranean and Spanish models.
The buyers for Eichlers by this time were mainly immigrants from the Middle East, Asia or Russia. They had probably never seen those Ernie Braun photos, and they dealt with the idiosyncratic look of the Eichlers by hiding it. They wanted their houses to look like other houses in the area: stuccoed and columned.
Nolan and Flores, who bought their home in 1993, were among the first of an influx of design connoisseurs. They were also the ones, together with Biondo, who circulated the petition to have their neighborhood considered for H.P.O.Z. status. Most people, Flores said, even those whose homes had been significantly altered, ''were O.K. with the idea of the H.P.O.Z. as long as it was to improve the neighborhood.'' Hoping that some owners of extreme renovations would try to undo the damage, he tried to stress that ''contributing'' houses in the H.P.O.Z. would receive tax benefits. One couple, Flores recalled, didn't like the implication that houses in the original style were somehow more important: ''They were like, 'Why?''' But for many, the tax breaks just aren't enough of an incentive to pay for restoration.
Though roughly two-thirds of homeowners eventually signed the petition, the H.P.O.Z. status of Balboa Highlands remains uncertain. The ''historic resources survey,'' conducted for the city's Cultural Heritage Commission to determine how many of the houses in the district will be considered ''contributing,'' can't be done because the office in charge of the surveys recently lost its financing. And while Biondo holds out hope that the H.P.O.Z. designation is not far off, she is careful to modulate her zeal. ''I don't want people to feel pressured to do anything,'' she emphasized.
Economics may apply the pressure for her. Houses in Balboa Highlands were originally priced at $30,000. In 1966, Hora paid $42,000 for his, which, he noted, was not cheap. In 1993, Nolan and Flores paid $260,000. It was a pretty good deal. The Eichler cachet, combined with prevailing real-estate trends, has driven prices up to more than $600,000 for a fixer-upper and more than $700,000 for a house that has been well restored.
The H.P.O.Z. is meant to appeal to and attract a new type of homeowner. The designation doesn't just protect the look of the neighborhood; it's also an advertisement. ''I think bringing in like-minded people is really key,'' Biondo explained. ''That's been the change over the last eight years, wouldn't you say?''
''Oh, yes,'' Nolan agreed.
Biondo continued, ''We try very hard, when the house goes on the market. . . . ''
''The word goes out,'' Nolan said.
''It goes out,'' Biondo affirmed, nodding her head decisively.
Karrie Jacobs, an architecture and design critic, is writing a book about housing in America.
May 15, 2005
Saving the Tract House
By KARRIE JACOBS
Frank Nolan, casually dressed in an olive drab polo shirt and blue jeans, occupied a white leather Brno chair set off by the room's gleaming Philippine-mahogany paneling. ''One never wants to come across as a design snob, especially as it pertains to one's neighbors,'' Nolan said gingerly. ''We know that having a good neighbor is so much more important than what color they paint their house or how they choose to landscape. But there just seems to be a great disparity between the potential that we see in this neighborhood and then what you actually do see when you drive down the street.''
Nolan's house was one of 120 built in the 1960's by the developer Joseph Eichler in a San Fernando Valley subdivision called Balboa Highlands, 26 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Nolan and some of his neighbors want to have their neighborhood designated a historic district, which won't quite create an enclave of unsullied 60's modernity but will keep the threat of McMansions at bay.
It may also confuse some of the neighbors, who may not have thought that buying a 60's tract house would entail accepting a small role in Modernist architectural history. Stuart Frolick, who bought a house that had been radically altered by a previous owner, an engineer, told me, unapologetically, that he can't afford to return the house to its original state. Besides, his wife isn't into Modernism. ''She would like to gingerbread the place up,'' Frolick said, ''and I resist.''
"We clocked over 500 people coming through our neighborhood,'' Adriene Biondo said recently. ''We had vintage cars cruising up and down the street that day. People were tuned into the oldies station. It was a really exciting moment.'' Biondo, a short, roundish 49-year-old with the breathy voice of a chanteuse, was talking about the 2000 ''How Modern Was My Valley'' tour as if it happened yesterday. Sponsored by the Modern Committee, which she heads -- a furiously active branch of the city's dominant preservation organization, the Los Angeles Conservancy -- the tour brought a flood of tourists into the neighborhood. It also focused attention on the architecture about which Biondo is most passionate: the homes, including her own, built by Eichler.
Eichler, who was responsible for the construction of some 11,000 homes, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, was the last and most successful of a breed now largely extinct. In the years after World War II, commercial home-builders all over the country, but particularly in the West, began experimenting with new methods of construction and new styles of architecture. Abraham Levitt and his sons applied mass-production methods to building thousands of tiny ranch houses and Cape Cods on Long Island. Other developers, trying to remake the American dream, combined ideas from European Modernists -- simple geometric forms, functionalism, flexible space -- with a New World elan.
Balboa Highlands was constructed as a solidly middle-class neighborhood -- the houses typically had several bedrooms and measured 2,200 square feet -- at a time when some California home-builders believed that buyers craved the drama of L.A.'s experimental Case Study houses, built between 1945 and 1966 under the direction of Arts and Architecture magazine. The most famous Case Study house -- the one made into an icon by Julius Shulman's photo of two young women, seated in an all-glass living room, who appear to be floating above the Hollywood Hills -- was built in 1960 on a budget of $13,500, roughly the price of a standard tract house at the time.
Eichler worked with a handful of prominent California architects, including A. Quincy Jones, who designed a Case Study house. But Eichler's success perhaps owed less to the architects he employed than to his crack publicity photographer, Ernie Braun, who concocted and promoted a sophisticated but casual lifestyle. Braun's photos of the Eichler houses showed families dividing their time between sunny rooms and perfectly groomed backyards, the adults seemingly as likely to skip rope as the children. What Eichler sold from 1948 until the late 1960's wasn't architecture but happiness.
Each housing development Eichler erected represented a variation on the same program for happy family life. In the Balboa Highlands tract, the clean wood-and-concrete-block facades were designed to conceal the interior from the street. But inside, a whole world opens up: behind the front door of each house is an open-air atrium. Frank Nolan and his partner, Jaime Flores, have transformed theirs into a Zen garden carpeted with smooth round stones. A door from the atrium leads into the house itself, and it is easy to grasp the appeal of Eichler's plan: light-flooded rooms, exposed beams that support an elegantly simple roof and floor-to-ceiling glass intended to further the notion that interior and exterior are one and the same, a central tenet of California Modernism. Out back are a verdant yard with a swimming pool, a giant bronze Buddha and, in the distance, the Santa Susanna Mountains, green from months of rain.
Nolan, an elementary-school teacher, and Flores, a graphic designer, so impeccably restored their house that it probably looks better than it did when it was completed in 1964. Biondo's house is equally well preserved, painted pistachio green to match her 1956 Oldsmobile Rocket. But just down the block are Eichlers that have been altered to suit a more conventional suburban aesthetic. At one address, Eichler's A-frame model, distinguished by an unenclosed peaked roof over the front door -- the architects intended it as a car port -- is covered with a new red-clay tile roof and a line of classical columns out front. Another house has been stuccoed over, the roof turned into a giant gable, like the prop from a lesson about the properties of isosceles triangles.
While pitched preservation battles in most cities are usually fought over beloved public buildings, in Southern California they often center on private homes -- especially when those homes were designed by California's great midcentury architects, like Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler and John Lautner. These battles tend to get thorny, pitting as they do the sacred rights of the property owner against equally deep-seated, and often rather abstract, notions of historic value. The city's Historic Preservation Overlay Zone ordinance, which Biondo and Nolan said they hope will protect their neighborhood, tries to split the difference by rewarding, but not demanding, compliance from homeowners.
Enacted in 1979, the H.P.O.Z. ordinance makes it difficult, though not impossible, to alter the facade of a house that is considered a ''contributing'' part of a protected neighborhood; that is, one that preserves the building's original features. But it also allows for the continued existence of ''noncontributing'' buildings in the neighborhood. The owners of ''renovated'' houses don't have to change a thing if they don't want to -- but they get a break on their property taxes if they do.
There are currently 20 H.P.O.Z.'s in Los Angeles County. Some are clusters of Victorian houses or bungalows. Currently, just one consists of postwar architecture: Mar Vista, a tract of 52 modest, rectangular houses just east of Venice Beach, became an H.P.O.Z. in 2003. A 1948 collaboration between the populist architect Gregory Ain and the landscape designer Garrett Eckbo, Mar Vista is a lush oasis of 1,100-square-foot homes laid out as efficiently as cabin cruisers. The little houses originally sold for $12,000 and now fetch as much as $950,000.
The movement to preserve and restore Eichler homes has been going strong for at least a decade in Northern California, nurtured by a San Francisco-based organization known as the Eichler Network. But nationally, postwar tract houses are just beginning to receive the attention of the preservation community. As Ken Bernstein, director of preservation for the Los Angeles Conservancy, pointed out, ''Only about 15 percent of Los Angeles has ever been looked at.'' The Getty Conservation Institute, he said, is now working with the city planning department to survey the remaining 85 percent.
Bernstein said he strongly believes that the conservancy should back the H.P.O.Z. effort in Balboa Highlands, as it did in Mar Vista. ''Both were examples of really bringing the tenets of Modernism to the masses in an affordable manner,'' he explained. ''And both also are uniquely intact, surprisingly intact, given the vagaries of the real-estate market here in L.A. and the pressures that you see upon individual neighborhoods. And we also felt that if steps weren't taken soon, they could become more significantly threatened in the future.''
Some of the early Eichler-home buyers are still in Balboa Highlands. Edgar Law, who earned his degree in architecture, bought his house in 1969 because, he said, ''it has principles that I believe in.'' He was referring to the openness of the design, though he and his wife, Fay, as African-Americans, also benefited from one of Eichler's political principles: he had a nondiscrimination policy, which was not the norm in 1960's suburban Los Angeles. John Hora, a cinematographer, bought his house in 1966. ''It was so weird-looking that I wasn't going to get out of the car,'' he told me, taking a break from his yard work. ''But I walked in, and I was converted.''
Balboa Highlands was one of the last projects Eichler completed before his foray into urban development in the mid-60's nearly bankrupted him. Within a decade, the neighborhood he had envisioned had begun to change. The Valley's citrus groves gave way to ever more houses. By the 80's, the real money was in newer homes, mostly Mediterranean and Spanish models.
The buyers for Eichlers by this time were mainly immigrants from the Middle East, Asia or Russia. They had probably never seen those Ernie Braun photos, and they dealt with the idiosyncratic look of the Eichlers by hiding it. They wanted their houses to look like other houses in the area: stuccoed and columned.
Nolan and Flores, who bought their home in 1993, were among the first of an influx of design connoisseurs. They were also the ones, together with Biondo, who circulated the petition to have their neighborhood considered for H.P.O.Z. status. Most people, Flores said, even those whose homes had been significantly altered, ''were O.K. with the idea of the H.P.O.Z. as long as it was to improve the neighborhood.'' Hoping that some owners of extreme renovations would try to undo the damage, he tried to stress that ''contributing'' houses in the H.P.O.Z. would receive tax benefits. One couple, Flores recalled, didn't like the implication that houses in the original style were somehow more important: ''They were like, 'Why?''' But for many, the tax breaks just aren't enough of an incentive to pay for restoration.
Though roughly two-thirds of homeowners eventually signed the petition, the H.P.O.Z. status of Balboa Highlands remains uncertain. The ''historic resources survey,'' conducted for the city's Cultural Heritage Commission to determine how many of the houses in the district will be considered ''contributing,'' can't be done because the office in charge of the surveys recently lost its financing. And while Biondo holds out hope that the H.P.O.Z. designation is not far off, she is careful to modulate her zeal. ''I don't want people to feel pressured to do anything,'' she emphasized.
Economics may apply the pressure for her. Houses in Balboa Highlands were originally priced at $30,000. In 1966, Hora paid $42,000 for his, which, he noted, was not cheap. In 1993, Nolan and Flores paid $260,000. It was a pretty good deal. The Eichler cachet, combined with prevailing real-estate trends, has driven prices up to more than $600,000 for a fixer-upper and more than $700,000 for a house that has been well restored.
The H.P.O.Z. is meant to appeal to and attract a new type of homeowner. The designation doesn't just protect the look of the neighborhood; it's also an advertisement. ''I think bringing in like-minded people is really key,'' Biondo explained. ''That's been the change over the last eight years, wouldn't you say?''
''Oh, yes,'' Nolan agreed.
Biondo continued, ''We try very hard, when the house goes on the market. . . . ''
''The word goes out,'' Nolan said.
''It goes out,'' Biondo affirmed, nodding her head decisively.
Karrie Jacobs, an architecture and design critic, is writing a book about housing in America.
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adma
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And not to over-spam this thread, but there's this terrific Oscar Niemeyer profile here