Russian Constructivist Architects and the Ideal of America

Ga-young Kim is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at Indiana University Bloomington. She is interested in exploring the relationship between the individual and society through art, particularly during periods when social unity was emphasized over personal identity.

This post won a Judges’ Choice Prize in the Jordan Center Blog's fifth annual Graduate Student Essay Competition.

The Soviet OSA (Ob”edinenie sovremennykh arkhitektorov, Organization of Contemporary Architects), founded in 1925 by the Constructivist architects Moisei Ginzburg (1892-1946) and Alexander Vesnin (1883-1959), soon became known for its admiration of America. This predilection nearly caused the OSA to be disbanded in 1930 due to criticism that "the birthplace of [the OSA’s] Constructivism was not the USSR but capitalist America," as its opponents put it. 

The journal SA (Sovremennaia arkhitektura, Contemporary Architecture), an OSA bulletin published during the organization’s active period of 1926 to 1930, provides evidence of its affinity with America. Over thirty issues, some 80 articles mention America. It is clear that OSA's orientation toward America was a group initiative that shaped its functionalist and socialist identities. Beyond Ginzburg and the architect M.A. Okhitovich, on whom studies have mostly focused, diverse figurescontributed to the OSA's “American” orientation.

SA generally denotes engineers and architects by their surnames and initials, making it difficult to ascertain individuals’ identities with any certainty. This anonymity was likely intentional on OSA’s part, intended to present their initiatives as collective works that included contributions by lay engineers. Focusing on these lesser-known figures shows that admiration of American examples was not imposed from the top down, but was shared by the OSA’s broader constituencies. 

The OSA’s admiration of America spurred Soviet architects to explore the possibility of a heterogeneous identity for their discipline, challenging the stereotype of Soviet culture as insular and monolithic. Yet by 1932,  the OSA had been absorbed into the state-sanctioned SSA (Soyuz sovetskikh arkhitektorov, Union of Soviet Architects) and accused of being “bourgeois.” The organization’s dissolution, part of Stalin’s subjugation of independent Soviet culture during and after the so-called “Great Break,” demonstrates that the state ultimately rejected the strategy of borrowing from capitalist models to construct a Soviet identity.

An Ideal to Emulate

OSA looked to America for a panoply of architectural elements—from construction machinery and exterior materials to interior finishes, ideas, technologies, and human resources. The architect A.N. Erlikh (1890-1971) had first recommended the adoption of American-style machinery in 1926, when he provided detailed information about American and European machines to the Soviet architectural community. 

Erlikh had emphasized the importance of mechanizing Soviet construction practices in the name of economic efficiency. He harshly criticized the Soviet Union’s reliance on wooden equipment. By 1929, the engineer Oskolkov, describing the construction of the Dnieper River hydroelectric station, proudly noted that, thanks to the OSA, American machines were being used in the Soviet Union for the first time.

Another American-inspired innovation was the use of concrete blocks, which the engineer B. Dzurin argued should replace Soviet bricks due to their lower cost, lighter weight, structural soundness, and superior heat retention properties. According to S.L. Prokhorov (1879-1967), an engineer-architect, the Soviet engineer Tsuberbiller had brought the “Toronto” block from America as early as 1917. The “Toronto” block was a simple structure with a gap in the center, which allowed it to retain heat while reducing the weight of the construction body. SA contributors would subsequently propose using blocks that adapted this American design to suit local climate conditions. 

The engineer-architect V. Kalish (1899–1973), meanwhile, was especially interested in American windows, focusing on the product catalog Fenestra by Detroit Steel Products Company. Commenting on photos of steel-framed windows, he detailed their construction and ventilation functions. He urged the adaptation of American window designs to the Soviet climate to “improve working conditions in factories and enhance the hygiene of residential spaces.” 

The architects A.L. Pasternak (1893-1982) and I.N. Sobolev (1903-1971) admired functional American furniture, which they hoped to use for the workers’ commune houses they designed. The pieces in question were made of steel, lightweight, folding, collapsible, and sliding, but Soviet architects “could only admire them platonically” because they lacked the techniques to produce them on Soviet soil. The Berlin-based Dr. L. Yakobson and other members of SA’s editorial collective studied American kitchen furniture designed “to provide maximum convenience to the housewife in a minimal space.” Ginzburg termed this approach “optimized movement patterns” and drew its inspiration from house plans by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959).

Aside from design principles, OSA was also interested in the ideas and techniques used in construction itself. SA’s editorial team studied Chicago’s Palmer House, drawing on discussions from Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra’s (1892-1970) How America Builds. Through plans and construction site photos, the journal’s editors explained the construction process for American-style buildings, detailing quantity, size, and the budget of each module.

Beyond these few examples, OSA significantly relied on American elements to establish its functionalist identity, which sought to adapt new construction principles to the actual conditions of Soviet society. For this reason, the criticism that “the birthplace of [the OSA’s] Constructivism was not the USSR but capitalist America” was not entirely off the mark. However, OSA’s engagement with American ideas always unfolded in tension with socialist ideology. This strategic approach reflected the Soviet Union's contradictory position in the 1920s, when the country rapidly absorbed foreign innovations out of sheer necessity while rhetorically and ideologically distinguishing itself from some of the same Western nations from which it borrowed.

A Subject to Treat Warily 

In the second issue of SA, published in 1926, Ginzburg analyzed Western architectural strengths and weaknesses. He portrayed America as “entirely unique and distinct from Europe,” calling it “a strong outpost of [the Soviet] international front.” At the same time, he warned against America’s tendency to “repeat the endless European song of eclecticism.” By contrast, Ginzburg called Russian Constructivist architecture “entirely based on the functional characteristics of the entire task,” which, in his opinion, lent it a unity of purpose missing from European and American counterparts. Ultimately, Ginzburg aimed to create Soviet-specific building types—“new forms”—by establishing new standards.

Yet in the journal’s very next issue, the layman Iuda Grossman-Roshchin (1883-1934) challenged Ginzburg’s analysis with pointed questions. What distinguished Soviet architectural utility from American utility? How could Soviet modern architecture embody the unique Soviet era, achieved through the October Revolution, and the emergence of a new ruling class—the proletariat? 

His questions exposed the ambiguity of OSA's approach, which stemmed from the organization’s desire to create Soviet-specific standardized types—which Ginzburg himself related to “Soviet forms”—while simultaneously crafting a method that emphasized functionality over form. It is in pursuit of this standardized approach that the OSA relied on American examples.

Six months later, in the first issue of 1927, the OSA responded to Grossman-Roshchin’s questions by rehashing known theoretical matters. They argued that two key distinctions existed between the USSR and America. First, Soviet construction was designed “not for people,” but “for machines” and emphasized “a rational production process.” Accordingly, Soviet architecture was intended for the worker, which meant that its design encompassed “more complex, interconnected production and domestic premises” than those found in America. OSA would continue to argue for the distinctiveness of its America-inspired approach to architecture by framing it as a contrast between the “bourgeois socio-domestic structure of the capitalist West” and the “new socio-domestic relationships of the proletarian state building socialism.”

By late 1927, the OSA’s affinity with American-style architectural principles, despite their attempts to conceive this affinity as, in fact, consummately Soviet, left them vulnerable to attacks from rival organizations like ASNOVA (Assotsiatsia novykh arkhitektorov, Association of New Architects) and VOPRA (Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo proletarskikh arkhitektorov, the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Architects). Following debates with their opponents, the OSA attempted to define itself as a new leader in functional architecture and distanced itself further from America.  They did not, though, enact a complete break with American sources. 

The dual perspective that Soviet architects held toward America—as both a model and threat—remained deeply intertwined and inseparable from OSA’s mission throughout its entire period of activity. The editorial page of SA’s final issue in 1930, before OSA was merged into VANO (Vsesoyuznoye arkhitekturno-nauchnoye obshchestvo, All-Union Architectural-Scientific Society), asserted that “one of the most important issues facing modern architecture, both in the past and today, is to establish the correct attitude towards the architecture of the West and America.” Yet the journey toward discovering this “correct attitude” came to an abrupt end in 1932, under the maturing Stalinist system. Their once-bold approach of seeking to “draw with both hands what is good from abroad”—borrowing Lenin’s visionary phrase from the NEP era—was now denounced and stigmatized as dangerous sabotage.

For the OSA and the Russian Constructivists more generally, America served as a critical “other” during a period of intensive aesthetic and ideological upheaval. The OSA, like the whole of early Soviet society, struggled to reconcile a genuine admiration for Western examples with the need to forge a uniquely Soviet identity. On the one hand, the OSA saw itself as pursuing modernity through the assimilation of cutting-edge American technology and design principles. On the other, it had to seek revolutionary legitimacy through ideological distancing from America. 

The OSA vanished into history, along with its vision of achieving transnational modernity while becoming socialist. The journal SA, however, vividly demonstrates the deeper fractures that American influence created within Soviet modernity. The USSR might have succeeded in striking the OSA’s name, replacing it with the famous catchphrase “Socialism in One Country.” Yet the OSA’s legacy—a contradictory approach to building Soviet society through engagement and interaction with numerous others, including “foes”—outlasted the organization itself.