Patrik Schumacher – The Russian Avant Garde – A Glimpse Back into the Future

ZAHA HADID
AND
SUPREMATISM
GALERIE GMURZYNSKA

Patrik Schumacher
The Russian Avant Garde —
A Glimpse Back into the Future
23
Over ninety years ago the October Revolution ignited the most exuberant
surge of creative energy that has ever erupted on planet earth. While some
of the artistic seeds were present beforehand, they blossomed and
proliferated thousand-fold in the first ten years of the revolution. This
amazing firework of creative exuberance took off under the most severe
material circumstances—fueled by the idealistic enthusiasm for the
project of a new society. The pace, quantity, and quality of the creative
work in art, science, and design was truly astounding, anticipating in one
intense flash what then took another fifty years to unfold elsewhere in the
world. In art and design there is nothing of note during the twentieth
century that was not already experimented with during the first decade of
the October Revolution—only at the end of the century did the microelectronic
revolution open up a whole new universe of possibilities that
could not have been dreamed of at the beginning of the century.

24
The 1920s avant garde not only anticipated the urbanist concept of the
1950s, but projects were designed that anticipated the mega-structure
utopias of the mid 1960s and the high-tech style of the 1970s. Ivan
Leonidov’s 1927 project for the Lenin Institute was fifty years ahead of its
time and his 1934 competition entry for the Soviet Ministry of Industry—a
composition of different towers placed upon an urban podium—remains an
inspiration for metropolitan architecture today. What is most refreshing
about these projects is the way in which they were embedded within an
intense discourse promoted by exhibitions, academic institutions, and
public competitions.
These projects—in all their experimental radicality—had a real social
meaning and political substance. But their originality and artistic ingenuity
transcends the context of the grand Russian social experiment. For
instance, Alexander Rodchenko’s amazing hanging sculptures are pure
explorations of space, which opened up a whole new sensibility—the
sensibility of the space age—and, grouped as a constellation, produce one
of the most sublime art experiences of all time.
It is a well-established fact that the work of Zaha Hadid took its first
inspiration from the early Russian avant garde, in particular from the work
of Kazimir Malevich. Malevich stands here for the enormously momentous
discovery of abstraction as a heuristic principle that can propel creative
work to hitherto unheard of levels of invention. Mimesis was finally
abandoned and unfettered creativity could pour out across the infinitely
receptive blank canvas. Space, or even better the world itself, soon
became the site of pure, unprejudiced invention. Malevich has been a
pioneer of abstraction and a pioneer in directly linking abstract art with
architecture via his seminal Tektoniks. It is interesting however, to
observe that these Tektonik sculptures, which were conceived of as a kind
of proto-architecture, were geometrically far more constrained than his
compositions on canvas. The Tektoniks are dynamic equilibrium
compositions that strictly adhere to the principle of orthogonality and are

composed by cubic volumes with adjoining surfaces, thus excluding
interpenetration. These “Cubist” restrictions characterized most of the
modern architectural work in Russia and elsewhere. Zaha Hadid’s work
quickly disposed of these seemingly inviolate architectural principles and
translated the warped and anti-gravitational space of Russian avant-garde
painting and sculpture into her own unique architectural language. The
inspiration came from the paintings of Malevich and László Moholy-Nagy,
El Lissitzky’s Prouns, and Naum Gabo’s sculptures.
25