Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 17:44:36 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: M-TH: Architectural Design and Capitalism


Teh Limin wrote:

> I've just read the Neo-Marxist architectural historian, Manfredo Tafuri's 
> book "Architecture and Utopia:Design and Capitalist Development". And the 
> question is what do Marxist do about skyscrapers? Are skyscrapers 
> celebration of capitalist achievement? Would celebrating beautiful 
> architecture mean consuming capitalist ideology? 

You might be interested in reading one of the many books available on
architecture and design in the USSR during the early 1920's. Although the
"constructivists" are perhaps best known for the graphic arts (such as
film posters), there were also  highly innovative and avante-garde
architects and designers such as Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko.
Many of the buildings designed during that period still stand in Petrograd
(formerly Leningrad) and Moscow. Unfortunately, the economic situation in
post-revolutionary Russia prevented a lot of the designs of the
constructivists from being completed (such as Tatlin's plan for a
"Monument for the III International"). 

Now, you might ask: what does this have to do with the question you
asked? One of the themes that one can observe in the constructivists art
is a glorification of the machine and industrialization as a symbol of
progress. This faith in the power of machinery -- to revolutionize the
means of production and develop socialist relations -- was also shared by
most of the Bolsheviks. Lenin once, for instance, gave the following
unique definition of communism: "Communism is the power of electricity." 

Yet, with hindsight, we now know that it's not that simple and that
skyscrapers, electricity, and machinery, whether inherited from capitalism
or built by a workers' state, will not automatically usher in utopia. 

btw, most of the avante-garde in the USSR was purged, exiled, killed ...
or forced to re-cant their "bourgeois" art in favor of the stale and
dogmatic "socialist man" Stalinist art (you know, the type where the brave
workers and peasants go bolding marching off into the sunset).

Jerry



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