Alternative to what happened – Weekend

NER – “a new element of settlement” – a conceptual project of a group of Soviet architects led by Alexei Gutnov (1937-1986) and Ilya Lezhava (1935-2018). It existed from 1961 (NER-1, graduation project at Moscow Architectural Institute) to 2003 (NER “Sibstream”), and the team of authors changed. The main project – NER-2 Triennale (1968) – is one of the brightest Russian architectural utopias.

Text: Grigory Revzin

Complexly structured veins stretch for hundreds of kilometers (they are called “channels”), they contain transport and engineering communications, and all public buildings from the regional committee to the theater stick to their skin. Their shape, however, does not resemble either the regional committee or the theater – they are rather some kind of papillomas. Legs branch off from the channel, on which new formations sit – industrial zones and NERs. All this together is a single organism, which, like a mycelium, spreads over the surface of the earth. His organic growth knows no outer limits, only inner ones. This is so different from the current state of affairs that it seems as if the earth is colonized by the future and not people live there individually, but humanity as one being with an unprecedented level of fusion and interaction. This is NER-2.

Andrei Ikonnikov wrote: “On the surface of the aesthetics of NER-2 is the influence of the experiments of P. Soleri, but more significant was the reflection of the processes that developed in the Soviet artistic underground, which did not then have a wide outlet to the public.” I do not quite understand which of the masters of the underground he has in mind (some resemblance to the “club of surrealists”, in particular Hulo Sooster does not seem particularly significant), but since the project was being done in front of him, he probably knew about than he said. If so, one could assume that this is a utopia, if not dissident, then at least unofficial Soviet culture. However, nothing of the kind is even close.

NER-1 is the result of the efforts of the rector of the Moscow Institute of Architecture Ivan Nikolaev, a constructivist who survived Stalinism. In the Khrushchev era, he was full of enthusiasm. “I’m launching my satellite,” he repeated about NER. He created Gutnov’s group of students, he provided them with exceptional conditions, he extended the deadline for submitting their diplomas by six months, he sent to them the correspondent of Komsomolskaya Pravda Yuri Zerchaninov, who wrote an enthusiastic Komsomol article about them (and thereby beat off the attacks of the party committee), he invited the directors of Moscow design institutes to defend their diplomas and, when this did not make any impression on them, took Lezhava and Gutnov to teach at the Moscow Architectural Institute. It was 1961, the 22nd party congress, where Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed that communism would be built by 1980, and Nikolaev, a delegate to the congress, decided to invent a city of communism, because the city takes a long time to build.

Ivan Nikolaev is a bright man, and the producer of NER-2 and NER-3 was Nikolai Baranov, deputy chairman of Gosgrazhdanstroy, a man who left unpleasant memories for the architects of the Brezhnev era. Baranov was upset by the VIII World Congress of Architects in 1965, the theme of which was “City of the Future”. I was upset by the fact that they are discussing the city of the future, and the USSR is out of business. He summoned Ikonnikov and ordered his institute to invent the city of the future. And clever Ikonnikov called Gutnov and Lezhava. The project was prepared for the 1968 Triennale in Milan. It was a giant project, dozens of huge stretchers, plasticine models, its reconstruction in 2018 at the Museum of Architecture in Moscow occupied the entire museum. A book was written for him, which Giancarlo De Carlo, dean of the Milan Polytechnic School of Architecture, as it was then called, a great friend of the Soviet Union, published in Italian. And it sounded because it was the 68th year, and the world was thirsty for renewal, and a pirated English translation was made from the Italian text – it seems the only case in the history of the USSR.

But the Triennale did not open because it was 1968 and the world yearned for renewal, and it came in the form of student protests, which also took place on the grounds of the Triennale. Then there was NER-3, a much more modest project, shown at EXPO-1970 in Osaka, more for reporting than in the hope of a serious response – EXPO does not notice architectural projects. But anyway, NER has never been a dissident or unofficial production. It was, on the contrary, first a Komsomol project in the genre of “Decisions of the XXII Congress to be!”, And then the export production of Soviet agitprop, designed to demonstrate the merits of the Soviet country on international platforms. Based on this, one could assume that this is not a utopia, but propaganda bullshit, and it’s not that the specific manufacturing conditions did not leave any traces on the product.

The design idea is kind of mind boggling. The NER is built around the reincarnation of the idea of ​​a constructivist workers’ club. It is called the “Communication Center”, a building that combines an auditorium, a library, a sports hall and hobby groups. The NER is built like a funnel that flows down to its center, and in the center stands the club. The main functions of the city – work, trade, administration, culture, etc. – are assigned to the “channel”, and this is logical, since they can work for several NERs at the same time. NER is only a territory of housing, recreation and communication.

Today it is customary to point out that the authors thought of communication centers in a post-industrial paradigm based on the exchange of inalienable products of creative labor (such as an author’s song). Initially, this is Marx’s idea of ​​the emancipation of labor, but I am ready to admit that reading it in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse (the book “The End of Utopia”, where he argues that utopia has ended because it has become a reality, and is the first to proclaim the birth of the post-industrial world) was to Nerians as – that is familiar. The group included Georgy Dumenton, a philosopher who studied the Hungarian communists, who was expelled from the Institute of Philosophy after the execution of Imre Nagy and worked as a laboratory assistant in the department of Marxism-Leninism at the Moscow Architectural Institute. He might be familiar with these ideas. In any case, at the defense of NER-1 at the Moscow Architectural Institute, he successfully proved that a communist city, according to Marx, should not be built around production.

However, even in this edition, the idea of ​​the club looks unviable. According to both Marx and Marcuse, all labor is freed. It’s not like the person of the future lives according to the program “plow the land, write poetry,” and there is more and more time for writing poetry. Not so: he plows the land, as he writes, giving society the products of his labor and receiving everything he needs. In the idea of ​​the club, work remains, only it is located in the mainstream and in industrial zones, and in the NER there is only leisure, well, free creative work as leisure – this is possible. There is something of the relationship between the CPSU and the Komsomol in this: let the Komsomol members be engaged in amateur activities within the clubs.

From the point of view of ideas about the post-industrial society, this is no good. It is believed that at work, in a store, in a cafe, at the station, people do not communicate or do it inferiorly. Another thing in the club. This is not supported by any social reality. Today’s strategies of post-industrial urbanism are based on the opposite idea of ​​mixed-use, when the center connects all functions and thus the intensification of communication is achieved. The center, where they don’t trade, don’t eat, don’t work, which is not needed for anything other than to communicate creatively, can only gather a group of pretty outcasts. It can exist on a student campus, but does not survive in a normal settlement. This is a naive and unoriginal utopia, coming from Plato’s communal dining rooms or Campanella’s temple of the Sun, where lectures on astronomy and geometry were given instead of sermons.

However, I would venture to say that it does not define the NER, and the authors could treat it simply as an ideological pass, allowing them to present their ideas as the dreams of the Komsomol members who were picking up the revolutionary banner of the 1920s. The essence of ideas is not in this at all. The pictorial series of NER is much more important than its rationale. They say one thing and draw another.

Lezhava himself says in his memoirs that NER-2 was made under the influence of Japanese metabolism. Indeed, the work of Kenzo Tange is somewhat reminiscent of NER-2. Alexander Kudryavtsev (a friend of Lezhava, then rector of the Moscow Architectural Institute) claims that NER-2 was born from a book by Paolo Soleri, which Ilya Georgievich borrowed from him. The very way of presenting the project – huge sheets, where the drawings and perspectives are more like wall frescoes – is really similar. It seems to me that the work of the Italian Expressionists of the 1960s, Paolo Portoghesi, and especially Enrico Castiglioni, whose school in Busto Arsizio (1963-1964) seems to be the prototype of residential cells inscribed in the NER in the folded gills of the relief, is much closer to the NER. I think that Ikonnikov, at that time a big admirer of this architecture, could well captivate the NER people with it. One way or another, there were many sources in Western architecture in the 1960s from which one could take the form of NER without resorting to the Soviet underground. But, for my taste, NER looks stronger than its possible prototypes.

It must be said that it is unlikely that any of the authors of the NER would agree that the definition of “utopia” can be applied to their work. For them, it was science. The justification for NER is, in the end, not pamphlets, not treatises, and not novels, but doctoral dissertations by Lezhava (“Function and Structure of Form”) and Gutnov (“Structural and Functional Organization and the Development of Urban Systems”). The city is growing there not as a project, but as an objective reality of the future, arising from the extrapolation of existing trends in the development of engineering and technology, society, economy, ecology and, of course, architecture. Their division of the structure of the city into “frame”, “fabric” and “plasma” is truly a scientific discovery in the organic theory of the city, a breakthrough on which today’s understanding of the city in urban studies is based. If the theory of architecture were a fundamental science, they would have been awarded something like a Nobel Prize for it.

But it does not belong to fundamental science, because behind it is the intuition of form. This must be compared with the Soviet Khrushchev and Brezhnev architecture, with Tolyatti or Navoi, then the meaning will be transparent. This is architecture that grows by itself, the organics of life that cannot be subdued. Behind it stands a very strong sense of the unnaturalness of all the building matter that makes up Soviet civilization. And a very strong – up to utopian – desire to overcome this unnaturalness. This is the answer to the question of what we might look like if we were appropriate on earth.

In this sense, the NER-4 Sibstream project of 2003 says a lot. This is a late project, to a certain extent just a commercial work commissioned by Gazprom, there are no new ideas in it. However, there is a final word here that could not have been said in 1968. The structure of the NER is put on the map of Russia, it embraces all historical cities, all industrial settlements, all the consequences of the Soviet colonization of this endless territory and transforms them with its organic matter.

To a certain extent, everyone who suddenly falls out of the current of everyday life and is faced with the question: what are all these ruins of the great utopia of industrial communism – regional committees, panels, industrial zones? NER offers an alternative to the accomplished Russia. People brought up by the right angle, by machine production, by the pivot table, by the only true doctrine, by directive management, feel out of place here. I’m not even sure that this happens on land – rather, under water. Cities are replaced by creatures like stingrays connected by worm-vessels.

This is a utopia of the appropriateness of life in our space. That’s why it’s such a strong image, that’s why it’s so attractive and so repulsive. Still, it is unpleasant to realize that in your present form you are an unnatural creature in Russia.

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