«Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms»
1925-1931

Having graduated in 1925 from the Academy of Arts, Iakov Chernikhov became fascinated with industrial architecture, which was the area of construction showing the most progress. In comparison with other areas, it possessed multifunctionality and a wider elite, and consequently promised a wider field of activity in terms of form creation.

The pathos of industrialization, with its sublime, heroic-romantic aura in those years, defined creative quests in various forms of art.

1927 witnessed the debut of Alexander Mosolov’s one-part symphonic piece, The Factory, in which the image of a working factory was reproduced by musical means. It immediately entered the repertoire of the leading orchestras, and for several years its performance opened concerts of symphonic music in Moscow and Leningrad. Also at that time Sergey Prokofiev wrote his famous Le Pas d'acier, and Dmitry Shostakovich composed the ballet Bolt.

“… black chimneys, buildings, crankshafts, cylinders. Ready to talk to you, I raise my hands, I sing of you, my iron friends… I go to the factory as to a festival, as to a feast.” Thus wrote Alexander Gastayev in his Poetics of a Work Offensive, a distinctive manifesto of proletarian poetry in those years.

Having accepted an “all-encompassing role” for the machine in the 20th century, Chernikhov, unlike theoreticians of “production art” and radical Constructivists, was far from making a fetish of the machine. In his 1931 book The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms, he defines Constructivism first and foremost as a phenomenon typical for nature and for organized life in general. Using graphics to depict for the reader the peculiar panorama of Constructivism landscape, he also shows the evolution of the Machine by means of its gradual “reincarnation” through monumental forms.

A well constructed machine always affects our consciousness not just by its compactness, but by the rational combination of its parts. The machine can be static-supportive, static-bearing, or performing complex motion functions and other very complex operations. Irrespective of its operation, the machine always justifies itself from a construction point of view, and consequently its Constructivism is rational.

Chernikhov believed that structures which imitate machines or adjust themselves to machines – just as those, incidentally, that imitate natural shapes – “are in their spirit outsiders to architecture, since they are based on a false understanding of the chief stimulus for construction as such”, whereas the “asceticism” of form in contemporary architecture is a temporary phenomenon, with a purely economic underlining”. He affirmed that “architecture becomes an art the moment its image-creations are perceived as values of an artistic order. The aesthetic interpretation of concepts, space, and mass that we meet in practically the entire history of the arts must be supplemented with their understanding as a definite artistic formation process.”

“The consonance of forms gives rise in its harmonic combination to a “melody”. A construction that unites separate parts creates a special form. The feeling experienced by looking at successfully designed constructions is similar to the feeling that arises when looking at objects of professional art. The beauty concealed in perfected constructions becomes a manifest due to the unmediated impact of objects produced by human hands. This relates in equal degrees both to structures and to machines. The human being is affected by the entire conglomeration of elements gathered within a specific scale.

The melody of the magnificent (exalted) constructive combination of parts in the majority of cases affects us by the fact that the general mass of grouped elements is connected by a mutual compact constructive combination. This was noted still earlier in Gothic buildings, which possessed a subtle and complex design.

A flying apparatus, for example, possesses the same melody of aspiration. Certain engines and machine installations impress with the power of their aspiration. Such an impression is accounted for by our conviction of the rationality of their construction combination. It is not by chance that noise produced by machines sounds to many as the “music of time”. The interrelation of construction principles and motion captivates with a “machine animation”, to which we involuntarily sing praises. With the combination of genuine magnificence and aspiration in anything created by man and in the presence of functional movements there arises a certain “melody” that is different from other constructive melodies.

Today’s factory buildings must answer to the production principles of the epoch. Influenced by a functional direction peculiar to the machine, the new style in architecture acquires the laconism, utilitarianism, simplicity, and preciseness of engaged forms. The machine is not a dead mechanical construction for a specific function, but something self-sufficient and, in a certain sense, not an outsider to art.”