Constructivist architecture was a form of modern architecture that flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. It combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedly Communist social purpose. Although it was divided into several competing factions, the movement produced many pioneering projects and finished buildings, before falling out of favour around 1932. Its effects have been marked on later developments in architecture.

Defining Constructivism
The first and most famous Constructivist architectural project was the 1919 proposal for the headquarters of the Comintern in St Petersburg by the Futurist Vladimir Tatlin, often called Tatlin's Tower. Though it remained unbuilt, the materials - glass and steel - and its futuristic ethos and political slant (the movements of its internal volumes were meant to symbolise revolution and the dialectic) set the tone for the projects of the 1920s.
Another famous early Constructivist project was the Lenin Tribune by El Lissitzky (1920), a moving speaker's podium. During the Russian Civil War the UNOVIS group centred around Kasimir Malevich and Lissitzky designed various projects that forced together the 'non-objective' abstraction of Suprematism with more utilitarian aims, creating ideal Constructivist cities- see also El Lissitzky's Prounen-Raum or the 'Dynamic City' (1919) of Gustav Klutsis. In this and Tatlin's work the components of Constructivism could be seen to be an adaptation of various high-tech Western forms, such as the engineering feats of Gustave Eiffel and New York or Chicago's skyscrapers, for a new collective society.

A Revolution in Architecture
Immediately after the Russian Civil War the USSR was too impoverished to commission any new building projects. Nonetheless, the Soviet avant-garde school Vkhutemas started an architectural wing in 1921, which was led by the architect Nikolai Ladovsky, which was called ASNOVA (association of new architects). The teaching methods were both functional and fantastic, reflecting an interest in gestalt psychology, leading to daring experiments with form such as Simbirchev's glass-clad suspended restaurant

ASNOVA and Rationalism
A colder and more technological Constructivist style was introduced by the 1923/4 glass office project by the Vesnin brothers for Leningradskaya Pravda. In 1925 the OSA Group, also with ties to Vkhutemas, was founded by Alexander Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg- the Organisation of Contemporary Architects. This group had much in common with Weimar Germany's Functionalism, such as the housing projects of Ernst May. OSA published a magazine, SA or Contemporary Architecture from 1926 to 1930. The leading rationalist Ladovsky designed his own, rather different kind of mass housing, completing a Moscow apartment block in 1929. A particularly extravagant example is the 'Chekists Village' in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) designed by I. Antonov, V. Sokolov and A. Tumbasov, a hammer and sickle shaped collective housing complex for members of the secret police, which currently serves as a hotel.

OSA
The new forms of the Constructivists began to symbolise the project for a new everyday life of the Soviet Union, then in the mixed economy of the New Economic Policy. Many of these buildings are shown in Sergei Eisenstein's film The General Line, which also featured a specially built mock-up Constructivist collective farm designed by Andrey Burov.
A central aim of the Constructivists was instilling the avant-garde in everyday life. From 1927 they worked on projects for Workers' Clubs, communal leisure facilities usually built in factory districts. Among the most famous of these are the Kauchuk, Svoboda and Rusakov clubs by Konstantin Melnikov, the club of the Likachev works by the Vesnin brothers, and Ilya Golosov's Zuev Workers' Club.
At the same time as this foray into the everyday, outlandish projects were designed such as Ivan Leonidov's Lenin Institute, a high tech work that bears comparison with Buckminster Fuller. This consisted of a skyscraper-sized library, a planetarium and dome, all linked together by a monorail; or Georgy Krutikov's self explanatory Flying City, an ASNOVA project that was intended as a serious proposal for airborne housing. Melnikov House and his Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage are fine examples of the tensions between individualism and utilitarianism in Constructivism. There were also projects for Suprematist skyscrapers called 'planits' or 'architektons' by Kasimir Malevich, Lazar Khikeidel and Nikolai Suetin. The fantastical element also found expression in the work of Yakov Chernikhov, who produced several books of experimental designs - most famously Architectural Fantasies (1933) - earning him the epithet 'the Soviet Piranesi'.

The Everyday and the Utopian
El Lissitzky's contacts in Germany and Switzerland, as well as the impact of Melnikov's Paris Pavilion, led to many architects outside the USSR considering their work as Constructivist by the late 1920s. Architects of the New Objectivity like Lissitzky's collaborators Mart Stam and the ABC Group led by Hannes Meyer embraced Constructivism's severe geometry and technologically advanced aesthetic, despite their remoteness from their original context. The shift of the Bauhaus in 1922 towards 'art and technology - a new unity' was often considered to be a Constructivist one, while the Czech critic and designer Karel Teige's 1932 book The Minimum Dwelling uses Functionalism and Constructivism as interchangeable terms. Perhaps the best known example of Western Constructivism is the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam, by Brinkmann and Van der Vlugt with Stam as its main designer.

The Sotsgorod and Town Planning
The 1932 competition for the Palace of the Soviets, a grandiose project to rival the Empire State Building, featured entries from all the major Constructivists as well as Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier. However, this coincided with widespread criticism of Modernism, which was always difficult to sustain in a still mostly agrarian country. There was also the critique that the style merely copied the forms of technology while using fairly routine construction methods., the Moscow Textile Institute (finished 1938) or Ladovsky's rationalist vestibules for the Moscow Metro. Clearly Modernist competition entries were made by the Vesnin brothers and Ivan Leonidov for the Narkomtiazhprom project in Red Square, 1934, another unbuilt Stalinist edifice. Traces of Constructivism can also be found in some Socialist Realist works, for instance in the Futurist elevations of Iofan's ultra-Stalinist 1937 Paris Pavilion, which had Suprematist interiors by Nikolai Suetin.

The end of Constructivism
Due in part to its political commitment - and its replacement by Stalinist architecture - the mechanistic, dynamic forms of Constructivism were not part of the calm Platonism of the International Style as it was defined by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Their book included only one building from the USSR, an electrical laboratory by government team led by Nikolaev. During the 1960s Constructivism was rehabilitated to a certain extent, and both the wilder experimental buildings of the era (such as the Globus Theatre) and the unornamented Khrushchyovka apartments are in a sense a continuation of the aborted experiment, although under very different conditions. Outside the USSR Constructivism has often been seen as an alternative, more radical modernism, and its legacy can be seen in designers as diverse as Team 10, Archigram and Kenzo Tange, as well as in much Brutalist work. Their integration of the avant-garde and everyday life has parallels with the Situationists, particularly the New Babylon project of Guy Debord and Constant Nieuwenhuys.
High Tech architecture also owes a debt to Constructivism, most obviously in Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building. Zaha Hadid's early projects were adaptations of Malevich's Architektons, and the influence of Chernikhov is clear on her drawings. Deconstructivism evokes the dynamism of Constructivism, though without the social aspect, as in the work of Coop Himmelb(l)au. In the late 70s Rem Koolhaas wrote a parable on the political trajectory of Constructivism called The Story of the Pool, in which Constructivists escape from the USSR in a self-powering Modernist swimming pool, only to die, after being criticised for much the same reasons as they were under Stalinism, soon after their arrival in the USA. Meanwhile, many of the original Constructivist buildings are poorly preserved or in danger of imminent demolition.

Legacy
Lenin Tribune, El Lissitzky (1920/24)
Leningradskaya Pravda (Vesnin brothers, 1923)
Mosselprom Building (David Kogan, 1923-4)
Novo-Ryazanskaya Street Garage (Melnikov, 1926)
Gosprom, Kharkiv (Serafimov, Felger, Kravets, 1926-8)
Gostorg Building, Moscow (Velikovsky & Barsch, 1926)
Red Banner Textile Factory (Erich Mendelsohn, 1926)
Lenin Institute (Ivan Leonidov, 1927)
Svoboda Factory Club (Melnikov, 1927)
Kauchuk Factory Club (Melnikov, 1927)
Flats, Zamoskvorechye, Moscow (late 1920s)
Rusakov Workers' Club (Melnikov, 1927)
Narkomzem Building (Alexey Shchusev, 1928)
Tank Engine Offices (Ivan Fomin, 1929)
Narkomfin Building (Moisei Ginzburg, 1930)
Tsentrosoyuz building, Moscow (Le Corbusier/Nikolai Kolli, 1930-6)
MPS Building, Moscow (Ivan Fomin, 1930s)
Red Carnation Factory, St Petersburg (Yakov Chernikhov)
Likachev Palace of Culture, Moscow (Vesnin brothers, 1930-8)
Architectural Fantasy (Yakov Chernikhov, 1933)
Intourist Garage (Melnikov, 1934)
Krasniye Vorota Metro Station (Nikolai Ladovsky, 1935)
Textile Institute, Moscow (1930-8)

Constructivist Buildings and other Modernist Projects in the former USSR