Constructivist Square

PLOSHCHAD SVOBODY, KHARKOV

When you leave Derzhprom metro station in Kharkov, Ukraine, you can see the Soviet square’s first draft. It’s the nearest thing to a truly constructivist square across the territory of the USSR, the only public space that is a remnant from its first, most open, internationalist and cosmopolitan decade. The first thing you notice is not just the scale of the plaza, but also a peculiar indeterminacy. It’s in two parts, really — one of them, best seen from the furthest edge where it joins a fairly normal main road, is a relatively normal, albeit enormous plaza, a cobbled expanse that is not clearly either road or public space, between two gigantist neoclassical buildings of High Stalinist provenance. After the shock of the size, the second salient aspect is something apparently more prosaic — the Lenin statue, one of innumerable mass-produced figures placed in every single Soviet town, usually several in each; this one at least had the virtue of replacing Stalin.

Kharkov is one of the host cities of the 2012 European Football Championship. In 2011 a promotional video showed the square without its central stone figure, as if it might have put off UEFA, Western visitors, whoever. Elsewhere they would have actually demolished the statue itself — but in Kharkov it remains. Aside from his towering, superman-style carriage — like most Lenin statues, this one implies that underneath his suit is the body of a prize fighter, rather than an itinerant, ascetic intellectual — the pose is what is so striking. His arm is outstretched towards the towers behind him, as if to say, ‘Look here, this is what I have created!’ Walk past Lenin and there’s a green space, clearly planted so long ago that it’s now very lush, with lovely overhanging trees. Here the buildings form a near-circle of rectangular concrete and glass towers, interconnected by high walkways. Here in the middle they look symmetrical, elsewhere they become an instant metropolitan skyline. This is Derzhprom (Ukrainian), or Gosprom (Russian), itself.

It would be tempting to concentrate on this building rather than the square itself — it is one of the most remarkable buildings of the twentieth century anywhere, an improbable, incredible forgotten modernist landmark, a multi-level mini-metropolis. You get a preview of it in the metro. You have to purchase a little, round and extremely cheap plastic token to enter; they’re usually worn and chipped after years of use, funnelled in and out of the ticket barriers, bearing the marks of millions of fidgeting fingernails. On one side, the token displays the M symbol and the legend ‘Kharkiv’; on the other, the image is of a futurist building as out-of-time as the 70s-futurist metro itself.

The building is made up of several towers at angles to each other, linked by skybridges; the tallest tower has a radio mast attached to it. At the bottom of the moulded plastic relief is a framing train track and the M sign again. Even if you’re not on your way to Kharkov to specifically look at the building, you might have noticed this structure earlier, as an emblem of the city on the menus of the Kiev–Kharkov express train, where it is clearer, sweeping and dramatic above the various meat cutlets and pickled vegetables. If you’d never seen a photograph of it before, you’d be amazed by the image, like a constructivist dream scheme brought to life, one of the utopian structures the early USSR could never afford (and would soon explicitly reject) that had somehow accidentally strayed into reality. Walking around the city, you’ll come across its image alongside the quasi-impressionist amateur paintings on sale to tourists in street markets — it’s the symbol of this large but internationally obscure city (roughly the size of Warsaw or Hamburg), its Kremlin, its Reichstag, its St Paul’s. Kharkov seems to hold this uncompromising, unornamented, dramatic but seemingly un-populist square in extremely high esteem.

Gosprom — its typically Bolshevik acronym is a contraction of ‘House of State Industry’ –was the result of a competition proposed by Polish Soviet Commissar and former head of the Cheka (Secret Police) Felix Dzherzhinsky, to give the city a governmental complex befitting the capital of Ukraine. For this is what Kharkov was at the time — as an industrial, loyally Bolshevik city, it had gained preferment over untrustworthy, nationalist Kiev. Since Kharkov lacked the buildings to serve as a capital of any kind, this square’s inception was designed to beef up this provincial town, to make it into a modern, Soviet and bureaucratic centre. Gosprom had of necessity, then, to look like the central building of a capital city, the sort of centrifugal Stadtkrone that dreamers such as Bruno Taut had speculated about, and to incarnate some sort of specifically Soviet and socialist value system, as opposed to Kiev’s eclecticism and neoclassicism. The chosen site was an area of unused land — a tabula rasa — around Kharkov University. The outline plan for the square, which had Dzherzhinsky’s support, was designed in 1925 by the young architect Viktor Trotsenko, and combined the axial symmetries expected of a prominent government building with something more avant-garde. Whereas Alexei Shchusev’s Lenin Mausoleum of a year earlier was a compromise between an utterly ancient, dynastic image and a touch of Malevich’s less earthbound suprematism, with the former clearly winning out, here the order is reversed, with any hint of classicism immediately compromised by the strange forms of the prospective buildings, suprematist objects made up of interlinking tubes, lozenges and polygons. At the entrance to the circular plaza are two rectilinear towers, leading past various cubistic buildings to the central green (with statue) and the central walkway and tower complex. The complete circle of buildings was to enclose a plaza on the same preposterously huge scale as Petersburg’s Palace Square or Moscow’s Red Square, no doubt also specifically designed for mass events and parades. After Dzherzhinsky’s death in 1926, the square was named after him.

The first phase, the building now known as Gosprom/Derzhprom, was designed by Sergei Serafimov, Samuel Kravets and Mark Felger in 1925. It is ruthlessly powerful modernism, made up of hard and stark, angular and glassy concrete forms; the very large windows and the break-up of the massing into discrete parts stops the complex from becoming as authoritarian as it might be. The building’s three parts are interconnected with skyways at multiple levels, from the fourth floor to the eighth (derived, perhaps, both from fantasy and from built examples such as the skyway of the Wrigley Building in Chicago). The highest of the interlinked ‘skyscrapers’ reached a mere twelve storeys. The one element in this otherwise scrupulously non-hierarchical ensemble that perhaps antagonised more theoretical constructivists was the symmetry of the central entrance, with what almost resembles an unornamented concrete and glass arch, but the multi-level roofline and the round plaza’s subtle curves mean the building appears to have no ‘centre’, and no ostensible ‘meaning’ — though fanciful rumour had it that from the sky, the plan was designed to resemble the stave of The Internationale’s first note.

Gosprom came through World War Two intact, despite repeated attempts to blow it up. After failing to do so, the Nazis kept animals in the towers. But later phases of the plaza suffered far more from Kharkov’s brutal history. The second and third parts, originally in a similar style, were damaged and reclad with heavy masonry, closing up the large windows, affixing ornament to the smooth concrete surfaces. They are still visibly non-classical in plan and roofline, though the Party House that terminates the square, once modernist, is now completely unrecognisable, recreated wholly as an imperial and Stalinist edifice. After the war, one final addition to the square was contemplated — a stepped Gothick tower, this time of genuinely American skyscraper height, akin to Moscow’s ‘Seven Sisters’ or Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science. It was never built, though a gigantic painting of it standing proudly as a backdrop to heroic scenes still forms part of Kharkov’s railway station. Perhaps as a less expensive vertical focal point, a telecommunications mast was added to Gosprom’s highest tower in the 1950s, and more recently neon slogans and strip-lighting have been placed on the flat roofs (given that both were envisaged in the 1920s, it’s hard to resent either).

The square itself was very clearly designed to accommodate the street festivals of the early revolutionary period, something reflected even in the plan, in the way the rectangular square protrudes into the circle and seems to invite an organised public streaming into open space. Given that there are no longer any parades, any choreographed mass festivals, to fill it, it might seem at first to have entirely lost its function, and hence feel like a folly, something that exists at a scale this economically devastated post-industrial city can no longer accommodate.

As we walked towards the square, we noticed a clutch of four middle-aged women — coiffed, coutured and shod in the dramatically spiky footwear that seems fairly obligatory for female Ukrainians — posing in front of Gosprom. Evidently, these were important people — local dignitaries, businesswomen, actresses, maybe even politicians — as there was a small group of photographers trying to make sure their pose was exactly right. This, then, is the sort of building against which the inhabitants define themselves, an emblem for them and the city itself. By way of comparison, the Bauhaus, a structure of comparable size and provenance, feels like a peripheral, almost suburban and basically alien presence in Dessau, an East German city which seems prouder of its handful of Wilhelmine civic edifices than for being the home of one of the most famous buildings of the twentieth century. Somehow Serafimov, Felger and Kravets created something here which inspires identification and civic pride.

The possible reasons for this become clear when you walk around Gosprom itself. The Bauhaus overhead bridge might have housed a real office, but it’s at a low level and undemonstrative. Gosprom, in contrast, is exorbitant, revelling in its melodrama. As you walk under the six skyways that traverse the two roads that pass through Gosprom you might, if you were feeling especially pernickety, wonder whether there really is an entirely functional requirement for something like this; but more likely the immediate effect will be one of exhilaration. The circular plan means that the rectangular walkways fire off at unexpected angles, with the blocks curving round to meet them, never feeling obvious. It has the dizzy thrill of an imaginary Fritz Lang city that is palpable, that you can walk through and touch. Not that you’d necessarily want to, given the state of the place. The entrance to the square has been painted a gleaming white and the windows have been faithfully replaced, but after traversing the first walkway, you notice the painting got abandoned halfway through, and the concrete is crumbling. At the other side the building is randomly patched up; the mildly modernist housing project that faces it is in an even more parlous, decrepit state, with ad-hoc emergency additions and tacky signs lobbed onto it. By comparison Gosprom has got off very lightly.

Any thought that the square lost its function after 1991 is suddenly dispelled when we return past Gosprom, through the encased, classicised completions of the circle. Something is assembling — fleets of taxis, crowds of people are taking the lower part of the square, while a speaker’s rostrum is being erected on another side. Without the language skills to decipher it all we wander off; but on the way back at night, we stop again in the square to find it turned into another kind of instant city — a tent settlement where young people are camping in aid of a cause, much as they had in the ‘Orange Revolution’ on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti a few years before. One of the tents bore a helpful placard listing their demands in English, Polish and Russian as well as Ukrainian, though the English slogan, ‘Fairness is our choice’, didn’t offer much of a clue. Later it transpired that the protest was both against tax rises on small entrepreneurs (hence the cabbies) and the disputed re-election of Kharkov’s city administration; the protest placards referred to the latter as ‘the Pimp of Kharkov’. Whatever was happening, it was a reminder that these plazas, supposedly open only to spectacle, contemplation or windswept recherché aesthetic enjoyment, still have a political function.

Before leaving we picked up two artefacts which seemed to confirm our thesis that here, somehow, a hard-line modernist building had managed to insinuate itself into the affections of the public. One was a painting at a stall in Rosa Luxemburg Square, a lovely green space looked over by golden Orthodox domes, depicting Gosprom on a particularly sunny day (it was on sale alongside other paintings of gleaming cathedrals and cobbled streets in the rain). It shows the aesthetic of socialist realism — the adaptation of impressionism into a fixed, monumental style — grappling with the depiction of modernism. As we buy it the painter tells us what a glorious day it was when she painted it, pointing out to us the lighting effects on the leaves, concrete and glass — the constructivist green city belatedly creating its own folk art. A few days later in the capital we found another, more mass-produced object, a Soviet-era paperweight made up of two jaggedly suprematist polygons, with an image of Gosprom and the Lenin statue encased in Perspex — modernism eliciting its own ornamental commemoration. And why not? What makes Gosprom so special is its refusal to be tasteful, ‘high’ architecture. Rather than being anything so prosaic, it is the partial realisation of a dream, of the notion that the Soviet Union could become a socialist America, a dream of abundance, of a conception of space which entailed streets criss-crossing above the pedestrian’s head, a conception of the city that meant Manhattan skylines emerging in a matter of months, and a conception of modernism that entailed a vertiginous collision between archaic longings and futurist imaginings. It is a constructivist folly, and as a folly it carries perhaps better than any other structure the vertiginous hopes that state once brought into being.