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”In 1919, two years after the Revolution, the People’s Commissariat for Education asked Vladimir Tatlin to design a monument to the Third Communist International… It was to be a slanting tower, thirteen hundred feet high - three hundred feet higher than the Eiffel Tower. As Eiffel’s structure had been the symbolic climax of nineteenth-century technology, so Tatlin’s would be the emblem of twentieth-century skills: in fact, the banner which hung above his model of the tower, bearing the words, ‘Engineers create new forms’ was later carried through the streets of Moscow by crowds of chanting students…The Tower contained three chambers. A cubic hall at the lowest level… would turn one degree every twenty-four hours, a complete rotation every year. Above it, the pyramidal executive block would rotate once a month. Atop that, Tatlin placed a cylinder, meant to be an information centre, turning once a day; and surrmounting the whole, a half dome…From antiquity the spiral had been a symbol of triumphant aspiration, and a list of the tower’s precedents would include Trajan’s column, the tenth century tower of Samarra in Iraq and Breughel’s painting of the Tower of Babel. But none were industrial symbols and they did not move. In designing a monument of clearly articulated parts, and relating it at every point to utilitarian logic and the processes of the machine, Tatlin had virtually defined what Constructivism meant and what its political role might be - if the politicians were committed to it. But they could not be. There was not enough steel in all Russia to build the tower and it was never built. It remains the most influential non-existent object of the twentieth century…” - from The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

”In 1919, two years after the Revolution, the People’s Commissariat for Education asked Vladimir Tatlin to design a monument to the Third Communist International… It was to be a slanting tower, thirteen hundred feet high - three hundred feet higher than the Eiffel Tower. As Eiffel’s structure had been the symbolic climax of nineteenth-century technology, so Tatlin’s would be the emblem of twentieth-century skills: in fact, the banner which hung above his model of the tower, bearing the words, ‘Engineers create new forms’ was later carried through the streets of Moscow by crowds of chanting students…The Tower contained three chambers. A cubic hall at the lowest level… would turn one degree every twenty-four hours, a complete rotation every year. Above it, the pyramidal executive block would rotate once a month. Atop that, Tatlin placed a cylinder, meant to be an information centre, turning once a day; and surrmounting the whole, a half dome…From antiquity the spiral had been a symbol of triumphant aspiration, and a list of the tower’s precedents would include Trajan’s column, the tenth century tower of Samarra in Iraq and Breughel’s painting of the Tower of Babel. But none were industrial symbols and they did not move. In designing a monument of clearly articulated parts, and relating it at every point to utilitarian logic and the processes of the machine, Tatlin had virtually defined what Constructivism meant and what its political role might be - if the politicians were committed to it. But they could not be. There was not enough steel in all Russia to build the tower and it was never built. It remains the most influential non-existent object of the twentieth century…”

- from The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

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Sunday, 1st July
#art #Architecture #Constructivism #Vladimir Tatlin #Robert Hughes #Russia #Peter Bruegel