Rzianin, M[ikhail] I[vanovich].

[CONSTRUCTIVISM AND BAUHAUS IN THE SOVIET PROVINCE] Proekty kolkhoznykh klubov i raionnykh domov kul'tury [Designs for kolkhoz clubhouses and district houses of culture].

Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Vsesoiuznoi Akademii arkhitektury, 1937. Quarto (35 × 27 cm). Green cloth boards; gilt title to front board and spine; 157, [1] pp. Over 200 illustrations including photographs, plans, tables, technical drawings and one folding leaf. Our copy lacks the four tipped-in leaves of color plates. Corners lightly bumped, else very good. Item #54804

An album presenting 23 architectural designs for so-called Houses of Culture to be built in villages and provincial towns across the Soviet Union. Planned for a wide variety of natural environments (the Caucasus, Near East, and Far North, as well as central USSR), the designs use local materials and reflect a variety of local architectural traditions. The author calls for new, grander projects to replace the existing rural infrastructure for entertainment, culture, child-rearing, schooling, literacy advocacy, and political “education” (such as the earlier izby-chital’ni, or reading huts, now outgrown). The work reproduces approximately ninety perspective and elevation drawings, eighty plans and sections, sixteen photographs of models, and is appended with thirty-five detailed plans and drawings including interior design, windows, and doors. The preface by O. Barshak predicts the construction of six hundred new regional “houses of culture” during the third five-year plan. This type of construction would be able to unite all needed features, from larger performance venues to smaller rooms for agitational and political meetings.

Of special interest are the Bauhaus takes on the architecture of Norther Caucasus, the Volga region, the Ural mountains, and Southern USSR by the Bauhaus architect Antonin Urban (1906–1938), and his partner Soviet architect Liudmila Urban. A student of Hannes Meyer at the Bauhaus, Urban was part of the “Red Brigade” of seven architects to follow Meyer to the Soviet Union after he left his post as the director of Bauhaus in the early 1930s. In Moscow Urban studied at the All-union Academy of Architecture where he seems to have met his future wife and design partner. Several of their projects are presented in this volume which was published shortly before Urban’s arrest in 1938, with this album a rare example of his surviving work. Other projects of note in the album are the designs by the Constructivist architect Nikolai Kolli, and modernist takes on the northern vernacular architecture by Lidia Tvelkmeyer and Genrikh Ludvig. The volume also features drawings by Roman Khimer, Ivan Leonidov, Iakov Kornfeld, Evgenii Levinson, Igor Fomin, Arkadii Mordvinov, Andrei Rostkovskii, Oskar Munts and numerous others.

As of December 2024, KVK, OCLC show five copies in North America.

Price: €500.00

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