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[EVOLUTION OF SOCIALIST HOUSING] Proektirovanie zhilishch: 1917-1933 [i.e. Projecting Habitations: 1917-1933]

Khiger, R.

Moscow: Glavnaia redaktsiia stroitel’noi literatury, 1935. Item #1175

88 pp.: ill., 5 folding tables in original pocket on the rear side of the back cover. 29,5x23 cm. In original illustrated full-cloth binding. No dust jacket. Spine slightly deformed (due to plans), with tear, foxing on covers, faded endpapers with small tears, two ink spots on separate tables, otherwise very good and clean.

First and only edition. One of 4000 copies. Title pages, the table of contents, lists of illustrations are in Russian and French. Graphic elements of the work were produced by V. Inshtetov.
Design of covers, title pages was created by V. Selinginskii. Most likely, he designed the layout as well. He certainly created designs for some books about Soviet successes in Arctic exploration, industrial reconstruction of cities, airship construction. All of them were published in the 1930s. Just like them, this book is about Soviet achievements but in architecture.
This striking book was written by Roman Khiger (1901-1985), an architect and engineer, one of the ideologists of constructivism. In the 1930s, he was one of the leading architecture critics in the USSR.
In this work, he had drawn the bottom line for constructivist housing construction. Focusing on the best and worst solutions, more and less common apartment plans, Khiger gathered a huge mass of constructions that were built in 1917-1932 and systematized them.
This period tended to liquidation of individual apartments and construction of more collective forms like houses-communes. Khiger collected the most interesting plans that were not recognized by him as easy to use but were important as mistakes made in the past. Among them is a “round, closet-type” plan where rooms resembled pieces of cake in the middle of which a common hall was located. Next to this plan are a ring-type solution, as well as a cylinder plan implemented in Konstantin Melnikov’s House (1927-1929) in Moscow. The author also criticizes an outstanding project of Anzhero-Sudzhensk house-commune (1928) by Nikolai Kuz’min and shows its general plan and axonometric design. This qualifying project might have had an incredible impact on development of modernism in Siberia but wasn’t built. In 1935, Khiger called it “a vivid example of a vulgar-simplistic understanding of the idea of socialist life”. Other four projects of houses-communes published in this book were created by Vesniny brothers, I. Golosov, M. Barshch and V. Vladimirov. There is a plan of linear settlement for Magnitogorsk developed in 1930 and “preserved negative features of abstraction and utopism inherent in the deurbanist theory”. A curious double-page spread presents four projects of fixed habitations for Central Asian nomads. All of them were developed by architect Kalmykov in 1933 and this deurbanism was accepted by Khiger because architect’s solutions were caused by native conditions of nomads’ lifestyle. A project of one quarter of the Dneprostroi 6th settlement (1933) by V. Lavrov was demonstrated with no comment at all. The city construction attracted all starring architects of the USSR - the entire realized project later was named the Socialist city. Contemporaries considered it “phalanstery of the new type”.
In the 1930s, the main state tendency modified remaining communal housing that concentrated living and common areas in borders of a separate apartment. Officially, the state launched the construction of innovated individual apartments all over the country. Khiger analyzed schemes of the evolution of 1,2,3,4-room habitation cells varying in type and availability of separate kitchen, bathroom and toilet. Supplementing tables for the magnificent Kiger’s system of apartment planning were published on 5 separate folding leaves, holding in the pocket. They feature selected plans of 1,2,3,4-room habitations, as well as corner room disposition, that were placed in tables depending on their profitability and frequency.
In addition to the whole above, Kiger created charts of person’s movement in a habitation cell. He calculated the dynamic minimum formula, including necessary movements between different furniture and facilities per one day. Socialist rationalization of housing construction should have taken into account this formula. In this point, the book echoes with works dedicated to the labor study and worker’s movements in particular.
Turning to post-constructivism and socialist classicism of the 1930s, Kiger wrote about the external decoration of buildings in the last chapter and published a row of 1931-1933 buildings images. In total, the book included 92 illustrations that are listed at the end. The edition was supposed to be the first in a series of similar works devoted to the construction of clubs, schools, theaters, palaces of culture, etc.

Worldcat shows copies located in Columbia, Harvard, Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, Cornell, George Mason Universities, Getty Institute, Art institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art.

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