Dwellings of the World Unite!

DWELLINGS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! Lawn Road Flats and Narkomfin, the convergent evolution of ‘communal living’ in the interwar period Calvin Po Tutor: Ricardo Ruivo Pereira

INTRODUCTION

Left – fig. 1 Lawn Road Flats (Isokon); right – fig.2 Narkomfin Building.

Until after World War I, there have been no endeavours on a comparable international scale to rationalise minimum standards of dwellings as an elemental part of European architectural discourse. Being the overarching focus of CIAM II, concepts of Existenzminimum and Maison Minimum were a response to Europe’s various housing crises and were at the forefront of the architectural profession’s socio-political preoccupations. But beyond the rational and technical analysis of household processes, minimum space and functions required for subsistence, ‘communal living’ as a concept emerged as a paradigmatic departure from economising the family dwelling – rather optimising the self-sufficient standard unit, fundamental household functions such as the kitchen would be shared communally. In the interwar period, two radical examples of ‘communal living’ emerged: Lawn Road Flats (later renamed Isokon) completed in 1934 by Wells Coates in Hampstead, London (fig.1), and the Narkomfin Building completed in 1930 by Moisei Ginzburg in Moscow (fig.2). Conceived in radically

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dissimilar circumstances of interwar England and post-revolution Russia but resonating in fundamental typological aspects, this essay will use Narkomfin, an earlier taxonomical model to examine how ‘communal living’ has evolved distinctly in Lawn Road Flats as a convergent design solution to fill an entirely different socio-political niche.

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ISOKON AND NARKOMFIN - A NEW PLAN

Left – fig. 3 Typical and ground floor plans of the Isokon as built; right – fig. 4 section and plan of Isokon’s ‘Minimum Flat’.

At the end of a leafy Victorian street in suburban Hampstead, the Isokon emerges in offwhite like an ocean liner amongst the trees. Its elongated, nautical form are a direct expression of its floor-plan: each floor consisting of a row of six cellular one-room flats bookended by two larger studios, connected on each floor by a shared external cantilevered deck access gallery (fig.3). With twenty-nine units, across five floors, the Isokon was a framework for a type unprecedented communal life. Conceived by the clients Jack and Molly Pritchard and the architect-engineer Wells Coates, the Isokon was an experimental new model to respond to the “demand for decent living” 1 with an economical, rationalised approach. Twenty-two of the Isokon’s units, the most common type, are the ‘Minimum Flat’, based on a footprint of approximately 5.4 m by 4.6 m (fig.4). Each ‘Minimum Flat’ consisted of a combined living and bedroom area, with a compact bathroom, dressing room, and a rudimentary galley kitchenette with only a

1

Burke, The Lawn Road Flats, p.15.

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hotplate for heating up food. The functioning of this ‘Minimum Flat’ relied on functions that were provided communally, such as a kitchen where food preparation was centralised and a shared laundry, both on the ground level.

Fig. 5 – Plans of the Narkomfin as built, showing connection to communal block and Type F units accessed from communal gallery.

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Fig. 6 – Third, fourth and fifth floors of the two variants of the Type F unit, above and below the access gallery.

The typological similarity with the Narkomfin building is immediate – designed by Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis to house the workers of the People’s Commissariat of Finance2, a similar horizontality reflects the organisation of the typical plan: a series of sixteen standardised units are accessed from a generous shared deck (albeit internal, to suit the Russian climate), bookended by larger units at either end (fig.5). In particular, the most common unit type, Type F (fig.6), are likewise one-room apartments consisting of a contiguous living and bedroom area, with a “back-up gas pipe” allowing the installation optional basic “kitchen component” 3, and a compact toilet and washroom.

On a less constrained site than the Isokon, the footprint of the Type F unit is at an even more generous 3.75 m by 10.5 m, and the innovative 3-2 section (fig.8) pioneered by Ginzburg allowed each unit to have dual aspects and allow one deck access gallery to serve two floors of dwellings. Again, the full utility of these minimum units are predicated on communal facilities, which, on top of a shared backup kitchen at the end

2

Vronskaya, "Making Sense Of Narkomfin".

3

Ginzburg, Dwelling, p.82.

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of the corridor, is manifested in a separate four-storey block connected by linking bridge on the first storey. The communal element is extensive: the communal block provides communal cooking and dining facilities, a kindergarten, and a laundry 4. Perhaps due to the unavoidable spatial hierarchy inherent in the top floor, both the Isokon and Narkomfin had a penthouse apartment for their respective commissioners - Jack and Molly Pritchard, the Isokon’s clients, and Nikolay Milyutin, the Commissar of Finance.

It is prominent that both the Isokon and Narkomfin, in opposite ends of Europe, have arrived at a communal housing typology with such similarity, at least organisationally.

It reflects the pre-eminence of a rationalist approach, where the architectural zeitgeist recognised housing as a fundamentally economical as well as social design problem.

Coates, trained originally as an engineer, planned the Isokon dwellings from the inside out, from the ‘Minimum Flat’, a subsistence unit built on the rationalisation of household processes, to the block. In fact, the ‘Minimum Flat’ was exhibited first as a 1:1 prototype of a new way of living at Maxwell Fry’s Exhibition of British Industrial Art in Dorland Hall 1933, and attracted the Isokon’s first tenants this way 5. Ginzburg, trained classically and also in engineering, derived Narkomfin from his housing research at Stroikom with spatial efficiency calculations and analysis of economies for the explicit intent of Standardisation of housing, also through the individual cellular unit first 6.

These methodologies both reflected a convergent belief in architecture as an instrument of economic planning, whether in the Keynesian or Soviet tradition: rather than a formalistic endeavour, architecture was used to ‘plan’ a modern, economical but decent

4

Ibid., p.82

5

Cantacuzino, Wells Coates – A Monograph, p.14, p.58.

6

Ginzburg, Dwelling, p.66.

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way of life. Keynesian planning was Coates’s client Jack Pritchard’s long-standing concern, and since 1931 he had been a member of the influential Political and Economic Planning policy think tank 7 that shaped British post-Depression political discourse.

While Coates himself was not officially associated with his client’s groups, his writing echoed the same views. In his article Response to Tradition, effectively his manifesto coinciding with the start of the Isokon’s design, he declared a new generation who “are concerned with a Future that must be planned rather than a Past which must be patched up” 8. For Ginzburg, economic planning was already the accepted postrevolutionary political ideal, with the conception of Narkomfin coinciding with the first Five Year Plan to strategically coordinate the rapid industrialisation of the country. His housing research on standardization between 1928-1929 laid the groundwork for the “industrialisation of the production process in construction” with a new paradigm of “socialist construction” 9. Echoing the Soviet Union, the shift in economic consensus in Britain towards economic planning could be read in this corresponding change in the means and ends of architecture as demonstrated in the approach to Isokon. However, there was also a more direct influence of Ginzburg and the Constructivists on Western architects including Coates, through an international forum of CIAM.

7

Burke, The Lawn Road Flats, p.27.

8

Coates, "Response To Tradition", Architectural Review, November 1932.

9

Ginzburg, Dwelling, p.42.

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CROSS-POLLINATION AT CIAM As the leading pan-European forum for the discourse of the concerns of Modern architecture, CIAM was highly instrumental to the cross-pollination of Modernist thinking across the continent. Both Ginzburg and Wells Coates had influential but nonoverlapping roles. Ginzburg was one of the leading figures of the Soviet delegation, involved from CIAM’s conception until 1933, when a confluence of drastic Soviet domestic policy changes and controversies over the Palace of the Soviets competition outcome resulted in the cancellation of the Moscow CIAM congress and the termination of the Soviet Union’s and Ginzburg’s participation. However, during Ginzburg’s involvement, he had already published by 1927 a case for a collective mode of life based on his Stroikom research and also a transitional form of communal dwellings 10. This was to be first realised in Narkomfin, with progress well underway by the time of CIAM II on the Minimum Dwelling in Frankfurt, 1929. Notably, the case presented by Ginzburg had an impact on Le Corbusier, and in 1930, after CIAM II, Le Corbusier criticised CIAM discussions on the Minimum Dwelling for the lack of sufficient focus on the comprehensive strategy advocated by Ginzburg and OSA that made communal services absolutely central, and proposed that a Moscow CIAM to be held in the future 11.

10

Ginzburg, "October Decade", S.A., no. 4-5 (1927).

11

Mumford, The CIAM Discourse On Urbanism, 1928-1960, p.44.

9

Fig. 7 – First draft plans of Isokon from November 1932. Note the lack of communal amenities at ground level.

Coates was also a central figure to CIAM, having founded the MARS group in spring 1933

12,

which acted as Britain’s first official delegation to CIAM. His inaugural CIAM

conference would be particularly resonant of the Soviet influence: CIAM IV, held in late July 1933, was the one originally intended to be held in Moscow in 1932, only later relocated to the SS Patris II cruise ship and Athens. In anticipation for the Moscow CIAM, Architectural Review published a special issue The Russian Scene in May 1932 to which fellow MARS architect Berthold Lubetkin contributed, and Coates would have had access to the publication and likely to have received a first-hand account from Lubetkin himself 13. Notably, Narkomfin was featured in a full page of the publication with built photos but no drawings, and only a passing mention of the centralisation of collective services. Explanation of its socio-political intent was omitted entirely 14.

12

Cantacuzino, Wells Coates – A Monograph, p.64.

13

Ibid., p.64.

14

Lubetkin, "The Builders", Architectural Review, May 1932.

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Despite Narkomfin being fundamentally political, the focus was overwhelmingly of the pragmatic and material aspects of its arrangement and construction. Given that Lubetkin acknowledged in the article that despite OSA’s avant-gardist claim that “architecture has nothing to do with fine art, a very strong aesthetic preoccupation will be seen in the works of this group”. It was telling that Narkomfin was presented to the English audience through a predominantly aesthetic lens. However, Coates also owned a copy of El Lissitzky’s book, Russland: Architektur für eine Weltrevolution 15, published in 1930 anticipating the upcoming Moscow CIAM. Lissitzky documented the Constructivist experiments and featured a chapter dedicated to communal dwellings, including Ginzburg’s Stroikom research. Particularly, plans and sections of the Type F typology that make up the most common units in Narkomfin are included, and Lissitzky referred explicitly to the communal amenities such as the communal kitchens 16. Coates would have been well aware of the Soviet’s contributions while absorbing CIAM discourse and adopting their principles in the founding of MARS. It is notable from the first draft plans of Isokon from November 1932 (around the time when Coates was first invited to form an English CIAM delegation) (fig.7) and the final plans submitted for tender in July 1933 17 feature an increased emphasis on communal amenities on the ground floor. Coates’s later 1939 project Palace Gate even replicates the 3-2 section of Narkomfin almost exactly, though it was used for luxury self-contained apartments rather than communal living. Though the discourse of Coates’s inaugural CIAM moved from the Minimum Dwelling to The Functional City, the fact that the Soviet Union’s

15

Cantacuzino, Wells Coates – A Monograph, p.64.

16

Lissitzky, Rußland: Architektur Für Eine Weltrevolution, p.18.

17

Cantacuzino, Wells Coates – A Monograph, p.57.

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Politburo was still anticipating a CIAM as late as 1933 18 and that a Moscow CIAM was still on the table until its postponement and effective cancellation in March 1933 19 reflected the immediacy and impact of Soviet ideas on the interwar Modernist discourse at CIAM and Coates’s frame of architectural references.

Left – fig. 8 section through floors three to five of Narkomfin; right – fig. 9 section through Palace Gate.

18

Flierl, "The 4Th CIAM Congress In Moscow. Preparation And Failure (1928-1933)",

p.22.

19

Ibid., p.20.

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POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES AND INTENTS Despite the converging concerns and methods in the architectural discourse in Coates and Ginzburg’s countries and a direct international cross-pollination of ideas and images through CIAM congresses, it is instrumental to recognise fundamental differences in political views in the spheres that Coates and Ginzburg were operating.

These political forces were crucial in steering the intentions behind the projects, even though the architectural resolution of both were spatially and typologically similar – in other words, they have evolved semi-distinctly but converged towards a similar design resolution.

Having witnessed the front line revolution’s aftermath in his youth in Crimea 20 and immersed in heated political debate while teaching Vkhutemas 21, Ginzburg and his architecture is inescapably politicised by the revolutionary zeitgeist which had put the worker and labour at the core, in accordance with Marxist philosophy. Ginzburg identified the working class as a “new social consumer of architecture” and that architecture’s role is to “organise not only [the working class’s] own daily existence but also the complex forms of the new economic life of the country” 22. In this light, “workers housing [would] become the most characteristic problem of modern architecture”

23.

Ginzburg’s aspiration towards full adoption of the communal living model is a means of

20

Senkevitch in Ginzburg, Style And Epoch, p.13.

21

Ibid., p.14.

22

Ginzburg, "New Methods of Architectural Thought", S.A., no. 1 (1926).

23

Ginzburg, Style And Epoch, p.77.

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realising the “abolition of the family” 24, which Marx saw as “a mere money relation” 25 and inherently capitalist. In his Dwelling manifesto, Ginzburg quotes Lenin: “The true liberation of women, true communism, will begin only” when there is “a mass reordering of the [family] into large-scale socialist housekeeping” 26. Recognising the unpopularity of abruptly imposing “socialised housekeeping”27 through communal housing, Ginzburg devised the ‘transitional type of habitation’ 28, which includes Narkomfin, with its concatenation of larger family units, one-room units, and full suite of communal services to “create a number of stimuli encouraging a switch to a higher form of social life, but without decreeing this switch” 29. In this mission of social engineering, the Narkomfin served as a pragmatic step in a wider process.

However, the political forces and intentions that shaped the Isokon are more nuanced.

Coates echoed Jack Pritchard’s interest in planning, and in his involvement in the Unit One group (and its later splinter faction he formed with Paul Nash) emphasised the applied arts and design as “a structural pursuit” 30, which was to be achieved in part resolving the conflict between art and industry and “the cooperation between State and industry to get better design standards” 31. This echoes much of Ginzburg’s themes in

24

Marx and Engels, Manifesto of The Communist Party, p.24.

25

Ibid., p.16.

26

Ginzburg, Dwelling, p.138.

27

Ibid.

28

Ibid., p.66.

29

Ibid., p.68.

30

Nash qtd. in Cantacuzino, Wells Coates – A Monograph, p.47.

31

Cantacuzino, Wells Coates – A Monograph, p.45.

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Style and Epoch in describing the conditions allowing the emergence of a new MachineAge ‘style’ and his Stroikom research that sought social change through Standardisation. However, in terms of where their belief systems lied on the actual political spectrum, Coates was far more ambiguous: “he declared as early as 1926 that he had thrown over Socialism, ‘an early enthusiasm, but not really gripping’” 32. Coates’s equivocality towards a particular political dogma is further highlighted by his admiration for Wyndham Lewis and frequent references to his writings in Coates’s own publications, including Response to Tradition and his other articles for Architectural Review. These quotations espoused an unapologetically elitist and individualist position.

Lewis’s political writings were widely acknowledged by his contemporaries as right-wing and he was known to be “vigorously anti-Communist and anti-Soviet” 33 – he was famously referred to as “that lonely old volcano of the Right” by W. H. Auden 34. During Coates’s stint as a literary reviewer for the Vancouver Daily Province in 1928, he published high praise for Lewis’s political treatise The Art of Being Ruled

35,

a text

which advocated for the ruling dominance and the freedom of intellectual. Lewis “opposed capitalist liberal democracy” because it “prevent[ed] the intellectual from functioning freely, by forcing him to submit to the market” 36, and instead advocated for “some species of authoritarian control, [...] some planning planning from a creative centre” 37, a simultaneous benevolent authoritarianism for the ruled and liberal

32

Ibid., p.48.

33

Munton, "The Politics Of Wyndham Lewis", p.34.

34

Ibid.

35

Cantacuzino, Wells Coates – A Monograph, p.15.

36

Munton, "The Politics Of Wyndham Lewis", p.35.

37

Lewis qtd. in ibid.

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individualism for the intellectual elite. When compared with how Isokon was conceived, Lewis’s impact on Coates’s political agenda is clearly tangible: Coates explicitly claimed the ‘Minimum Flats’ way of life bestowed “new possessions of freedom, travel, new experience” and liberation from the burden of “permanent tangible possessions” 38.

Indeed, a hub of free, individualist artist-intellectuals quickly coalesced around the Isokon, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy as residents, and attracting Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth as regular visitors.

But the fact that the invitation for Isokon’s opening was originally sent to the Labour LCC leader Herbert Morrison and that Pritchard had asked him “to consider the Flats as a blueprint for the ‘construction of large blocks of working-class tenements’”39 shows the Isokon can be read as an architecturalisation of Lewis’s concept of “two distinct types of life” 40, of the ‘ruled’ and the ‘rulers’, in contrast to the proletarian egalitarianism of Narkomfin. Isokon in effect embodied both freedom and choice for the intellectuals and imposed planned control for the rest, embodied by one typological model of housing.

As for the Pritchards, they dwelled within progressive British social circles that were sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution. Jack Pritchard’s formative years at Cambridge had his political views shaped by left-wing figures including Lella Florence, involved in the Mass Meeting Committee of Friends of New Russia, and Marxist economic historian Maurice Dobb, a founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain 41, and both Jack and

38

Coates qtd. in Burke, The Lawn Road Flats, p.9.

39

Burke, The Lawn Road Flats, p.37.

40

Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, p.96.

41

Burke, The Lawn Road Flats, p.13.

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Molly campaigned for left-wing causes such as the 1926 General Strike 42. Though of the left, the Pritchards were more of the Hampstead middle-class rather than Muscovite tradition. This becomes evident in Jack’s involvement at the PEP think tank. Despite Jack’s fleeting interest in the Soviet Gosplan 43, the PEP acknowledged its pitfalls and took an explicitly non-partisan position, claiming represent the ‘progressive features’ of Britain’s three main political parties 44. In their National Plan for Great Britain, PEP claimed to represent Socialist ideas focus on workers and state control, Liberal ideas of strengthening Britain as a financial centre and, Conservatism through “moulding of private capital to socially useful purposes rather than its supersession by the State” 45.

This is particularly fitting for the realisation of Isokon as a social experiment as it was funded with Pritchard’s private capital, from savings and private investors, and credit, from a mortgage loan 46. Fundamentally, the Isokon for Pritchard, regardless of its varied social intents, was an entrepreneurial endeavour. Pritchard acknowledged that the target market was a “particular class” of tenants who were “middle-class people of moderate means, who are in business in London and do not want to be bothered with tiresome domestic troubles and yet wish for the privacy of a flat” 47, and the budget of Isokon’s construction was calculated based on anticipated rental income 48. In fact, the communal kitchen, whose equivalent was integral in Narkomfin, was originally not used

42

Ibid., p.14.

43

Ibid., p.30.

44

Ibid., p.28

45

Burke, The Lawn Road Flats, p.29.

46

Ibid., p.34.

47

Ibid., p.38.

48

Ibid.

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by the tenants themselves, but for staff preparing meals ordered by tenants, which were sent up by dumbwaiter and eaten in the flats – it was only converted by Breuer two years after Isokon’s completion, turning it into Isobar, a communal club room and restaurant, after the meal service became uneconomical 49.

Unlike Narkomfin, Isokon never genuinely challenged class hierarchies, if anything it entrenched and made efficient the bourgeois social structure of its creators: the communal services were not provided by the residents themselves but by a underclass of staff who prepared meals, did “cleaning, bed-making, shoe-polishing, window cleaning, collection of refuse and distribution of laundry” 50, and housed in staff quarters located in the least marketable parts of the plan. Even after the creation of Isobar and communal dining infamously became part of life at the Isokon, it was opposite of the Narkomfin’s proletarian collectivisation of food preparation and consumption. Rather, it became host to the ‘Half-Hundred Club’, an exclusive invite-only members’ gourmet food and wine society 51 and had its own Isobar Wine Committee 52, with the club deigning to hold occasional fundraisers for fashionable left-wing causes 53. Unlike the Narkomfin’s intention as a social condenser to transition towards a genuinely socialist communal way of life by engineering “new communal social relations” 54, the Isokon would have been categorised under the Ginzburgian category of the “pre-revolutionary [...] revenue-

49

Cantacuzino, Wells Coates – A Monograph, p.62.

50

Ibid., also in: Cohn, The Door to a Secret Room: A Portrait of Wells Coates, p. 143.

51

Burke, The Lawn Road Flats, p.109.

52

Ibid., p.107.

53

Ibid., p.108.

54

Ginzburg, "The Objectives of Contemporary Architecture", S.A., (1927).

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generating house”

55.

Despite being built in the ‘style’ of the Machine Age, the Machine

Age spirit of rationalism and efficiency achieved by its centralised services and communality still served primarily the purpose of ‘revenue-generation’ and the bourgeois status quo.

55

Ginzburg, Dwelling, p.66.

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CONCLUSIONS Though both their communal modes of living had been gradually eroded over the years, with both Isokon and Narkomfin privately redeveloped, the radicalism of their organisation still endures today. With their rationalised minimum cellular units, shared social deck access galleries, and communal facilities, these elements would serve as blueprints for a whole generation of Modern housing in and beyond their original countries. In a sense, these housing models are still compelling today because they were conceptualised as ‘optimal solutions’ derived through a rational, technical process. With architectural discourse since Isokon and Narkomfin’s completions shifting from the dwelling to the city, these models of communal living were envisaged as part of a wider system of urbanism, such as the MARS Plan for London (1942), or ‘disurbanism’ in the Soviet’s plan for Magnitogorsk (1930).

However, it is clear from the writings and political influences of Isokon’s and Narkomfin’s respective creators that despite converging at a similar organisational and formal design solution, both projects evolved in thoroughly different political climates and were tools for profoundly opposing political agendas, with some scope for a direct design influence and a limited overlap in a belief in architecture as a tool for economic planning (for different ends). The ‘communal living’ model is evidently a product of a convergent evolutionary process, where the same design pattern arose semiindependently because they happened to satisfy the political intentions of both creators.

It is somewhat apposite that despite having been a thoroughly bourgeois manifestation of communal life, the Isokon later became home to many Soviet spies. Perhaps, they were attracted uncoincidentally by a familiarity and kinship with the evolutionary ancestry of the Isokon’s architectural expression.

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WORKS CITED Burke, David. The Lawn Road Flats. 1st ed. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014.

Cantacuzino, Sherban. Wells Coates – A Monograph. 1st ed. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1978.

Coates, Wells. "Response To Tradition". The Architectural Review, November 1932.

Cohn, Laura. The Door to a Secret Room: A Portrait of Wells Coates. 1st ed. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1999.

Flierl, Thomas. "The 4Th CIAM Congress In Moscow. Preparation And Failure (19281933)". Quaestio Rossica 4, no. 3 (2016): 20-22. doi:10.15826/qr.2016.3.173.

Ginzburg, Moisei. Dwelling. 2017 ed. London: Ginzburg Design Limited, 1934.

Ginzburg, Moisei. "New Methods Of Architectural Thought". Sovremennaya Arkhitektura, no. 1 (1926): 1-4.

Ginzburg, Moisei. "The Objectives of Contemporary Architecture". Sovremennaya Arkhitektura, (1927).

Ginzburg, Moisei. "October Decade". Sovremennaya Arkhitektura, no. 4-5 (1927).

Ginzburg, Moisei. Style And Epoch. 1982 ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT Press, 1924.

21

Lewis, Wyndham. The Art Of Being Ruled. 2nd ed. Boston: Black Sparrow Press, 1989.

Lissitzky, El. RuĂ&#x;land: Architektur FĂźr Eine Weltrevolution. 1st ed. Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1929.

Lubetkin, Berthold. "The Builders". Architectural Review, May 1932.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto Of The Communist Party. 1888 English ed.

Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1848.

Mumford, Eric Paul. The CIAM Discourse On Urbanism, 1928-1960. 1st ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2000.

Munton, Alan. "The Politics Of Wyndham Lewis". PN Review 1 4, no. 1 (1977): 34. http://www.wyndhamlewis.org/images/muntonpolitics%20of%20wyndham%20lewis.pdf.

Vronskaya, Alla. "Making Sense Of Narkomfin". Architectural Review, 2017. https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/making-sense-ofnarkomfin/10023939.article.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Cover: Cohn, Laura. The Door to a Secret Room: A Portrait of Wells Coates. 1st ed.

Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1999. p. 126.

Fig. 1: "Isokon, Lawn Road Flats". Architects’ Journal Buildings Library, 2018. https://www.ajbuildingslibrary.co.uk/projects/display/id/2839.

Fig. 2: Vronskaya, Alla. "Making Sense Of Narkomfin". Architectural Review, 2017. https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/making-sense-ofnarkomfin/10023939.article.

Fig. 3: Cantacuzino, Sherban. Wells Coates – A Monograph. 1st ed. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1978. p. 59.

Fig. 4: Cohn, Laura. The Door to a Secret Room: A Portrait of Wells Coates. 1st ed.

Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1999. p. 150.

Fig. 5: Vronskaya, Alla. "Making Sense Of Narkomfin". Architectural Review, 2017. https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/making-sense-ofnarkomfin/10023939.article.

Fig. 6: Vronskaya, Alla. "Making Sense Of Narkomfin". Architectural Review, 2017. https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/making-sense-ofnarkomfin/10023939.article.

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Fig. 7: Cantacuzino, Sherban. Wells Coates – A Monograph. 1st ed. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1978. p. 58.

Fig. 8: Lissitzky, El. Rußland: Architektur Für Eine Weltrevolution. 1st ed. Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1929. p. 22.

Fig. 9: Cantacuzino, Sherban. Wells Coates – A Monograph. 1st ed. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery, 1978. p. 67.

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