Ink and Image 16
Spring 2024
Undergraduate Research Journal
New York University | Department of Art History
Ink & Image
Spring 2024
Volume 16
Contributors
Morgan Austrich Ainsley Gorno Dean
Helene Holland
Spencer A. Hurley
Editor in Chief
Elizabeth Baltusnik
Editors
Camilla Johnson
Claudia Smithie
Meghan Watters
Design Editor
Cèlia Pardillo-Lopez
Table of Contents
Letter from the Editors
Activists Against Art: Damaging Art as a Means of Protest
Morgan Austrich
Heritage and Hegemony: Architecture as Legitimacy in Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s People’s Republic of China
Ainsley Gorno Dean
From Paper to Pixels: The Role of Analog Methods in a Digital World
Helene Holland
Night on Earth: Peter Hujar in Conversation with Brassaï Spencer A . Hurley
Dear Reader,
As the editors of Ink and Image, we are delighted to present the sixteenth edition of NYU’s undergraduate research journal of the Department of Art History. This journal was founded in 2009 with the intention of granting undergraduates the opportunity to present work typically reserved for graduate students. The original founders, Malcolm St. Clair (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘09) and Alexis Wang (Art History ‘09), intended to create a dialogue between Art History departments and researchers, both within NYU and with other academic institutions. We are proud to be a part of continuing their vision in the journal’s subsequent editions.
This year, we present a selection of papers with topics ranging from the comparison of artists and architectural styles, to the roles of art in an increasingly political and digital world. Throughout these works are themes of equity and justice: how can our art and our built environments adequately support the societies for which they were created? These debates are central to not just the advancement and expansion of art history but life as a whole as well. We hope that reading these papers will encourage you to question the structures and artworks around you.
We take this opportunity to thank our longtime faculty advisor, Professor Carol Krinsky, and to congratulate her on her retirement. We appreciate her continued support of the journal and the Art History department and will miss her guidance dearly. As Editor in Chief, I’d also like to extend a congratulations to the entire editorial staff and the authors of this year’s edition — their tireless efforts and intense research cannot be understated.
Central to the mission of Ink and Image are the ideas of inspiring new research, encouraging creativity, and furthering connections. Happy reading!
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Baltusnik, Editor in Chief
Activists Against Art: Damaging Art as a Means of Protest
Morgan Austrich
Protest is one of our most powerful modes of expression. In the United States and elsewhere, freedom of speech is protected, regarded as a god-given right and a necessary catalyst for change. From marches to strikes, people stand up for what they believe in with the hope of attracting attention and making a difference. Our common cultural heritage is a common instigator and target of protest. Fine art and artifacts are often halted at the crossroads of change and preservation. We admire art for its beauty and its historical significance, but sometimes its history reveals a dark part of our past. An object revered for its appearance attracts destruction and even works that don’t cause controversy can be affected by acts of resistance. In a society where art can be either the reason for or the target of a protest, how do we decide what we protect and what we are free to destroy?
Following the Second World War, Germany eradicated all representations of Hitler and the Nazis from public life. When that history is addressed, it is with a sense of shame and a desire to never repeat the mistakes of the past, such as a Berlin art exhibition titled “Hitler-How Could it Happen?”1 While Germany actively prevents references to an era in which an entire ethnic group were tortured
1 Amanda Erickson, “Analysis | How Other Countries Have Dealt with Monuments to Dictators, Fascists and Racists,” The Washington Post (WP Company, December 1, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/15/how-other-countries-have-dealtwith-monument s-to-dictators-fascists-and-racists/.
and in part exterminated, many states in America continue to celebrate their dark past. Monuments to Confederate leaders are commonplace from the Civil War era, and the dark past of the South continues to be romanticized today. Freedom of expression and various historic preservation laws protect the existence of Confederate monuments, making their removal extremely challenging. Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires government agencies to consider the negative effects of removing historic monuments prior to taking action.2 Moreover, individual states have legal protections in place for monuments in their jurisdiction. Georgia has one of the most rigid state codes regarding the removal of Confederate statues: GA Sat § 50-3-1 explicitly states, “It shall be unlawful for any person, firm, corporation, or other entity to mutilate, deface, defile, or abuse contemptuously any publicly owned monument located, erected, constructed, created, or maintained on real property owned by an agency or the State of Georgia”3 and further defines a monument as something that is “dedicated to, honors, or recounts the military service of any past or present military personnel of this state; the United States of America or the several states thereof; or the Confederate States of America or the several states thereof.”4
Rigid protections exist in the state because it is home to numerous offensive structures. Georgia’s Stone Mountain theme park has a massive carving of three Confederate figures’ heads on a mountainside, acting as the centerpiece of the tourist attraction. The location itself was also commonly used by the Ku Klux Klan to hold rallies and cross-burnings.5 Despite efforts to protest the theme park’s landmark, Georgia’s strict codes on removing monuments protect the tribute
2 “Confederate-Monument Removals Slowed by Knot of Legal Issues,” Americanbar. org, December 2019, https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/publications/youraba/2019/ december-2019/efforts-to-remove-confedera te-monuments-slowed-by-knot-of-legal-/.
3 “2021 Georgia Code :: Title 50 - State Government :: Chapter 3 - State Flag, Seal, and Other Symbols :: Article 1 - State and Other Flags :: § 50-3-1. Description of State Flag; Militia to Carry Flag; Defacing Public Monuments; Obstruction and Relocation of Monuments,” Justia Law, 2021, https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2021/title-50/chapter-3/article-1/section-50-3-1/.
4 Ibid.
5 “Confederate-Monument Removals Slowed by Knot of Legal Issues,”
toAmerica’s racist past. Georgia’s 2021 State Code mentions Stone Mountain by name, and explicitly protects the sculpture by saying, “The memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause.”6
Progress has been made in certain areas, however. In 2021, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled to remove a Confederate statue of General Robert E. Lee, the infamous Confederate general, in the city of Richmond.7 The monument was targeted in 2020 amidst Black Lives Matter Protests, but the statue was protected by an agreement from 1890 which maintained that it would be protected by the Commonwealth of Virginia.8 The state Supreme Court determined this agreement to be “unenforceable,” arguing that the old policy perpetuated a “message with which [the Commonwealth] now disagrees.”9
The removal of statues shows hope for a more progressive future, but some argue that the erasure of our racist past censors freedom of expression. They claim that the removal of controversial monuments will lead to the eradication of all slave-owning figures from American history, including most founding fathers
The Freedmen’s Memorial, an 1876 monument near the Capitol building in Washington DC, depicts Abraham Lincoln towering over a black man, who kneels at his feet, barely covered except by a cloth around his waist. Lincoln holds in one hand the Emancipation Proclamation, and gestures over the kneeling man with the other.10 Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton argued for the removal of the 6 2021 Georgia Code :: Title 50 - State Government :: Chapter 3 - State Flag, Seal, and Other Symbols :: Article 1 - State and Other Flags :: § 50-3-1. Description of State Flag; Militia to Carry Flag; Defacing Public Monuments; Obstruction and Relocation of Monuments.”
7 Vimal Patel, “Virginia Supreme Court Clears Path for Removal of Robert E. Lee Statue,” The New York Times (The New York Times, September 2, 2021). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/us/robert-e-lee-statue-removal-virginia.html.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Erin L. Thompson, in Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of Americas Public Monuments (S.l.: W W NORTON, 2023), 55-59.
statue amidst the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, but her protest was met with further protection of the monument as President Donald J. Trump subsequently issued an executive order for the prosecution of monument vandals; the statue was surrounded by a sturdy chain-link fence.11 Some argued that removing an image of Lincoln was taking things too far, and Trump’s executive order claimed that protestors exhibited “a deep ignorance of our history.”12
Rather than erasing history, removing the Freedmen’s Memorial would raise awareness of “the discriminatory intent of American monuments.”13 The problem with the monument arises not from the presence of Lincoln, but from the implication that black Americans did not fight for their own freedom, rather that it was bestowed upon them by their abuser of the past several centuries, white men. The kneeling man is still subordinate to the godlike image of Lincoln beside him. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man,” Frederick Douglas remarked on the statue at the time of dedication.14
We cannot pretend our past never happened, but we can educate the public on slavery and racism in the United States. Confederate statues, as they exist in America today, do not act as educational tools to raise awareness of our nation’s past. They are posed in our cities, mounted on pedestals, and honored as their names and faces are renowned They censor history themselves
Like the policy that protected Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue, the law has historically preserved works of art in their original state as it seeks to protect free speech and expression. Confederate monuments are often protected by laws that were written over a century ago that sought to preserve the racist ideals of the Confederate states. Protecting fine art preserves human history and expresses
11 Ibid., 55-56
12 Ibid., 55-56
13 Ibid., 57
14 Ibid., 59
a period’s political, spiritual and social climate. However, when an artist serves clients who intend to eradicate or enslave an entire race, it seems unjust that their ideas be preserved. In the case of racist monuments, preserving art for art’s sake could be preventing social change rather than protecting fine art from damage.
One proposed solution to the presence of racist statues is to intentionally vandalize them, rather than eradicate them. “If we destroy the monument, we lose a chance to study it as history or to be reminded of the continued need to fight racism.”15 Defacing statues reminds us of our sullied history while preventing the veneration of racist figures. But where is the line drawn to protect fine art from defacement? When does the right to protest threaten our common cultural heritage? Encouraging vandalism sets a precedent to tamper with any work of art that one finds offensive. Damaging art as a form of protest has a long history across various protest movements and was a primary mode of resistance for Suffragettes, who attacked at least 32 works of art between 1913 and 1914.16 They usually attacked images of nude women, protesting the sexualization of women in a country that did not grant them political equality. “I have tried to destroy a valuable painting because I wish to show the public that they have no security for their property nor for their art treasures until women are given their political freedom” said Suffragette Mary Wood, after she slashed a portrait at London’s Royal Academy.17
Most famously, Suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus on a busy day in London’s National Gallery, causing a spectacle before the police arrested her.18 Richardson’s selection of painting was significant, attacking a work that was created solely for the ‘male gaze,’ a purely
15 Adler, Amy M., “Against Moral Rights.” California Law Review 97, no.1 (2009), 280, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20441070.
16 Alexander Adams, “Chapter Three Defacement of Art; Defacement as Art,” in Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2020), 74 17 Females in the frame, 77
18 Ibid., 79-80
sexual representation of the female goddess of love.19 Further, the painting’s fame as Velasquez’s only surviving nude portrait, paired with Richardson’s timing and manner of attack made evident her desire to attract attention to her cause.20
Art can be the reason for a protest movement, as in the case of Confederate statues, but it is commonly a target of various acts of resistance because of its multitude of representations. The Suffragettes took issue with the objectification of women in art institutions at a time when females were not given equal rights. While this reasoning is logical, art history spans human history, visually representing all eras and beliefs. To destroy a painting from a time in which women were objectified warrants the destruction of a multitude of works. Should ancient Greek nude statues be smashed? Women were not given equal rights in their so-called democracy either. The actions taken by the Suffragettes raise similar complexities to that of the Confederate monument protests. Art is admired not only for its visual appeal but also for what it represents. Are we justifying the racist and sexist undertones of our past by exhibiting fine art, or is there a way we can appreciate aesthetics without perpetuating these ideals? Rather than destroy beautiful works for what they imply, we should use them as opportunities to educate. Institutions can be transparent about a work’s implications and history but still show fine art, separating aesthetic value from meaning.
While Richardson claimed to attack Velasquez’s Venus because of its demeaning representation of women, the large crowd she drew was a primary motive for her mode of protest. Drawing attention is the primary reason art is targeted, and the more famous a work, the more likely it is to be threatened. Perhaps more shocking than the vandalism of works that perpetuate racism or misogyny is the defacement of works that have no correlation to a disputed cause. In the fall of 2022, viral videos appeared on the internet of climate activists
19 Ibid., 82
20 Ibid., 81
throwing canned food on fine art. These works were not related to climate change but were used as devices to attract public attention. The rapid speed at which a shocking video can spread on social media has only increased protestors’ desire and ability to arouse the public. Most famously, tomato soup was splattered on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at London’s National Gallery in an effort to raise awareness of the climate crisis. “We are in a climate catastrophe, and all you are afraid of is tomato soup or mashed potatoes on a painting,” remarked a protestor who had just splattered mashed potatoes on a Monet.21 Vandalizing fine art has yet to improve the condition of the environment, and the perpetrators of these acts were arrested immediately after the incidents.
It is unclear whether vandalism by Suffragettes and climate activists advanced their causes. Their brash actions may have even had the opposite effect as art lovers who support the protestors’ causes watch the unnecessary defacement of precious works of art. It is true that words are amplified by actions, and the scenes created by Just Stop Oil protestors have reached many who would have not otherwise seen their efforts. 22 However, will those with the power to implement change be swayed by these viral spectacles? The climate crisis is in the hands of oil companies, not art museums.
Instead of inspiring change, these protests penalize public art institutions. Not only do museums have to clean and repair damaged art, but the increased frequency of attacks on art in museums has increased the need for heightened security, costing museums’ funds and affecting the public’s experience of art. Italy’s cultural minister is even considering covering all paintings in Italy with
21 Rachel Treisman, “Protests at Art Museums Are Nothing New. Here Are 3 Famous Examples from History,” NPR (NPR, October 26, 2022), https://www.npr. org/2022/10/26/1131377513/museum-protests-famous-artworks-history.
22 Smithsonian Magazine, “Why Are Climate Activists Throwing Food at Million-Dollar Paintings?,” Smithsonian.com (Smithsonian Institution, October 27, 2022), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-are-climate-activists-throwing-food-atmillion-dollar-paintings 180981024/.
glass, which would increase museum entrance fees and affect visibility.23 Art defacers jeopardize our access to cultural history. The right to protest does not grant permission to destroy. Vandalizing Confederate statues may tamper with their monumentality and prevent the veneration of racist figures, but the precedent this sets threatens the existence and appreciation of fine art as a whole. Art is used as a protest tool in its creation as well as its destruction. Often used as a mode of resistance, performance art enables artists to communicate their ideas through movement and action, enhancing the effectiveness of traditional fine art. When artists destroy to create, they encourage future vandalism. Art can be legally destroyed as a means of protest when it is done by its owner or creator. Street artist Banksy’s Love is in the Bin destroyed itself after it was sold at a Sotheby’s auction.24 Immediately after the gavel struck on a $1.4 million dollar sale, the piece sank through a shredder built within its frame, that Banksy had installed himself. If the work had been damaged by anyone other than the artist, especially immediately following its sale, legal consequences would have ensued. Moral rights protect Banksy’s ability to turn an auction into an opportunity to criticize the art market.2525 While the spectacle was intended by the artist to be a commentary on the materialism of the modern art market and a critique of the privatization of art, the shredded work ironically increased in value and subsequently sold for $25.4 million.2626 Given the work’s steep increase in price, the effectiveness of the protest in inspiring change is unclear, but Banksy succeeded at grasping the public’s attention and raising awareness of the elitist nature of the art market.
While Banksy’s spectacle was admired by the public, destruction in performance art, even when legal, sets a dangerous precedent. Other artists, too 23 Alex Marshall, “How Do You Tell a Vandal from a Visitor? Art Museums Are Struggling.,” The New York Times (The New York Times, November 24, 2022), https://www. nytimes.com/2022/11/24/arts/design/climate-protests-museums.html.
24 Sharon Pruitt-Young, “A Half-Shredded Banksy Piece Is Auctioned for $25.4 Million, a Record for the Artist,” NPR (NPR, October 14, 2021), https://www.npr. org/2021/10/14/1046134451/banksy-shredded-auction-sold-record.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
have legally destroyed art as a means of protest. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei resists the Chinese government in his work. In 1995, Ai painted a vase from the Han Dynasty to “resemble a cheap modern-day container, an example of his longstanding interest in notions of cultural heritage, authenticity, and—appropriately enough—the value of art.”2727 He didn’t stop at this: he captured images of himself shattering the defaced artifact to create his triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Like Banksy, Ai Weiwei had every right to destroy the work. He had purchased it at an antique market, giving him authority over its condition.2828 His performative piece raises questions about the preservation of art and the moral responsibility of private owners. While legal, his actions robbed future generations of an artifact.
Ironically, Ai’s performative piece was later vandalized by a local artist, Maximo Caminero while it was on display at the Pèrez Art Museum in Miami 29 Caminero smashed one of the exhibit’s brightly painted urns, mimicking Ai’s own actions. Caminero claimed to be protesting the museum’s failure to represent local artists.3030 He was subsequently arrested and charged with the estimated cost of the vase.3131 Both Ai and Caminero destroyed an artifact as an act of protest, but while Ai’s work was celebrated Caminero was led away in handcuffs. Do the destructive actions of artists like Banksy and Ai inspire further damage to art? It’s difficult to compare Ai’s destruction of an object that he owned to protest the Chinese government with Caminero’s seemingly brash decision to deface an exhibit at a museum. However, their actions are essentially the same. Is it just to penalize one artist and reward the other? Would Caminero have destroyed a work in the exhibit if he had not been inspired by the action of Ai Weiwei?
The intentions of Caminero in vandalizing Dropping a Han Dynasty
27 Ben Mauk, “The Case of the ‘Million-Dollar’ Broken Vase,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/business/ currency/the-case-of-the-million-dollar-broken-vase.
28 “Defaced Art and the Law - Maw-Law Web Site,” MAW, March 10, 2014, http:// www.maw-law.com/copyright/broken-vases-law/.
29 Mauk, “The Case of the ‘Million-Dollar’ Broken Vase.”
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
Urn were the same as those of Banksy and Weiwei, the same as Just Stop Oil protestors, the Suffragettes, and Black Lives Matter activists-to protest an existing system and to inspire change. Art will always be targeted for its beauty, its popularity and its symbolism. Vandalism of art as an act of resistance, no matter how justified, puts fine art and our experience of it at risk. Destroying to attract attention does more harm than good for the public, and threatens art institutions. However, controversial histories and offensive ideals should not be admired. Instead of encouraging destruction no matter the circumstances, we can attempt to find a balance between education and admiration, acknowledging the sullied history of art and humanity and differentiating what can be displayed from what needs to be removed.
Protests that destroy art to attract attention must be distinguished from the removal of statues that cause an entire race to feel unwelcome and mistreated. Confederate monuments exist amidst our cities, reminding descendants of slaves of a time in which their ancestors were not treated as human beings. These monuments to the oppression of an entire race must be distinguished from that of fine art in an institution, which can be preserved for aesthetic and educational purposes. Monuments to slavery exist not for visual admiration; but to glorify a shameful period of American history. Given the precedent it sets, vandalism is not appropriate for Confederate statues, but their removal from public display is essential. Fine art should be protected as an educational reflection of our past and a preservation of our common cultural heritage. Monuments with dark histories, however, should be removed or relocated to a location where their racist intentions can teach us about the mistakes of our nation’s past.
Heritage and Hegemony: Architecture as Legitimacy in Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s People’s Republic of China
Ainsley Gorno Dean
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 by Mao Tse-tung, Chinese government officials turned towards the USSR for guidance on socialist building and planning principles. Despite the formal similarities between each government’s architectural plans and economic policies — largely due to the USSR’s direct work with PRC planners — distinct urban forms emerged in each territory. How did theoretically similar architectural programs manifest themselves in strikingly divergent ways? Why did the USSR’s socialist classicism embrace traditional, quasi-imperial motifs despite being created by a revolutionary, anti-bourgeois regime? Why did the Maoist PRC quickly discard Soviet forms and turn to modernist planning solutions?
In this paper, I propose an answer to these questions by investigating the built landscapes of the Stalinist USSR and the Maoist PRC. Using philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, I examine the ideological underpinnings of each state’s architectural programs. I closely analyze two types of built forms — institutional and residential buildings — to explain how state hegemonies were embodied in and furthered by architectural creations. Rather than simply describing how Soviet and PRC architecture expressed national ideals, this project traces these ideas from their economic and historical bases to their architectural expressions in a genealogy of socialist aesthetics.
Past Scholarship
Scholarship on socialist architecture has explained the connection between mid-twentieth century Soviet and Chinese architecture, but has left untouched the reason why plans that appear similar in formal terms created distinct built environments1 The USSR’s classically grand high buildings and avenues stand in sharp contrast to the early PRC’s spartan, efficient danweis and people’s communes . Although some scholars have highlighted the ideological influences of Stalinist and Maoist architecture, these analyses have been uniregional or have centered on specific buildings, rather than on these regimes’ broader building programs.2 Furthermore, much of the recent scholarship on communist architecture analyzes structures built after the Stalinst and Maoist periods.3 Scholars have investigated the changing architectural forms in China under its current mixed economy; works from the Maoist period have received far less attention.4 Similarly, a large body of modern scholarship has explained architectural forms within post-Stalinist Russia and the Soviet Bloc while glossing over the contrasting built environments of Stalinism as strange exceptions.5 These studies have been foundational to current understandings of Eastern European and Chinese urbanism, but they fail to fully situate these forms within their (inter) national economic and historical contexts.
1 Yan Li, “Building friendship: Soviet influence, socialist modernity, and Chinese cityscape in the 1950s,” Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies 2.3 (2014): 48; Victor Sit, “Soviet Influence on Urban Planning in Beijing, 1949-1991,” The Town Planning Review 67, no. 4 (1996): 457–84; Mark Gamsa, “Refractions of China in Russia, and of Russia in China: Ideas and Things,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60.5 (2017): 549-584
2 Yichun Xie and Frank J. Costa, “Urban planning in Socialist China: Theory and Practice,” Cities 10.2 (1993): 103-114; Wojciech Leśnikowski, “Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An Aspect of Cold War History,” Journal of Architectural Education 48:3 (1995): 202-204; Konstantin Akinsha, Grigorii Kozlov, and Sylvia Hochfield, The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia, (Yale University Press, 2008).
3 I use the term “Communist architecture” broadly to indicate architecture built by a communist regime.
4 Charlie Q. Xue, Building a Revolution: Chinese Architecture since 1980 (Hong Kong University Press, Vol. 1, 2005); Xuefei Ren. Architecture and nation building in the age of globalization: Construction of the national stadium of Beijing for the 2008 Olympics . (Journal of Urban Affairs, 30(2), 2008), 175-190
5 David Crowley and Susan Emily Reid, ed. Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, (Oxford University Press, 2002); Vladimir Kulic, Land of the in-between: Modern Architecture and The State in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1945–65, The University of Texas at Austin Publishing, 2009.
Stalinist architecture comprised one period in the USSR’s larger architectural history; Maoist planning was likewise simply the beginning of the PRC’s transformation of China’s urban landscapes and infrastructure. One must be careful not to conflate the forms and ideologies discussed here with all Soviet, Chinese, or Communist architecture. Nonetheless, modern Russian and Chinese architectural forms cannot be properly analyzed without an understanding of the built forms and ideologies that preceded and influenced them. By tracing the dialectical qualities of Maoist and Stalinist architecture,6 this paper offers insight into how historical moments and economic structures materialize in built forms.
Hegemony and Architecture
The contrasting architectural histories of the USSR and the PRC result from specific efforts to reconcile revolution with tradition. From the modernist Chinese danwei to the monumentality of Moscow’s Seven Sisters, these architectural forms physically manifest these regimes’ attempts to construct a new “national-popular character”7 — what Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci terms egemonia or hegemony — to replace antithetical past ideologies.8
Developed in response to Marxism’s slide towards “mechanical materialism,” which emphasized the importance of economic structures while dismissing ideological and political influence, Gramsci’s writing on hegemony emphasized that “ideas ha[ve] consequences.”9 In Gramsci’s theory, a ruling class’ interests are disguised as common sense and are therefore universalized through civil life and hegemonic apparatuses (e.g. schools, workplaces, and jails).10
Both Stalin and Mao recognized the power of public opinion; they
6 As both resulting from and engendering hegemony.
7 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere [Prison Notebooks], (Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editori, 2001), 942. Trans. Ainsley Dean.
8 In Russia, this meant replacing Imperial Russia’s “official nationality” ideology; in China, it meant constructing a new one from the fractures of its Colonial, Imperial, and Republican legacies.
9 Joseph Femia, “Hegemony and Consciousness in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci,” Political Studies 23.1 (1975): 29
10 Joseph A. Woolcock, “Politics, Ideology and Hegemony in Gramsci’s Theory,” Social and Economic Studies 34, no. 3 (1985): 206
understood that “popular persuasion often has the same energy as a material force.”11 Communist architecture, therefore, was not simply the result of these regimes’ hegemonies: it was also a way to cement them. Soviet workers’ clubs and mass marches down grand avenues, along with the intense collectivization of life in the PRC’s people’s communes, reinforced the national-popular characters of Stalinism and Maoism. As the USSR and PRC discarded deeplyembedded religious beliefs (and therefore, traditionally unifying values) under state atheism,12 their architecture was shaped by the difficulties of reconciling powerful national legacies with revolutionary ideals. Their constructions speak to their efforts to solidify new ideologies while navigating the dialectics of past and future, nationalism and globalism.
A Brief History of Architecture in the USSR and People’s Republic of China
Within the Soviet Union, architectural policies varied tremendously as the USSR navigated changes from the New Economic Policy (NEP) to the years of Stalinism, the Second World War to the Cold War, and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the 1990 fall of the Berlin wall. During the USSR’s early years (roughly 1917-1930), modernist and constructivist architecture promoted collectivism and attention to workers’ needs; its decidedly anti-classical forms emphasized Soviets’ anti-bourgeois character. After Stalin’s rise during the late 1920s, Soviet planners discarded Modernism in favor of the emerging style of Socialist Classicism (often referred to informally as Stalinist architecture). Modernism was now deemed indulgent, “inhuman,” and “technocratic”; its lack of legibility to the proletariat spoke to its bourgeois nature for Stalin and his supporters.13 Socialist Classicism, a part of the Stalinist USSR’s broader cultural
11 Gramsci, 869. Trans Dean.
12 Marxism’s disdain for religion stems from its Hegelian roots. Gramsci writes that according to Hegel, “religion is a mythical and inferior philosophy, corresponding to an infantile mentality not yet capable of raising itself to pure philosophy,” Gramsci, 919. Trans. Dean
13 Owen Hatherley, Landscapes of Communism: A History Through Buildings, (Allen Lane, 2015), 6
program of Socialist Realism,14 incorporated classical motifs and strong lines to create spaces of legible, historical grandeur. Despite the regime’s revolutionary principles, “material traces of earlier eras inevitably remained.”15 After Stalin’s death in 1953, classical architectural forms were once again discarded, with a return to functionalist modernism, brutalism, and even postmodernism within the Eastern Bloc. Today, Stalinist forms are referenced by Putin’s Russian Federation in buildings such as Moscow’s Triumph Palace.16
The PRC’s planning policies have similarly changed dramatically since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power during the Chinese Revolution of 1949. In the regime’s earliest years, over 10,000 Soviet planners were invited to advise the PRC on housing and urban policy.17 While the guidance provided by Soviet planners was primarily technical, many early PRC buildings integrated elements of Socialist Classicism.18 By the late 1950s, however, relations between the USSR and PRC had cooled. Under the guidance of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, “wasteful” Soviet and traditional Chinese structures were replaced by “antiwaste” (and therefore, revolutionary) modernist designs.19 Plans for communities that integrated work, leisure, health, and government were prioritized, finding their realization in danweis (work units) and people’s communes. Mao’s regime embraced architecture as a pivotal educational and economic tool (figure 1).20
As Communist China wrestled with the legacies of past foreign concessions, Opium War defeats, and its resulting underdevelopment, it sought to become a
14 Socialist realism is itself a “a very complex combination of varying components, including Old Russian traditions and superstitions.” Alexander Ivashkin,“Who’s Afraid of Socialist Realism?,” The Slavonic and East European Review 92, no. 3 (2014): 430
15 Crowley and Reid, 8
16 Hatherley, 206
17 Duanfang Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 19492005, (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2006), 31
18 The Chinese People’s Revolutionary Military Museum, one of Beijing’s Ten Great Buildings, is a clear example of how Socialist Classicist motifs (symmetry, tiered towers, pilasters, worker statues) were used in early PRC architecture.
19 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, 9
20 Xie and Costa, 106. Xie and Costa’s table highlights the PRC’s shifting views of architecture-as-tool.
Third World leader.21 After Mao’s death in 1976, the CCP’s economic and cultural reforms created a mixed economy with significant revisions to party doctrine, drastically changing PRC urban planning guidelines and resulting in unequal regional development.22 Still, Maoism’s architectural legacy remains influential. The layouts of residential areas and industrial zones in modern Chinese cities such as Beijing still bear the stamp of Maoist planning policies.23
Institutional Buildings in the Stalinist USSR
Many of the most archetypal Stalinist structures were institutional buildings: historical monuments, governmental headquarters, and state universities. These buildings are decidedly classical – even imperial – in form. Perhaps the most recognizable examples of Socialist Classicism in Moscow are the seven skyscrapers known colloquially as the “Seven Sisters” . Clustered around Moscow’s center, these “high buildings” were only a few of many proposed during the regime’s 1930s-era fixation with high rises.24 Their soaring spires and asymmetrical placements throughout the city recall the “bunched towers and irregular silhouette” of Moscow’s iconic orthodox churches.25 Although many of these churches were demolished during the Stalinist period, their Russian character was emulated with high buildings that connected Moscow’s past greatness to that of the Stalinist USSR. By referencing orthodox forms even as religious belief was suppressed, the USSR reminded citizens of their common folklore and heritage. Past “religious Russification” to unite the state’s “diverse population” was replaced by a communist neo-Russification program.26 Rather than following the Orthodox church or father-Tsar, patriotic Russians were now
21 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, 4-5
22 Cindy C. Fan, “Uneven Development and Beyond: Regional Development Theory in Post-Mao China,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21 (1997): 620-639
23 Chaolin Gu, Yehua Dennis Wei, and Ian G. Cook, “Planning Beijing: Socialist City, Transitional City, and Global City,” Urban Geography 36.6 (2015): 905-926
24 Hatherley, 205. The USSR preferred the term “high buildings” to skyscrapers, as the latter term was connected to capitalistic structures like the Empire State Building.
25 Ibid., 211
26 Ronald Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (Verso, 2017), 115
devoted to Stalin’s regime.
Today, the Seven Sisters continue to dominate Moscow’s skyline, recalling the epic proportions of imperial and capitalist cities such as Paris, Vienna, and New York. No matter where one is in the city, a Seven Sister invariably remains within view. The soaring, symmetrical complex of Moscow State University exemplifies the monumentality of High Stalinist architecture (figure 2). With a soaring central building (the tallest building in Europe at the time) flanked by smaller twin towers,27 ornate neoclassical decorations, and numerous classical statues, Moscow State would not look out of place in Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg or Imperial Berlin’s Unter den Linden. They also served as orienting monuments, anchoring Stalin’s 1935 neo-baroque Moscow plan in much the same way that obelisks delineated important axes in Pope Sixtus V’s 16th-century replan of Rome.
Architectural historian Irina Seits notes in her analysis of Moscow’s aesthetics that “Stalin’s neo-classicism is more characteristic to the portrait of Moscow than constructivist dom-kommunas and workers’ clubs.”28 As the seat of a revolutionary regime, heir to a millennium of great empires — and in many ways, seeking to become one itself — Moscow was transformed by Stalin’s efforts to make it a “capital of all capitals.”
29 Moscow State University’s grandeur is a manifestation of this vision. By combining the architectural forms of Imperial Russia with a crowing five-point star, reliefs of the USSR’s hammer and sickle emblem, and statues of workers, Moscow State University channels the national mythology of “Russian exceptionalism” into a monument for its revolutionary
27 Georges Binder, 101 of the World’s Tallest Buildings, (Images Publishing, 2006), 10
28 Irina Seits, “Invisible Avant-Garde and Absent Revolution: Walter Benjamin’s New Optics for Moscow Urban Space of the 1920s,” Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art 8 (2018): 576
29 Katherine Zubovich, Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital, (Princeton University Press, 2021), 87
vanguard.30
The Stalinist USSR’s deep engagement with the legacies of Kievan Rus, Muscovy, and Imperial Russia are not only visible in its constructions, but also in the structures it appropriated.31 The Lubyanka Building in Moscow, built in 1897 to house the Rossiya Insurance Company,32 was converted into the Soviet secret police (the Cheka; later the NKVD and KGB) headquarters in 1918. In the 1940s, the USSR commissioned Aleksey Shchusev to design a renovation plan that doubled the building’s size to meet the NKVD’s growing space needs. Today, it is still owned by the FSB, the successor to the Soviet KGB and NKVD, today.33
With its historicist stone facade, the Lubyanka repeatedly references classical and Palladian motifs: Doric and Corinthian pilasters, pediments framing USSR emblems, graduated rustication, round arched windows, and repetitive symmetry define its exterior. These traditional forms, along with the Lubyanka’s imposing size and solidity, communicate the strength of the Soviet regime and visually connect it to a legacy of powerful states from Rome to Imperial Russia.
Despite its magnificence, the Lubyanka is immediately legible to the proletarian worker. Not a modernist work of “fantastic disorder,” the building integrates familiar classical forms and revolutionary Communist insignias into a comprehensible whole.34 The Lubyanka’s strongest tie to Russia’s past, however, is its location. Situated on the site of Empress Catherine the Great’s secret police building, it is both literally and symbolically a continuation of Imperial Russia’s legacy.35 However, the Lubyanka’s location does not simply connect the USSR to Russia’s past; it also supersedes it. By standing on a site embedded in imperial
30 Brendan Humphreys, “Russian Exceptionalism: A Comparative Perspective.” Politics in Central Europe 12.1 (2016): 9. Russian exceptionalism is a complicated but central part of Russia’s national identity. Situated between East and West, Russia’s unique position has been a source of both pride and tension.
31 And in those it never built; Stalin’s never-constructed Palace of the Soviets exemplifies how ideology deeply influenced architectural programs during his rule.
32 Dan Richardson, The Rough Guide to Moscow, (Penguin, 2009), 139
33 Margaret Comer, “Lubyanka: Dissonant memories of violence in the heart of Moscow,” Memory Studies 16(3) (2023): 563
34 Zubovich,“Moscow Monumental,” 53
35 Richardson, 139
power, the Lubyanka building legitimizes the USSR’s hegemonic ideals while representing the end of the Imperial government’s bourgeois oppression.
Institutional Buildings in the Maoist PRC
Like the USSR, the Maoist PRC embraced the institutional building as an ideological tool of power. Architecture was not merely decorative: the PRC thought it “should assist in educating the new socialist man.”36 While some Maoist buildings show the direct influence of Soviet architecture,37 the PRC’s major buildings are notably distinct from Stalinist forms. As Yan Li writes in their exploration of Soviet influence in China, Maoist-era buildings were “generally free from the neoclassical ‘excesses’ of [Soviet] tiers and spires that granted them extraneous height.”38 The famous Ten Great Buildings in Beijing do not lack monumentality, but theirs is an austere, modern grandeur. Each of these structures integrates modern forms and traditional Chinese motifs, though some tend more strongly towards modernism (or traditionalism) than others.39
Still, these structures—as part of Mao’s new architectural program— “made a statement about the modernist outlook of the new regime in the 1950s.”40
Through straight lines and simplified ornament, the PRC’s institutional buildings symbolized proletarian pragmatism. The excesses of neoclassical and BeauxArts motifs were rejected as emblems of capitalist intemperance and Western foreign oppression; they were at best “petit-bourgeois” and “waste[rs of] valuable [re]sources.”41 Maoist buildings did not neglect aesthetics but embraced an architectural language of revolutionary simplicity. By fusing modern and simplified traditional forms, the PRC’s institutional buildings conveyed both 36 Xie and Coasta, “Urban planning in Socialist China,” 105
37 Li, 52-58. Notable examples include the profusion of 1950s Sino-Soviet Friendship buildings created for exhibitions throughout China.
38 Ibid., 58
39 One can roughly split these buildings into two groups: five of which are “traditional” and five of which are “modern.”
40 Paul Clark, “Beijing’s Ten Great Buildings: popular responses over three eras (19592016),” Asian Anthropology 19:3 (2020): 181
41 Zixian Liu, “Making a New World and a New People: Cold War, Maoist Austere Architecture and the ‘Rammed-earth Campaign’, 1966-76,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4, no. 2-3 (2017): 278
the regime’s socialist frugality and its bold ambitions to become a leading world power.
Among Beijing’s Ten Great Buildings, the Great Hall of the People and the Cultural Palace of Nationalities are striking examples that show how PRC architects blended modernism with traditional motifs. Purely modernist buildings, while perfectly suited to austere worker housing, lacked the majesty required of institutional buildings. Built in 1959 to “commemorate the tenth anniversary of the PRC’s founding,” the Great Hall’s enormous scale, decorative friezes, and colonnaded central facade give it a decidedly official air that strict modernism alone could not.42 Despite its use of classical motifs, the hall is not entirely neo-classical, modern, or Chinese traditional; it is a blend of all three styles. Its horizontal arrangement, overhanging upturned eaves, and central PRC crest integrate traditional Chinese elements (figure 3). Paired with the modernist geometries of straight lines and unadorned marble walls, these elements impart a clear message of China’s reclaimed power by visually asserting a modernity imbued with Chinese tradition.
The Cultural Palace of Nationalities, also built in 1959, similarly blends historical and modern motifs.43 Its traditional hipped roofs, symbolic colors (red, green), and decorative golden characters pay homage to Chinese tradition, while its flat concrete walls and modular windows speak to the PRC’s modernism. As Paul Clark, a Professor of Chinese at the University of Auckland, writes in his analysis of the Ten Great Buildings, these structures “marked a new era for this ancient city and for China[...] Beijing was to become a modern capital of a modern, socialist state.”44 By integrating contemporary and traditional architectural forms into its institutional buildings, the PRC sought to create a new Chinese identity:
42 Haode Sun, “A Collective Narrative: Documentary Architectural Photography of the Great Hall of the People,” The International Journal of the Image 8 (3) (2017): 70
43 Chang-Tai Hung, “The Cultural Palace of Nationalities: Ethnicities Under One Roof?,” Journal of Contemporary History 47(3) (2012): 579
44 Clark, “Beijing’s Ten Great Buildings,” 181
one definitively modern yet profoundly nationalistic.
Residential Spaces in the Stalinist USSR
When one imagines Soviet housing, images of monotonous modernist towers readily come to mind. However, as architectural journalist Owen Hatherley discovered during his travels through the Soviet Bloc, these harsh structures of “endless blocks on blocks weren’t the architecture of Stalinism at all.”45 The constructivist social condensers and prefabricated estates of the 1920s were rejected by Stalin’s regime as anti-humanist and alienating.46 Only after Stalin’s death did large-scale modernist housing forms meaningfully re-emerge as an antidote to the “architectural excess” of Stalinism.47 Still, the Soviet Union badly needed more housing during the Stalinist period and the regime did indeed build new residential communities. While the residences built under Stalinism may not always look stereotypically “Soviet,” their designs reflected the USSR’s doctrine of Socialist Realism: proletarian, typical, realistic, and partisan.48
The Stalinist regime’s shift away from radical modernism is visible in Leningrad’s Traktornaya development, built between 1925 and 1927 (figure 4).49 One of the first housing developments built after Stalin’s rise to power, it was an important intermediary step between the modernist constructivism of the early 1920s and traditional shapes of Socialist Classicism. The Traktornaya development’s plain plaster facades, streamlined windows, and individual balconies speak to the Constructivist ideal of modernity for the average worker. However, the building’s traditional white cornices, graceful curved turrets, and low-rise scale also mimic the classical forms of imperial St. Petersburg. Traktoryana’s architects rejected the visual totalitarianism of modernist “house
45 Hatherley, 6
46 These structures were designed to instill socialist values though communal space.
47 Michał Murawski, “Introduction: Crystallizing the Social Condenser,” The Journal of Architecture 22:3 (2017): 373
48 Dubravka Juraga and Keith M. Booker, Socialist Cultures East and West, (Praeger, 2002), 68
49 Strelka Magazine, “The Hidden History of St. Petersburg’s Leningrad-Era Avant-Garde Architecture,” ArchDaily (2016)
machines.”50 By providing residents with residences that paired the comforts of traditional family apartments with communal kitchens and entertainment spaces, the USSR signaled its proletarian allegiances while fostering a spirit of socialist interdependence among residents. Like their social condenser predecessors and mikrorayon (microdistricts) heirs, smaller-scale Stalinist developments such as Traktoryana shaped workers’ sensibilities while allowing Soviet officials to “extol [...] their ‘socialistic’ achievements” through architecture.
Larger-scale residential developments were also built during Stalinism, as small developments alone could not meet Russia’s housing needs during rapid industrialization. These early Stalinist mikrorayons, however, were distinct from the repetitive, mechanistic forms of post-Stalin housing.51 Essentially new towns built to house workers at nearby industrial plants, these mikrorayons intertwined work and life. Magnitogorsk, a Russian steel manufacturing town founded in 1929 and constructed throughout the 1930s by the USSR, was chosen for its location near rich deposits of iron ore.52 Despite its purpose as a manufacturing center, Magnitogorsk features broad avenues lined with neoclassical buildings. Engaged pilasters, grand city squares, and decorative cornices recall the regular avenues and enclosed public squares of Hausmann’s Paris. The city’s classically-inspired decor glorified workers’ labor, while its “communal settlements with collective dwellings” — high density apartment blocks with shared cooking, working, and entertainment spaces — instilled a socialist disposition in residents.53 Along with other Stalinist mikrorayons and the institutions noted above, Magnitogorsk sought to foster a new “religion” of socialist labor that could replace citizens’ former allegiances to the father-Tsar and Orthodox church.
Despite Magnitogorsk’s orchestrated grandeur, Stalinism’s residential 50 Hatherley, 97
51 Katherine Zubovich, “Housing and Meaning in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 4 (2015): 1005.
52 Uwe Altrock, “The Lost Centre: Magnitogorsk Revisited.” Journal of Urban Design, 3:2 (1998): 203-07
53 Altrock, “The Lost Centre: Magnitogorsk Revisited,” 202
architecture reached its monumental peak in boulevards such as Berlin’s appropriately named Stalinalle (today Karl-Marx-Allee), which Italian architect Aldo Rossi once deemed “Europe’s last great street.”54 Built in the early 1950s, Stalinallee is lined with blocks of so-called “workers’ palaces” and culminates on both ends in twin towers at Frankfurter Tor and Strausberger Platz. Its monumentality, heavy use of Soviet motifs and statues, and “wedding-cake” buildings make it an almost-perfect example of Stalinist architecture. Themed amenities such as Cafe Moskau and the Kino International highlighted the DDR’s place within the Soviet Union while also showcasing the everyday comforts of communist life.
This was not by chance. Designed by a team of East German planners who had traveled to Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad, and Leningrad, Stalinallee was based on these architects’ “16 Principles of Urban Planning,” a manifesto written during their trips that codified the aesthetic and ideological aims of Stalinist architecture.55 From its initial conception to completion, Stalinallee was as much a work of propaganda as it was a work of housing. Under Stalinism, even residences became classrooms of ideological education. Stalinallee’s comfortable housing and glittering cafes encouraged residents to embrace the illusion of socialist abundance. Likewise, its staggering scale framed a setting for mass rallies and military marches, reminding the public of the dangers of rejecting the USSR’s political hegemony while simultaneously reinforcing it.
Residential Spaces in the Maoist PRC
In contrast to Stalinist housing, “endless blocks on blocks” did appear consistently in Maoist residential architecture.56 From danweis (work units) to microdistricts (counterparts to the USSR’s mikrorayons), large-scale,
54 Brian Ladd, “The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 187
55 Geyer, State Secretary. “Die 16 Grundsätze des Städtebaus.” Ministerialblatt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, (1950). Trans. Dean
56 Hatherley, 6
prefabricated housing was a central aspect of Maoist urban planning programs. These residential complexes were born out of both ideology and necessity. Built to provide much-needed housing after the destruction of the Second World War, PRC housing developments were designed to create a unified socialist populace by destroying divisions between rural and urban while engaging “every resident [in] production.”57 Despite their often monotonous regularity, these “superblock” communities were often surprisingly livable, with common lawns, water features, and spaces for children to play and adults to socialize.58
In urban areas, these residential communities took the form of the danwei, 59 which permeated every aspect of residents’ lives. Not simply a residential space, the danwei was an essential organization tool of PRC social life. As Duanfang Lu writes in his explanation of Chinese urbanism, danweis supplied residents with “the necessities of life[...] and offer[ed] welfare in [their] old age.”60 The Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation (WISCO), which began operation in 1958, exemplifies this deep integration of work, home, health, and social life (figure 5).61
Organized into industrial and residential districts, WISCO’s residential spaces feature geometric blocks of austere modern architecture, with little extraneous decoration. The “big roof” style popular in the early 1950s and more generous Soviet space quotas were replaced by streamlined housing developments focused on efficiency above all else.62 This embrace of modernism had both economic and ideological motivations. Unadorned buildings required fewer materials to construct, reducing the cost of housing; they also visually reinforced the PRC’s embrace of “scarcity [as…] a favoured condition” through their spartan 57 Liu, 277.
58 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, 31
59 Danwei roughly translates to “a people place set apart.” E. M. Bjorklund, “The Danwei: Socio-Spatial Characteristics of Work Units in China’s Urban Society,” Economic Geography 62:1 (1986): 21
60 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, 48
61 Sam Jacoby and Jingru Cheng, “Collective Forms in China: An Architectural Analysis of the People’s Commune, Danwei, and Xiaoqu,” The Socio-spatial Design of Community and Governance: Interdisciplinary Urban Design in China (2020): 35
62 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, 9. The USSR allotted “9 square meters” of floor space per capita; this was reduced “to 4.5 square meters per capita” in China.
forms.63 By embracing strict modernism in lieu of neoclassical and traditional excess, WISCO and other danweis molded their residents into ideal “austere Maoist Proletarian warrior[s].”64
However, traces of traditional Chinese housing do remain: WISCO’s numerous courtyards recall the traditional siheyuan houses that danweis replaced.65 Through the destruction of siheyuans and the hutong neighborhoods they formed, the PRC literally and figuratively erased China’s imperial and colonial past. This destruction of past legacies was paired with the construction of new ones.
Danweis like WISCO were not just modernist in form; they were also radical in function. Through the communalization of “housing and canteens, public services and amenities,” WISCO taught its residents to live, work, and think as one.66 The monopolization of health and education services by danweis further ensured that “the relationship between individuals and danwei[...]bec[ame] extremely close.”67
The danwei, therefore, was not simply a tool of China’s industrial revolution. It also engendered social revolution by leveraging the political power of aesthetics and transforming traditional Chinese architectural features — such as private courtyards — into communal spaces.
In rural areas, people’s communes similarly intermingled work with leisure, health, and education. More explicitly utopian in design than the danwei, the people’s commune represents the PRC’s most extreme physical manifestation of modernity, comprising the “complete negation of[...] existing rural life.”68
Despite the staggering difficulty of this task and the USSR’s disapproval,69 Mao saw these communes as essential to his goal of surpassing Soviet socialism and 63 Ibid., 11 64 Liu, 271.
65 Shuishan Yu, “Courtyard in Conflict: The Transformation of Beijing’s Siheyuan during Revolution and Gentrification,” The Journal of Architecture, 22:8 (2017): 1338.
66 Jacoby and Cheng, 35.
67 Zixin Zhan, Yeshuo Shu, and Feng Song, “Morphology Development of Chinese Danwei under Marketization Process: The Case of Wuhan Iron and Steel Company,” Annual Conference Proceedings of the XXVIII International Seminar on Urban Form (2022): 1654.
68 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, 101.
69 Wen-shun Chi,“The Ideological Source of the People’s Communes in Communist China,” Pacific Coast Philology 2 (1967): 62.
reaching true communism.70 The commune’s purpose was not simply to condition the minds of PRC peasants; communes were intended to show the world China’s success.
While people’s communes took various forms, the Xiaozhan District People’s commune exemplifies their essential components.71 Centered on agricultural production, rather than the danwei’s industrial factories, Xiaozhan’s population of 60,000 made it significantly larger than even the largest danwei.72 Although few available images of Xiaozhan’s housing exist, evidence indicates that housing most likely resembled the standard housing forms of communes such as Suicheng People’s Commune. Despite their sparse decor, geometric lines, and efficient spatial layouts, these developments offered rural people relatively luxurious accommodations. By providing a deeply impoverished population with access to basic amenities such as modern appliances, the PRC “equate[d] abundance[...] with what communism had to offer mankind,” signaling the legitimacy of its rule.73
This usage of aspirational objects to encourage peasant loyalty stands in stark contrast to the austere lifestyles of danwei, but was part of the PRC’s attempt to level extreme urban-rural inequalities.74 Scarcity was emphasized for the relatively affluent, luxury for the relatively impoverished. Communes and danweis alike were essential elements of a larger PRC planning program aimed at transforming China into a pioneering country of united communist workers. As the Stalinist USSR drew legitimacy from tradition, Mao’s regime used promises of future glory to validate its rule.
70 Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, “The Great Leap Forward, The People’s Commune and the Sino-Soviet Split,” Journal of Contemporary China 20.72 (2011): 863-68.
71 Few photographs of people’s communes exist. By necessity, only drawings and plans of communes are included in this paper.
72 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, 113
73 Ibid., 107
74 Martin King Whyte, “Inequality and Stratification in China,” The China Quarterly, no. 64, (1975): 686. In 1956, urban workers earned roughly 200% of rural peasants’ incomes.
Discussion and Conclusion
As both regimes worked to create new mythologies, their built forms became essential implements of social education. Gramsci writes that “parties can be considered schools of civil life;” they teach values such as “character (resistance to the impulses of surpassed cultures), honor (intrepid will to sustain the new kind of culture and life), [and] dignity (awareness of working for a superior purpose).”75 Through their prescriptive architectural programs, the USSR and PRC moved civil education beyond party bounds. Socialist values permeated citizens’ workplaces, social lives, and neighborhood streets. Stalinist and Maoist architecture both reflected the tension between past and future, but this tension was manifested in surprisingly distinct constructions. Stalinist architecture embraced traditional forms while Maoist architecture generally rejected them. This discrepancy is not coincidental: it is rooted in these territories’ legacies of empire, development, and revolution.
In the USSR, traditional motifs were embraced for their unifying power and legitimizing authority. The Soviet Union was the direct heir of imperial Russia; it was connected to a history of longstanding power and proud tradition. Although the institution of tsardom was denounced as despotic, Stalinist architecture referenced traditional Orthodox and imperial forms even as it destroyed authentic examples of them. Buildings that both embodied and overwrote past authority cast the USSR as a secular “third Rome” built on the foundations of Russian tradition. Appeals to heritage did not only legitimize Stalin’s rule: they also unified the Soviet population. In the 1950s, only 54% of the USSR’s population identified as Russian.76 By embodying imperial traditions in architecture, Stalinist buildings reminded citizens of all ethnic backgrounds of their common connection to the
75 Gramsci, 920. Trans. Dean.
76 Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Demographic Sources of the Changing Ethnic Composition of the Soviet Union,” Population and Development Review 15, no. 4 (1989): 619-18.
“hybrid exceptionalism of Romanov Russia.”77 Soviet cities did not renounce the past but remade it. Stalinist architects understood the power of dressing tradition in revolutionary garb.
The PRC paid similar attention to China’s history. Unlike the USSR, however, Maoist China was a state disconnected from its long imperial tradition and still grappling with its post-Opium War “century of humiliation.”78 Through the embrace of Modernism’s promises and forms, the PRC sought to transform China’s fixed state of “being less” into the changeable state of “being lacking.”79 PRC policies such as rapid industrialization and utopian communization were meant to remedy this lack; Maoist architecture reflected and reinforced these ambitions. Maoist China was the successor to China’s fractured Republican period, its imperial legacy, and its 19th-century subordination to Western powers; the PRC’s built forms therefore embody its “complex relationship between revolutionary aspirations and developmentalist drives.80
As both regimes constructed new hegemonies, they grappled with the angels and specters of their pasts. Walter Benjamin wrote that “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”81 Through architectural destruction and reconstruction, Maoism and Stalinism overwrote dangerous memories while integrating hegemonic past legacies into revolutionary new doctrines.
This paper does not address the entire range of built forms in the Stalinist USSR or Maoist PRC; an exhaustive analysis of ideology and urban design under these regimes is beyond the scope of this brief survey. Likewise, these regimes’
77 Kevork K. Oskanian, “A Very Ambiguous Empire: Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism,” Europe-Asia Studies 70:1 (2018): 28.
78 William A. Callahan, “National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation, and Chinese Nationalism.” Alternatives 29(2) (2004): 199-218.
79 Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form, 10.
80 Duanfang Lu, “Third World Modernism: Utopia, Modernity, and the People’s Commune in China,” Journal of Architectural Education 60.3 (2007): 41.
81 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1938-1940 (Vol 4), ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Harvard University Press, 2003), 391
economic, religious, and political differences are contextualized here, but never deeply analyzed. Maoism and Stalinism maintained significant doctrinal differences with their Communist programs; how these manifest in architecture is not investigated here. Further examinations of these factors are needed but are outside the scope of this paper’s analysis of the way in which hegemonic change shapes built forms. As Max Weber wrote at the end of his treatise on the Protestant Ethic, “it cannot be the intention here to set a one-sided… analysis” against other explanations;82 studying communist architecture through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, of which this paper is but one, can only bolster scholarly understandings of the link between architecture and ideology.
82 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 159.
Figure 1
“Principles of Chinese urban planning by period.” Source: Yichun Xie and Frank J. Costa, “Urban planning in Socialist China: Theory and Practice,” Cities 10.2 (1993): 106, table 1.
2
Main Building of Moscow State University, Moscow. Lev Rudnev, architect. Source: Dmitry A. Mottl, Wikimedia Commons (2012). Photograph.
3
Central Facade of the Great Hall of the People. Bo Zheng, architect. Source: Danny Pang, flickr (2013). Photograph.
Figure
Figure
Figure 4
Traktornaya Street and Narvskaya Housing Estate. Alexander Gegello, Alexander Nikolsky and Grigory Simonov, architects. Source: Leonid Balanev, in “The Hidden History of St. Petersburg's Leningrad-Era Avant-Garde Architecture,” Strelka Magazine via Arch Daily (2016). Photograph.
Figure 5
The WISCO Residential Area in the 1980s. Source: Sam Jacoby and Jingru Cheng, "Collective Forms in China: An Architectural Analysis of the People’s Commune, Danwei, and Xiaoqu," The Socio-spatial Design of Community and Governance: Interdisciplinary Urban Design in China (2020): 36, fig. 2.19.
From Paper to Pixels: The Role of Analog Methods in a Digital World
Helene Holland
We live in a world increasingly driven by technology, and the field of architectural design is no exception. Since the inception of computer-aided design (CAD) in the late 1950s, an architect’s toolset has quickly moved from the drafting table to the computer desktop, and t-scales have been traded in for computer algorithms.1 Some architects have abandoned analog tools altogether, and knowledge of software is an industry standard today. We might assume that this technology makes design more “efficient,” and that software’s advanced capabilities far outpaces anything that can be done with bare hands. We may ask ourselves what the purpose of a pen, paper, or a foam model may be when complex programs like Revit can store all the information necessary to carry out a project. While it cannot be denied that digital tools have revolutionized the work of the architect, the notion that technology is always better should be challenged
In my internship at Nelson Wilmotte Architects I was tasked with building a physical model of a current project (Fig. 1). The firm already had a beautifully rendered 3D digital model on Twinmotion (an animation software), and I wondered why architects would want to build cardboard models when they have tools that can nearly simulate reality. What does my paper box offer that Twinmotion does not?
1 G. Yogapriya, Narayanan Muthuraman, and A. Ranganath, “Application of Software in Architectural Design,” Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects 86, no. 10 (October 2021), 70
This question is dear to my interest in architecture—in high school I made a studio art portfolio exploring the different ways architecture can be represented with different mediums. My love of the subject came from my love of creating art, and I want to see how an artistic perspective can fit into a field that is increasingly digitized. I aim not to offer a clear answer as to which set of tools is correct or the best, but instead to probe each approach and what they have to offer in the design process. User-friendliness, creativity, representation, and education are all important aspects to consider, as well as the artistic aspect of joy, or the architect’s enjoyment of the process.
The Dawn of Software
Before understanding the tools of architecture today, it is important to look at their development. I will not explain specific software extensively, but it is essential to understand their capabilities. Early architectural tools were simple and unspecialized; ancient Roman yardsticks, levels, and compasses have been found at Pompeii, among other sites. We have earlier evidence for drawing and planning buildings, as seen in a Babylonian sculpture of ruler Gudea who holds a ground plan 2 Models made of stone, clay, or wood have also been used since ancient times.
Architects’ lives were forever changed in 1957, when Patrick Hanratty developed the first version of CAD, replacing the architects’ tools that had been used for millennia. At that time, and until the widespread adoption of PCS, most work was done on drafting tables where architects used t-scales and flexi-curves (3). Some projects in the 1960s, such as the roof of the Munich Olympic Stadium, were shaped by mainframe computers. Large projects done completely through manual drafting were of course laborious, so these innovations were welcomed. By the 1980s, PCs were used in architecture offices—albeit with minimal 2 Christian Gänshirt, “Design Tools,” Chapter, in Tools for Ideas: An Introduction to Architectural Design (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021), 98
capabilities and Autodesk started marketing AutoCAD. By the 1990s, desktop computers were commonplace, and AutoCAD was capable of rendering 3D models.3 A single 3D model can contain all the information of conventional ground plans, sections, and elevations. Overall as computers advanced, so did architectural software.4
As software expedited drawing and calculation, and Building Information Modelling (BIM) technologies were also being developed in the late 20th century. These software allow for models to become complex polydimensional data structures that can store the information needed by all participants in the development of a building architects, contractors, engineers, code officials, et al. Some also allow for realistic walkthroughs, allowing clients to more accurately visualize projects.5 With all of the information contained in one database, there is little need for switching between drawings and representations. Everything from construction schedules to performance simulations, optimization, and maintenance can be contained in today’s software. The capabilities of software grow every decade, and practitioners are expected to keep learning the skills necessary to keep up with them. It is now an industry standard to know how to use software. While sketching has not disappeared, it is no longer necessary to be able to draw perfect documents by hand.
It cannot be denied that these innovations have drastically changed the work of the architect in many ways for the better. Information can be stored and shared in one place instead of strewn across paper documents, and the laborious facets of calculations and drawings can be done without a headache. It has become easier to coordinate the work of various trades in the building process, and complex parametric models (forms generated with algorithms) can now
3 Christian Gänshirt, “Design Drawing,” Chapter, in Tools for Ideas: An Introduction to Architectural Design (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021), 179
4 Yogapriya, Muthuraman, and Ranganath, “Application of Software,” 69–71
5 Gänshirt, “Design Drawing,” 180
be made easily. It can also be argued that clients can more easily comprehend animated 3D models than the 2D drawings of the past, and even virtual reality headsets have recently become a helpful tool. However, no discussion on the role of analog can be had without examining the disadvantages of software.
My critical approach is not unique; many designers have been skeptical of the initial excitement about these technological innovations. Firstly, the matter of user-friendliness cannot be ignored. The usability of a tool is directly correlated to the results one can produce, and learning software that are constantly evolving is a new task placed upon architects.6 Austin Sakong, a design director at FX Collaborative in New York, finds BIM programs are too often unfriendly to users While it took him about a week to learn the CAD software Rhino, it took about six months to feel comfortable with Revit, an industry standard BIM program. While user-friendliness is subjective and should not be taken as a fact, it is telling that architecture firms now need employees simply to manage these software. Sakong also noted that while software has been advancing in terms of communication across disciplines, he feels that its graphic capabilities in the design process have not really advanced as much.7 As software advance, these advancements may not all be improvements. Many software are not intuitive, and can take architects already versed in digital tools months to master.
Overall, the physical mass of analog tools has been replaced by intangible data and algorithms, and this shift has changed the way architects design. Different stages of the design process require different methods, and it can be argued that BIM software, albeit a difficult tool to master, is the most efficient tool available for recording and sharing information about a project. It is admittedly easier to draw a scaled 14.56 foot line on AutoCAD than it
6 Christian Gänshirt, “Digital Design,” Chapter, in Tools for Ideas: An Introduction to Architectural Design (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021), 310
7 Taken from an interview I conducted with Austin Sakong, Zoom, November 10, 2023.
is with a ruler, and clients prefer to see a pristine walkthrough rather than complicated drawings. There are obvious benefits to using software, and it has definitely been a revolution for the field of architecture. While the benefits to using software are clear, the question persists: Wny are old ways still in use?
In Defense of Analog Tools
Despite the advantages of digital tools, architecture schools and firms continue to stock paper, rulers, and glue. During my internship, I observed that architects still create physical models. One may question whether or not complex systems always mean better ones. I could see that sometimes simple analog tools permit more spontaneity and foster learning. As architect Christian Gänshirt writes, “the distance –spatial and mental– between the designer and the designed object” increases when only software is used.8 Drawings and models are tangible, and this changes the entire relationship a designer has with these tools. There are three main ideas to discuss: how analog methods aid in the design process, their pedagogical advantages, and how they represent designs.
In terms of the design process, drawing has many advantages. While design is not a linear process that is always the same, it often involves initial concepts that are gradually reworked.19 Freehand sketching is simply quicker, and when it comes to conceptualizing a project, jotting down a sketch will always be faster than opening a file, selecting a drawing tool, and setting the parameters on a software. Mr. Sakong points out that there are simply more decisions involved in drawing on software, so freehand drawing is almost irreplaceable.10 Most of the sources I consulted agree that freehand drawing is the most efficient way to start a project.11 Technical drawings may benefit from the quick precision of software, 8 Gänshirt, “Digital Design,”321
9 P. Lloyd and P. Scott, “Difference in Similarity: Interpreting the Architectural Design Process,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 22, no. 4 (August 1995): https://doi.org/10.1068/b220383, 383
10 Interview with Austin Sakong, Zoom, November 10, 2023.
11 Juan Saumell, Francesca Fatta, and Mario Docci, “Design by Hand in a Digital Environment. Drawing Storytelling and ICT Development,” Springer Series in Design and Innovation 23 (2022): https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04640-7,_25, 245
but when it comes to creating concepts, freehand sketching allows abstraction. Moreover, erased marks remain visible, unlike digital drawings, so that drawn sketches show the development of an idea.
A case study conducted at Harvard Graduate School of Design reaffirms the idea that using drawing as a tool in the conceptual phase of the design process is beneficial. In the study, an architect was required to design a research lab, and she began by sketching out multiple ideas that fit the basic requirements (Fig. 2). After processing the space requirements and laying out the design on AutoCAD and then a 3D model, she realized that something needed to be reworked. She went back to her initial sketches and discovered a more suitable idea, one that she continued.12 The paper sketches had allowed her to revisit her ideas, which a start using AutoCad would not have done. I found this true when I built the model during my internship, when a rough sketch to show how parts fit together would have taken at least ten minutes to produce on AutoCad, instead of the one minute needed with pencil and paper. I could quickly edit the project without wasting time by creating a digital drawing.
The same study revealed similar advantages of physical models. After building a physical model of the new idea, the architect realized more elements that needed to be adjusted. Even though she also had the reference of an AutoCAD 3D model, she claimed, “It is not the same as having a piece there that you can break, stick things on, or take them off; it’s not a tangible thing”.13 Each tool can reveal different aspects of a design solution. Mr. Sakong said he also begins designs by sketching, and then moving onto software. Physical materials don’t have to represent all of the information about a building, but they can be useful in the process of figuring out how the parts should fit together. In my own design
12 Panagiotis Parthenios, “Analog vs. digital: why bother?,” In Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Critical Digital, Cambridge, 2005, 118–9
13 Parthenios, “Analog vs. digital,” 119
process, I always start by making sketches, however messy, that embody my ideas even if they show inaccurate dimensions.
Mr. Sakong also brought up an interesting point about the role of analog tools in education: the limits of software can suppress the creativity of the free hand, and it can also change the way architects learn about space. He recalled that his undergraduate education used analog tools as their pedagogical approach, and that he did not learn software until after graduating in 2004. Once he started working, he seemed to grasp spatial concepts and translate them into digital models better than some of his colleagues whose education involved software. This advantage is subjective, but we’re told a similar concept when teachers tell us to take handwritten notes instead of typing–our bodies and brains are connected in a way that digital technology just cannot capture. As Mr. Sakong said, “The hand has a different intelligence,” and drawing with our hands can teach us about space in a way that screens cannot.14 Another architect, Cindy Nguyen, echoed these sentiments. She has used sketching during field studies because she believes it helps her students step back and see a structure piece by piece.15 Overall, instead of getting caught up in the details which software requires, the simplicity of hand drawing forces designers to focus on the most important elements of their work.
This pedagogical advantage extends to 3D models as well. As architect Michael Meredith points out, “The analog is the system that allows for the digital. The analog is primary and the digital is secondary.”16 Ultimately, software is only a tool meant to document data points about a project that will eventually be constructed in the physical world. We cannot understand a design on software unless it can be understood in terms of actual space. A digital drawing will
14 Interview with Austin Sakong, Zoom, November 10, 2023.
15 Notes on informal conversation with Cindy Nguyen, Paris, November 22, 2023, 7 16 “A Conversation About Models,” https://drive.google.com/file/d/11Xm2HWk3ccI80F0k_I_ob0iyZwnt65bZ/view, accessed November 26, 2023, Michael Meredith, 70.
never relate to a project in the way that a tangible model can, because after all, buildings are tangible, too.
This helps us to see how analog tools can not only aid the design process but also can represent designs. At my internship, I was once asked to build a model out of craftboard, even though the project had already been rendered using Twinmotion, and the clients could virtually walk through their future house. I wondered what the point was of building a costly and laborintensive model, especially since the Twinmotion rendering so thoroughly simulated reality, including weather changes, different lighting, and even the movement of individual leaves on trees. My supervisor explained that the model would be used by the firm’s architects for inspiration later. Someone walking into the office and seeing the numerous models would have an immediate impression about the firm’s work. The small versions make the buildings seem real, and they can be viewed and apprehended all at once.
There is also something to be said about the humble materials used in a model. While the rendering simulates reality using numerous textures, I was limited to what could be bought at an art store. The limits of these materials forces architects to think about the broader themes and concepts of their projects, not just what it will look like from a technical standpoint. The house for my project was built into a hillside and had a vegetal rooftop, so it was important to make the roof out of the same material as the landscape to express that idea (Fig. 3). While a rendering might look good just because the graphics are beautiful, models challenge architects to convince their audience of a design’s ideas through much more limited means. These can then become helpful once again in the design process as they remind the firm of previously used concepts.
The Question of Priorities
Many architects yearn to reinstate the human dimension of design.17 In the face of shortening deadlines and software raising expectations of speed, some architects are asking for slowness. I believe that slowness can not only make for more thoughtful design, but it also contributes to the joy of the designer. In their essay “On Slowness,” Tod Williams and Billie Tsien explain how they still use hand drawings in their practice, despite also using computers. They note, “As our hands move, we have the time to think and to observe our actions. . . So, decisions are made slowly, after thoughtful investigation, because they are a commitment that has consequence.”18 At my internship, I found this idea persuasive, as I was pressed for time by the end. I made many mistakes in my model simply because I did not have time to think the process through and thoroughly understand what I was building. I do not mean to suggest that good design can only come from slow, handmade materials, but this essay brings up an important thought to consider. Should speed and efficiency always be the goal, or should thoughtfulness? And what about joy?
Analog tools are still relevant for process and representation. Sketching can be faster, and using models can reveal aspects of a design that software cannot. However, I would like to challenge the notion altogether that efficiency must always be the goal. Software is efficient for storing and processing information, but why is efficiency itself valued so highly? Mr. Sakong introduced an idea that resonated with me: “There is often a direct correlation between the success of a project and the joy felt in making it.”19 Many architects enter their profession because they love to draw. Sitting in front of a computer all day may be less engaging, but there is an incomparable joy in building and creating
17 Saumell, Fatta, and Docci, “Design by Hand,” 246
18 “On Slowness,” https://twbta.com/and-also/on-slowness/, accessed November 25, 2023, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, 1999. Originally published in 2G
19 Interview with Austin Sakong, Zoom, November 10, 2023.
with our hands. Perhaps architects do not derive as much joy from drawing a warehouse compared to an art museum, but joy is subjective. The point is that the personal relationships that designers have with their tools cannot be dismissed as unimportant—after all, they spark creativity. Essentially, I believe the human side of the issue matters as much as the practical advantages. While the field of architecture does involve service and business which necessitates efficiency, it is still an art.
Conclusion
In both my experience and my research, I found that the role of analog tools should not be objectively defined. Approaches are personal, although it can be argued that a mixture of both tools is beneficial. Frank Gehry provides a great example of an architect who has balanced both the digital and analog. Known for his deconstructivist style, Gehry takes an approach that involves using physical drawings and models for the creative process, and then translating them into digital tools for optimizing shapes and lowering costs.20 In a job that requires both creativity and logic, he chooses the best tool for each requirement. The result is expressive architecture with mathematical accuracy, for example his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Fig. 4). This harmony between the analog and digital can serve as inspiration for the role each can play.21 Neither is the only way to design.
As we have seen, design is a complex process that involves development, representation, efficiency, and the human spirit. With so many stages and dimensions, it is fair to say that the tools which one uses are subjective. Architects may combine tools to produce more thorough designs, and one method is not superior to the other. Each has a function and role to play. While there is no
20 Peter Szalapaj, Contemporary Architecture and the Digital Design Process (Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 231
21 Javier Francisco, Raposo Grau et al., “Analog Drawing – Digital Drawing. The Architectural Virtual Model as More than a Technological Implementation,” Springer Series in Design and Innovation 23 (2022): https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04640-7_20, 196
universal solution for design, my research and my experiences reaffirm that drawing and modeling hold a place in architecture that may never be replaced by pixels. This conclusion responds to my original question. An idea came from my research, and it has provoked a reflection deeper than one about architecture. It is no secret that we live in a world increasingly consumed by technology, and the consequences of this shift have been questioned across disciplines. On the surface, tools like iMessage, Google Maps, and Zoom seem to speed tasks that would otherwise take longer. While it is easy to laud these tools which supposedly make our lives easier, we may question whether or not they have placed a greater expectation on our productivity as a tradeoff. I do not advocate disposing of software, but the pull towards analog which I and many others experience may be a larger reaction to a society consumed by efficiency. Productivity and efficiency have become the goals, while quality, innovation, and the joy we find in our work take the back seat. Beyond architecture, these priorities should undergo constant reevaluation.
1. Finished model created by the author of a residence designed by Nelson Wilmotte Architectes.
Figure 2. Sketches at different stages taken from Case Study A. Parthenios, Panagiotis. "Analog vs. digital: why bother?." In Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Critical Digital, Cambridge. 2005.
Figure
Figure 3. View of the roof of the model created by the author of a residence designed by Nelson Wilmotte Architectes
Figure 4. Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao by Frank Gehry. Photo by Naotake Murayama.
Night on Earth: Peter Hujang in Conversation with Brassaï
Spencer A. Hurley
Peter Hujar in Conversation with Brassaï
When night falls upon the city, a new reality emerges. The nocturnal city has always attracted its waking members as an ominous undertow begins to surface. With the setting sun, social norms are lifted and true desires can make themselves known. In Tropic of Cancer (1934), Henry Miller states, “Night after night I had been coming back to this quarter, attracted by the certain leprous streets which only revealed their sinister splendor when the light of day had oozed away.”1 Miller describes the emergence of a deviant scene after sundown, where possibilities are no longer limited by daytime norms: a tempting proposition to anyone. Promises of promiscuity, adventure, and misbehavior lurk around every corner, something well captured by American photographer Peter Hujar and his French-Hungarian predecessor, Brassaï.
Hujar’s night photography captures New York City in a transient state far from its daytime counterpart. Under the cover of night, costume jewels become diamonds. Diurnal expectations dissipate with the sunlight, and freedom runs rampant through the streets. Despite being captured exclusively in black and white, the nocturnal New York photographed by Hujar is exceptionally colorful, filled with a whole cast of characters donning feathers and casting suggestive glances. Hujar’s night photography has often been compared to Brassaï’s taken in 1 Henry Miller, Tropic of cancer, (London: Penguin Books, 2015), 34.
Paris nearly five decades earlier. The eerie, liminal photographs in Paris de nuit (1933) garnered the attention of the Surrealists and were featured in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure 2 There are undeniable formal similarities between Hujar’s and Brassaï’s images; however, identity, location, and ideological approach distinguish the photographers. By understanding the Surrealist obsession with the nocturnal city and the photographs of the city taken by Brassaï, one can better comprehend Hujar’s work and its importance in the canon of street photography. This essay will address the visual language developed by Brassaï and interpreted by the Surrealists to analyze Hujar’s photos of New York during the 1970s and 1980s. It then will investigate how the same themes that attracted Surrealist imaginations to the nocturnal city enabled the formation of queer scenes and communities photographed by both Brassaï and Hujar. Finally, this essay will elucidate the role of the photographer in these queer spaces and the danger of the Surrealist appropriation of people and images.
Brassaï, Paris, and the Surrealists
Brassaï’s night photos, also in black and white, depict Paris as an amalgam of high-contrast shadows and sublime light seeping from behind walls, streetlamps, and windows. Many of Brassaï’s human subjects are obscured by darkness or silhouetted by mysterious light. A clandestine rendezvous between lovers is performed in the sanctity of darkness while Paris’ more peculiar and marginalized residents begin to show their faces (Fig. 1). Cars full of bacchanalian youth hold the promise of good times yet to come. “Night is not the negative of day;” states Paul Morand in his introduction to Brassaï’s Paris de nuit, “Black surfaces and white are not merely transposed, as on a photographic plate, but another picture emerges at nightfall. At that hour, a twilight world comes into being, shifting forms, of false perspectives and phantom planes.” 33 Morand
2 Ian Walker, City gorged with dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris, (Manchester Univ. Press: Manchester, 2002), 148
3 Paul Morand, “Introduction” in Paris by Night, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).
identifies the transformation of Paris after dark as more than merely a visual one. The absence of daylight brings about a moral leniency. No longer confined by the social norms that define the day, Brassaï’s Paris is one of infinite hedonistic opportunity.
While Brassaï didn’t consider himself a Surrealist, he understood why the group would be attracted to his work: “‘They considered my photographs ‘surrealist’, because they revealed a ghostly, unreal Paris, drowned in the night and the fog.’” 4 The dim streets captured by Brassaï came to represent a multitude of themes integral to the doctrine of Surrealism. Ian Walker, author of City Gorged with Dreams (2002), states that it is “[a]s if the night makes the logic and rationality that dominates the day simply untenable.” 5 Brassaï’s images create a mysterious setting ideal for the departure from the rational and everyday, inviting the social deviance and reckless behavior that enchanted the Surrealists.
André Breton was aroused by the city streets’ ability to upset rational expectations, stating, “‘The street, which I believed could furnish my life with its surprising detours; the street, with its cares and its glances, was my true element: there I could test like nowhere else the winds of possibility.’” 6 Breton marveled at the endless prospects the street provided for the aimless wanderer, depicting the importance of flânerie to both the Surrealist movement and street photography.7 Charles Baudelaire’s poem, “À une passante” (1855), describes the role of the flâneur, who exhibits aimless or idle behavior. 8 Baudelaire’s ode to the passerby describes the possibility behind each person on the street, stating, “I, not knowing/ Who you may be, nor you where I am going —/You, whom I might have loved,
4 Brassaï quoted by Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 145
5 Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 148
6 André Breton quoted by Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 31
7 Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 31
8 Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 30
who know it too!” 9 Lamenting an unrealized romance, Baudelaire understands the potential of the street. Each passerby holds the multitude of possibilities that captivated Breton including, as noted by Baudelaire, the prospect of love. Baudelaire’s flaneur knows a chance encounter can potentially alter one’s lifetime. Furthermore, the life of the flâneur, according to Baudelaire, resembles the Surrealist notion of objective chance, or the “projection of subjective desire onto objective facts to manipulate them towards its fulfillment.” 10
Of the myriad possibilities that Brassaï’s Paris contained, the Surrealists were most fascinated by the possibilities that defied social norms and verged on deviance and criminality. Walker observes, “But [the Surrealists] were not interested in the glittering surface of the urban spectacle [...] rather their concern was with the disruptive forces which lay behind the facade of normality.” 11 The Surrealists craved the dismissal of rationality and the dismantling of society via deviants such as the infamous early 20th-century French fictional criminal Fantômas . Rene Magritte and Robert Desnos were among the Surrealists who venerated Fantômas . Desnos explained in an issue of Documents (1930) that Fantômas had “‘assumed an enormous importance in Parisian mythology and dreamology.’” 12 The masked criminal became synonymous with the dreamscape of the streets. Fantômas’ ability to undermine the French legal system and continually evade capture by the law represented to the Surrealists a figure that not only avoided but also subverted rational aspects of society. Because of this ability to dismiss rationality, the social deviant and criminal became a lively figure in the collective Surrealist consciousness.
As Brassaï mentioned, the Paris he captured in his nocturnal images acts as an appropriate setting for interminable possibilities and social deviance.
9 Charles Baudelaire, “À une passante” from Poems of Baudelaire trans. Roy Campbell, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), lines 13-15
10 Garrett Cables, “The Tide Part 2: Objective Chance”, The Poetry Foundation, May 11th, 2011, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2011/05/the-tide-part-2-objective-chance.
11 Walker, City Gorged in Dreams, 32
12 Robert Desnos quoted by Walker, City Gorged with Dreams, 33.
Brassaï’s image of dark streets against the walls of La Santé Jail closely resembles a still from an episode of Fantômas: The Shadow of the Guillotine (1913). Long streets, mostly devoid of passers-by, mimic actual film sets where the titular character evades the law and exists on the fringes of society. Brassaï’s images could easily be occupied by Fantômas himself, lurking in the shadows. The streets captured by Brassaï become the dreamscape that Fantômas inhabits, committing the crimes that entranced the Surrealists.
Peter Hujar vs. Brassaï: Capturing Queer Spaces at Night
Brassaï cannot definitively be labeled as one of Hujar’s artistic influences; however, the formal similarities between their work are uncanny. Solemn Parisian boulevards are mirrored in lonesome New York avenues. Compositions of aerial photographs of light emanating from the buildings below are nearly indistinguishable, only differentiated by New York’s skyscrapers. The differences between the artists arise when one begins to focus on who is behind the camera, rather than in front.
Brassaï states in Secret Paris of the 30’s that he was interested in capturing the ‘real’ Paris: “I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic.” 13 Enticed by the novelty of the exotic underbelly, Brassaï enters a world separate from his own, while the one captured by Hujar is all too familiar.
Hujar, born in 1934, the year following the release of Paris de nuit, was a New York native. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, Hujar took to the streets he knew well after dark. 14 His personal experience with New York City nightlife was bolstered by his queer identity. In his essay “Peter Hujar: The Nocturnal World,” Bob Nickas
13 Brassaï, Secret Paris of the 30’s trans. by Richard Miller, (Pantheon: New York, 1976).
14 Bob Nickas, “Peter Hujar: The Nocturnal World” in Peter Hujar: Night, (Matthew Marks Gallery: New York, 2005).
states, “The night is to enter a space of expectation and desire, where senses — sight and sound — are heightened. For Hujar, a gay man with a strong libidinal drive, exploring the city at night must inevitably have led him to return with his camera.” 15 Hujar’s presence as a street photographer, as argued by Nickas, didn’t stem from a morbid fascination with nocturnal citizens as it did for Brassaï, but rather a desire to capture the lives of a community to which he already belonged. Both photographers were attracted to photographing the LGBTQI+ communities in their respective cities. Again, one can compare these photographs to understand how the photographer’s identity is captured in the image.
Brassaï dedicated a chapter in Secret Paris to underground gay and lesbian scenes. He explored Parisian dance halls where drag and same-sex couples were readily accepted. When describing the scene of a homosexual ball at a venue called the Magic City, Brassaï recalls, “The cream of Parisian inverts was to meet there, without distinction as to class, race, or age. And every type came […] cruisers, chickens, old queens” to name a few. 16 It is clear from Brassaï’s description of the night that he was an outsider, which he was in most of the scenes he photographed. He even explains that his presence was often unwelcome, and he resorted to “trickery and diplomacy” to invade “those suspicious, closed circles, so wary of witnesses,” usually by befriending “someone who belonged.” 17
The images that resulted from Brassaï’s visits to these balls, like many images already mentioned, are voyeuristic and impersonal. In many of the photographs, the individuals pictured are not looking at the camera, but are engrossed in the eyes of their lovers. Men dancing together do not face the camera, nor does the couple that leans against each other, backs to the camera. This is exemplified by an image of multiple couples dancing and the few individuals (far right) who seem alarmed by locking eyes with Brassaï’s camera (Fig. 2). There 15 Ibid.
16 Brassaï, “Sodom and Gomorrah,” in Secret Paris of the 30’s, Secret Paris of the 30’s trans. by Richard Miller, (Pantheon: New York, 1976).
17 Ibid
are, however, examples of the sitter acknowledging the photographer. Brassaï includes a few portraits, such as two women, their hands intertwined during a dance, and one of a drag queen glancing sidelong at the camera from under her gingham hat. There is wariness: the glances seem careful and reserved, suspicious of a newcomer in their spaces. When compared to Hujar’s images of queer nightlife, Brassaï’s photographs lack the tenderness that accompanies capturing a community to which one belongs.
Nan Goldin, a photographer and contemporary of Hujar, also specialized in capturing the ‘taboo’ behavior of fringe communities and scenes like those captured by Hujar. In a 2021 interview with Robert Enright, Goldin eloquently highlights the nuance of photographing one’s friends. Goldin did not consider herself a street photographer, noting, “I always ask if I can photograph them. That’s why I can’t really get into street photography. In the last few years since I started going out all the time, I have loved the idea of shooting strangers, but it doesn’t work because I have to ask them and then they take on a role.” 18 To photograph the unfamiliar requires the subjects to assume the role in which the photographer has cast them. Brassaï’s Secret Paris, for instance, organizes his nocturnal interlocutors by occupation; for example, cesspool cleaners, performers, and sex workers. Unlike Brassaï, Hujar did not work in series or categorize his work in the way Brassaï did in Secret Paris 19 While both Brassaï and Hujar’s nocturnal subjects are photographed mostly unposed, Brassaï’s photos impose onto his subjects his outside perspective. Hujar captures his subjects as they are, made possible by his familiarity with the community. Meeka Walsh explains how Goldin’s friendships with her subjects imbue a tenderness also present in Hujar’s photos: “Generosity is a quality that suffuses all of Goldin’s work. Free of judgment, instead filled with admiration for her subjects [...] They are her family, 18 Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh, “Endings and Beginnings: The Generative Photographs of Nan Goldin,” Border Crossings Magazine vol. 40, no. 2 (August 2021): 47, https:// www.mariangoodman.com/usr/library/documents/main/border-crossings-august-2021-scan.pdf. . 19 Nickas, “Peter Hujar: The Nocturnal World.”
relationships better than any other for having been chosen.” 20 Hujar’s images carry the same qualities: admiration, authenticity, and tenderness.
No photograph exemplifies these qualities better than Boy on Park Bench by Hujar (Fig. 3). Hujar’s images of cruising illuminate a hidden practice that was the reality for many queer individuals. Boy on Park Bench depicts a nameless sitter, lackadaisically leaning back onto his seat. He stares directly into the lens of Hujar’s camera with a look of familiarity and desire. Nickas confirms, “[t] he connection between them is undeniable. And who’s to say what, if anything, happened after this picture was taken.” 21 The reservation in the eyes of Brassaï’s sitters is completely absent here and is replaced by ease and comfort. Forced smiles are replaced with jubilation as queens press their cheeks together for a picture (Fig. 4) or grin behind the windshield of a convertible, speeding off into the night. Queen with Fur Stole, Halloween could be placed directly in conversation with Brassaï’s image, yet Hujar’s sitter stares directly at the camera, as opposed to the tentative glace in Brassaï’s.
To Brassai, there is a novelty in the nocturnal city, but for Hujar, the night is necessary for existence. Brassaï states in Secret Paris, “The real night people, however, live at night not out of necessity, but because they want to. They belong to the world of pleasure, of love, vice, crime, drugs.” 22 The ‘social deviance’ captured by Hujar and made possible by the night is that of freedom of expression and love. The acts of ‘criminality’ that interested the Surrealists take the form of drag makeup applications and sexual encounters on park benches due to the lack of other spaces for queer existence. These queer spaces seen through the eyes of Hujar are all too necessary, functioning as a last resort to belong. Despite this, these scenes flourished into beautiful displays of expression, and as well put by Brassaï, “There were no indiscreet onlookers here to make them
20 Enright and Walsh, “Endings and Beginnings,” 35
21 Nickas, “Peter Hujar: The Nocturnal World.”
22 Brassaï, “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
uneasy. No threatening opprobrium from ‘normal’ men, no humiliating female disdain, no inquisitorial vice squad surveillance looking for outrages to public decency. On that night, ‘the love that dares not speak its name’ said it loud and clear, shouted it from the rooftops…”. 23
Herein lies the danger of labeling Hujar and Brassai’s work as Surrealist. The subject matter is undoubtedly real. Brassai was correct in saying that the most authentic city is revealed after sundown. While 1970s and 1980s America wanted to hide and reject queer expression, these scenes persisted nonetheless; in fact, they flourished. Because of the formal similarities between Hujar and Brassaï’s work, Hujar’s photos also hold the same ability to house the internal projections and desires that interested the Surrealists. The Surrealist inclination to appropriate images like Hujar’s and Brassaï’s diminishes the fact that these scenes are not subconscious projections but actually occur. The people in Hujar’s and Brassaï’s images do not exist merely for enjoyment or to become vessels for voyeuristic projection.
While Brassaï may not have fancied himself a Surrealist, his pull to the streets was also one of an attraction to the novelty of the other. Brassaï and other Surrealists saw the people of the night as having chosen to remove themselves from society to pursue their hedonistic desires. Hujar’s images, in contrast, make clear that this is untrue. The night’s ability to enable the deviance that fascinated the Surrealists allowed the freedom of expression and love visible in Hujar’s photos. Hujar’s photos are integral to understanding the scenes that were otherwise demonized or hidden. Hujar’s membership in these scenes preserves the integrity of these spaces, both embracing and protecting other members. These are not images onto which to project one’s desires. The New York captured by Hujar is not a setting for dream scenarios, but rather a setting for the reality of being a queer man in 1970s and ‘80s America. 23 Ibid.
Figure 1. Plate 24, Brassai, 1933, Paris de nuit
Figure 2. Brassai, Secret Paris of the 30’s
Figure 3.
Boy on Park Bench, 1981, Peter Hujar, Peter Hujar: Night
Figure 4. Two Queens, 1978, Peter Hujar, Peter Hujar: Night