During my exchange at the Architecture Academy Mendrisio, I attended the elective by Pavel Kuznetsov, in which the rich and often utopian architectural practice of the early 20th century Soviet Union was treated in a series of lectures. Parallel to the overview that the lectured provided, we were invited to engage further with specific cases. 

As such, Thomas Whiting and I researched the life and work of Ivan Leonidov (1902-1959), from which a series of models of the following projects was made; The Lenin Institute and the Film Factory, both from 1927; The Club of New Social Type from 1928 and finally the Palace of Culture for the Proletarskii District of Moscow, 1930.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Peoples Houses morphed into workers clubs as Russia moved from monarchic rule to adopt a socialist form of government. These clubs were sponsored by Trade Unions and a standard workers’ club often included many socio-cultural and educational activities as well as various sports activities. Overall, it was a space where workers could recreate, socialise and learn after a shift at work. But it was also learning how to behave in the societal shift towards the “new man” brought about by the revolution.

Leonidov’s Social clubs are paradigmatic of the social condensers that were prevailing among his contemporaries. Yet crucially, it is in both the revisioning of the program and in the spatial arrangement of this program where Leonidov’s projects differ from the rest. In the four projects that we modeled, the program is broken up into a series of simple geometrical shapes, such as squares, circles and crosses in plan, as well as pyramids, spheres and hyperboloids in volume.