ABSTRACT
By the autumn of 1922, when the Moscow Architectural Society (MAO) began engaging with the prospect that Russian building activity would start again, circles outside the profession, as we have seen, were urgently prompting them to some theoretical engagement with the new Soviet ideology. Alexei Gan’s Constructivism came out in December that year. But the professional issue of what a real Soviet building would be like, as a fully resolved work of architecture rather than a diagram, was not yet broached. Three-dimensional experiments being conducted among artists were to have enormous long-term importance as a source of new formal languages for architecture. By their very origins, however, they crucially lacked any input from that domain-specific knowledge which Gan had stressed as the essential partner of ideological understanding in creating the ‘materialtechnical “organs” of the new society.’ In his argument, it was only the practitioners in possession of such knowledge who could produce the catalyst to launch a new direction in each field.
