WHOS IN THE KITCHEN?

HOUSE-COMMUNE EXPERIMENTS IN SOVIET RUSSIA 1927-30

GRETTA S. TRITCH

ARCHITECTURE, according to the Constructivist architects, was the optimum vehicle for
the metamorphosis of humanity into a collective society. The new socialist state, defined neither
by gender nor by family, found the emancipation of women from slavish domestic chores (e.g.,
food-preparation, childcare, laundry) as integral to its egalitarian idealism as well as its industrial
success. As a solution for freeing women from the home to actively participate in the economy,
Constructivist architects in the first decade of the Soviet Union developed the idea of the housecommune (dom-kommuna), and early manifestations of this typology focused on the
collectivization of domestic facilities as both contributory to as well as emblematic of the
liberated woman. Throughout house-commune experiments a consistent feature became the
inclusion of a communal kitchen which often replaced the private individual kitchens that were
so easily associated with the enslavement of women and the undesirable bourgeois lifestyle of
individualism.1
With increasing intense focus on industrialization under Stalins First Five-Year Plan
(1928-1932), however, the emancipation of women from the duties of the home became a
roadblock to expansion for the state. Consequently, the communal kitchenarguably once the
physical embodiment of the liberation of womenwas no longer encouraged by the government
as a means of emancipating women from the conventional roles of mother and housekeeper but
as a way to cut the costs of housing in the wake of a shortage crisis. This was largely due to the
redistribution of funds for housing towards industry as dictated by the plan. Yet, the cause of this

Likening the position of women in a pre-revolutionary state to slavery was common in the writings of both
Frederick Engels and V.I. Lenin. For example: The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed
domestic slavery of the wife, Engels, Origin of the Family in The Woman Question: Selections from the Writings
of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, and Joseph Stalin (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 39; and,
Up to present the position of women has been such that it is called a position of slavery, Lenin, Women and
Society in The Woman Question, 43.

symbolic reversion of the communal kitchen away from liberating women and the larger
socialization project should not be attributed to the increased attention to industry alone. Rather
than contesting the soundness of such arguments that have been made citing economic factors of
industrialization as the sole culprit of the eclipse of womens liberation issues, 2 I propose the
addition of another factor, that of the family issue, that has received less attention but which
becomes more apparent when considered in the context of the development of Constructivist
house-commune proposals from 1927-1930 and the subsequent abandonment of such projects.
While all three topicsthe emancipation of women, the restrictive economics of the First FiveYear Plan, and the question of the socialist familyhave been addressed by scholarship on the
subject of Stalins industrial expansion, rarely are they combined to demonstrate the
interrelations of the three.
As a necessity in the new Soviet state, the communal kitchen encompassed all of these
issues as intentions continuously removed its symbolism further and further from womens
issues. Striving to maintain the relevance of architecture to current Soviet reformations by
contributing to the states socialization goals in 1927, though, the Constructivist architects
initially concentrated on the liberation of women as well as the Bolshevik ideal of dissolving the
nuclear family (considered a remnant of bourgeois economics). With hopes of initiating the
beginnings of the transformed society, these issues informed the foundations for the
materialization of these architects organization, the Union of Contemporary Architects (OSA)
and, more notably, the facilities they designed such as the house-commune.
Little separated the built environment from the social and political environment for these
architects who proclaimed in an early edition of their architectural review, Sovremennaia

Such as Thomas G. Schrand, The Five-Year Plan for Womens Labour: Constructing Socialism and the Double
Burden, 1930-1932, Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 8 (December 1999): 1455-1478.

Arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture), CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE MUST

CRYSTALLIZE THE NEW SOCIALIST WAY OF LIFE!3 Architecture was the medium through which
the individual would be transformed into an active participant of the collective, but this idea of a
building or even an entire city that could influence change/abandonment of old capitalist ways, a
social condenser, demanded a new form that embodied the ideals of the socialist way of life
enough to impart them to the inhabitant.4
In attempts to elucidate this form, the OSA announced in its fourth issue of SA a design
competition for workers housing followed by a survey regarding communal living where they
probed the questions of socialization.5 Primarily focused on defining the new way of life rather
than industrialization, topics ranged from the reorganization of everyday aspects on a collective
social basis to public catering linked with the liberation of women from her enforced social
passivity to public education of children within the framework of new forms of collectivism.6
This collection of questions points to precedents that constructed the concerns of these architects
who maintained the early Bolshevik idealism that soon fell out of favor with Stalins plan for the
advancement of the state.
In 1927, however, before the introduction of the Five-Year Plan and Stalins
reformations, the Constructivist architects consistently aimed to align their architecture with the
Communist Partys vision of a socialist state often basing their ideology on the oft-lauded

A. Pasternak in SA, no. 4/5 (1927) as quoted in Kopp, Constructivist Architecture in the USSR, 23.
Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917-1935, trans. by Thomas E.
Burton (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1970), 115.
5
An earlier competition organized by the Moscow Soviet in 1925 has actually been credited with the coining of the
phrase dom-kommuna. It, too, was a project that demanded new forms for a new life. See Kopp, Town and
Revolution, 145.
6
OSA, Opinion Survey on the Subject of the Communal House, SA no. 3 (1927) as reprinted and translated in
Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917-1935, trans. by Thomas E. Burton (New
York: George Braziller, Inc., 1970), 246.
4

nineteenth-century writings of Frederick Engels and Karl Marx7 but centering their ideas on a
Soviet state as previously defined by Lenin. An ardent follower of Engels and Marx, Lenin
stated, The aim of the Soviet Republic is to abolish, in the first place, all restrictions of the
rights of women.8 He advocated the complete socialization of the population into a new Soviet
society that could commence only when we, having achieved the complete equality of women,
take up our new work together with women who have been emancipated from petty, stultifying,
unproductive work.9 Likewise, the architects of the OSA advanced the emancipation of women
as a primary task in the transformation of daily life, and as evidenced by their survey in 1927 this
emancipation was linked to public catering.
The communal kitchen was an important link in an idealistic chain that tied together the
emancipation of women and the future of industrialization. Accordingly, the architects did not
rely on socialization entirely in realizing the new socialist way of life, but found industrialization
to be a key factor in accomplishing complex buildings in innovative, non-capitalistic methods.10
Prefabrication and standardization lowered the cost of building, and new discoveries in building
techniques that opened the expanses of interior spaces allowed for areas such as a common
dining hall and kitchen. These facilities would encourage the new socialist way of life so that
further advancements in industrialization would be a logical outcome of this transformation.11
The Constructivist architects made little distinction in their projects between concerns of
7

In an article defining Constructivism in terms of architecture, Aleksei Gan, author of the Constructivist manifesto,
writes, The birth, development and socio-productive existence of Constructivism as an artistic school and creative
working method exist under the banner of dialectic materialism. Constructivist methodology is irrevocable linked
with the Proletarian Revolution and the building of the Soviet socialist regime, as quoted in Anatole Kopp,
Constructivist Architecture in the USSR (New York: St Martins Press, 1985), 23.
8
Lenin, Women and Society as quoted in The Woman Question, 42.
9
Ibid., 52.
10
Victor Buchli, Moisei Ginzburgs Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow: Contesting the Social and Material
World, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 2 (June 1998): 161.
11
However, as pointed out by Kopp, Town and Revolution, 115: Often they viewed their principal task as the
transformation of man, forgetting that this never could be achieved merely by the exercise of a sometimes
moralizing will or by a new environment that was, indeed, itself impossible without preliminary industrialization.

socialization and industrialization. They were inextricably linked together in their focus on the
realization of the project which increasingly came to rely almost completely on the economics of
the design. Consequently, socialization lost much of the earlier attention. Idealistically, however,
Engels argued for the emancipation of women by tying together socialization and
industrialization in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) elucidating
the earlier intentions of projects by OSA members:
to emancipate woman and make her the equal of man is and remains an impossibility so long
as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor.
The emancipation of woman will only be possible when women can take part in production on a
large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of
her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which
does not merely permit of the employment of female labor over a wide range, but positively
demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labor by changing it more and
12
more into a public industry.

Not only did Engels intertwine the emancipation of women with the socially fulfilling and
economic necessity of their industrial labor (a connection that Stalin later exploited throughout
the First Five-Year Plan), he also made the link to collectivized services as the solution to the
consequences of removing the traditional domestic structure.
The inclusion of communal facilities was the programmatic basis for the house-commune
experiments in the late 1920s, and all eight projects submitted to OSAs competition addressed
the needs of a community of both working men and women by the inclusion of such facilities.
The offering of public services varied from project to project, but a common thread among them
was the communal kitchen. The rooms typically consisted of sleeping areas, a bathroom
(washroom and toilet), a living area, and occasionally a kitchenette with a small stove for
reheating meals served in the communal kitchen. A certain level of private life was conserved in
these early house-commune designs that accommodated single laborers as well as families

12

Frederick Engels, Origins of the Family as quoted in The Woman Question, 11.

recognizing the difficulty of a transition from established living patterns to the new way of life.13
[FIGURES 1 AND 2]
The following year, the government organized a group of planners, the Building
Committee of the Russian Republic (STROIKOM), to develop proposals that might be
economically feasible in order to somewhat alleviate the housing crisis imposed by the influx of
peasants from the countryside after Stalins initiative to collectivize farming. Further supporting
the idea of transition, STROIKOM, led by OSA architect Moses Ginzburg, suggested a variety
of living arrangements that ranged from the progressive totally collectivized apartment (F Type)
to a very traditional apartment (K Type). [FIGURES 3 AND 4] The distinguishing factor between
these variations was, most certainly, the inclusion/omission of a kitchen, but neither their
motivation nor promotion addressed womens issues. Rather, the principles guiding the work as
cited by Ginzburg focused on their economic efficiency, not the social issue of liberating
women:
1.
2.

6.

In a country building socialism, the problems of economics are indissolubly linked with the
problems of improving the quality of housing from the standpoint of increased productivity,
the cultural revolution, and the transition to a new, socially superior way of life.
Careful rationalization of the old prerevolutionary apartment plan, an analytical study of the
way in which people use space, particularly kitchen space, can lead to savings of about
10%.
.
.
.
The F type unit is important as a step along the road toward a communal form of housing in
keeping with the social processes of differentiation of the family and the increased use of
collective facilities.

Ginzburg still promoted the new way of life that had been the prominent theme in work by
architects of the OSA the previous year, but, as the first heading suggests, economics in housing
had become the prime factor; it was the means towards socialization instead of the product. The
issue of the family and its place in an increasingly communalized, socialist environment became
13

Kopp, Town and Revolution, 150; and Buchli, Moisei Ginzburgs Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow,
164.

the motivation for the project of socialization and collectivization rather than the emancipation of
women.
With succeeding house-commune projects, ideas of total collectivization dominated the
designs consistently relegating concerns previously considered familial to the collective sector.14
This idea of communalizing domestic activities, extends further back in communal-living history
than Engels or Marx (to whom the architects likely referred), even, to the Utopian Socialists of
post-revolutionary France in the early nineteenth century. For instance, Charles Fouriers
Phalanstery was a vision of a community of people living independently as a commune and who
shared certain facilities such as dining rooms, meeting rooms, library, studies, etc.15 Both Engels
and Marx frequently cited the sexual egalitarian ideas of Fourier repeatedly restating his famous
assertion: Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of
women towards liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a result of a diminution in the liberty
of women,16 but more interestingly, though, was the adoption by Marx and Engels and later by
Constructivist architects of the twentieth century of Fouriers notions of the necessity of
abolishing the nuclear family structure. 17 As so boldly stated in the Communist Manifesto:
Abolition of the family!...On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?
On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the
bourgeoisieThe bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement
18
vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

14

Ibid., 151.
Fourier, Le Nouveau monde industriel et socitaire, vol. IV, O.C. as compiled and translated in The Utopian
Vision of Charles Fourier, 240.
16
Charles Fourier, Thorie des quatre mouvements et des destines gnrales, vol. I, Oeuvres compltes de Charles
Fourier (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1966-68), 131-133 as compiled and translated in The Utopian Vision of Charles
Fourier: Selected Tests on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, trans.
and ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 195.
17
Leslie Goldstein makes note of this in the article, Early Feminist Themes in French Utopian Socialism: The St.Simonians Fourier. Journal of the History of Ideas 43, no.1 (Jan-Mar 1982): 92.
18
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto as translated in The Woman Question, 34-35. Leslie Goldstein makes
note of this in the article, Early Feminist Themes in French Utopian Socialism: The St.-Simonians Fourier.
Journal of the History of Ideas 43, no.1 (Jan-Mar 1982): 91-108.
15

As a transformed Soviet citizen, the traditional nuclear family was superfluous to the
provisions of the socialized state. Once the need for capital had been removed, the structure of
the family as the continuation of that capital to succeeding generations was unnecessary.
Likewise, the kitchen, the source of the pre-revolutionary provisions for the nuclear family, was
also unessential to the new Soviet. The private kitchen and the traditional nuclear family were
only extraneous remnants of bourgeois, capitalistic society.19 Missing from the description of this
new circumstance, however, is the former occupant of the kitchen, the emancipated woman,
without whom the ideal socialist situation could not be realized. Tying all these factors together
Engels clarifies:
It will then become evident that the first precondition for the emancipation of women is the
reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry; and that this again demands that the
20
quality possessed by the individual family of being the economic unit of society be eliminated.

Not only did the emancipation of women depend on the removing domestic responsibilities, but
it also relied on the removal of the family for whom those chores primarily existed. With the
primary concerns of its program, the collectivized domestic services, focused on the
repercussions of women entering the labor force, the house-commune in the late 1920s became
the confirmation and embodiment of the disintegrated nuclear family that Engels predicted.
In a project designed in 1929 by M. Barshch and V. Vladimirov, the singles apartment is
much the same as the familys apartment, each of only six square meters.21 [FIGURE 5] They
reiterated the OSAs theme of a new life noting, The new socialist community needs
19

Urie Bronfenbrenner, The Changing Soviet Family, in The Nuclear Family In Crisis: The Search for an
Alternative, Michael Gordon, ed., (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972), 120-121. The author discusses
further the effectiveness of the Soviet governments adoption of communist theory regarding the family pointing out
that the chaos and strain of the Revolution and the civil war, the subsequent collectivization, famine, and purges,
together with the concomitant mass migration to the new industrial centers, led almost inevitably to the weakening
and disruption of the family, both as an economic and as a psychological unit.
20
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 26, Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 182,
http://alias.libraries.psu.edu/eresources/PASTMASTERS (accessed April 15, 2007).
21
Kopp, Town and Revolution, 152.

correspondingly new housing types, responsive to the new way of life, and the new economic
and cultural needs of the population22 The architects found it unthinkable to maintain
individual apartments that preserve the family as an economically independent unit.
The consequent spatial formations designed for this new way of life associated the
emancipated women (removed from the home, the kitchen, the familial core) to the celebrated
expiration of the nuclear family promoted by the Soviet government and by extension the
Constructivist architects:
The proletariat should proceed immediately to the destruction of the family, which is an
instrument of oppression and exploitation. In the communal housethe family [is] a union of
pure friendship, a physiological necessity which is historically inevitable between a man-worker
23
and a woman-worker.

Conspicuously missing from this passage, however, is any mention of children, the inheritors of
the Soviet state. This does not presume that children were excluded from the anti-familial housecommune. Radical assertions that that children of Communist societybelong to all the
workers24 were embraced by several of the Constructivist architects of house-communes as they
attempted to realize facilities that could accommodate the full-time care of children in boardingschool-like sections of the house-commune as in the proposal by Barshch and Vladimirov.
Within this complex the buildings were divided by the functions of age-groups: adults,
school-age children, and preschool-age children. The bar-tower that stretches almost
monolithically through two smaller buildings housed the private quarters for the adults on the
upper six floors and provided a range of communal services, including a dining hall with a
conveyor belt for food delivery, on the lowest four floors. The small flanking buildings housed
22

The architects as quoted by Milka Bliznakov, Soviet housing during the experimental years, 1918-1933,
Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble, eds.,
114-155.
23
V. Kuzmin in SA no.3 (1928) as translated and quoted in Kopp, Constructivist Architecture in the USSR, 81.
24
Aleksandra Kollontai, The Family and the Communist State (Moscow, 1920) as translated and quoted in Kopp,
Constructivist Architecture in the USSR, 81.

the children and provided for them not only their sleeping quarters but also education facilities,
playrooms, as well as separate dining areas for each age group.25 Adult interaction with the older
children was reserved for meals as they dined together in the large communal hall in the central
bar. Time with the younger children, however, was spent in the childrens wing accessible via a
corridor.26
The suggestion of a new lifestyle through the organization of living space had
transformed with Constructivist architects by 1929 into a more regulated construction of
circumstances. The new life, as defined by projects such as Barshchs and Vladimirovs, was no
longer a choice to be made by the individual aspiring to assimilate into Soviet culture; rather, it
was imposed by the accommodations. Interestingly, the issue of liberating women from domestic
chores diminished in the architects statement much as it had in STROIKOMs proposals, and
addressed more general issues of collectivity and the economic efficiency of combining these
facilities. Ironically, the issue of the emancipation of women ironically dissolved in the
projects that completely removed kitchens from private spaces.
The dictated lifestyle would reach its zenith in a proposal for a house-commune designed
by V. Kuzmin also in 1929. Termed by the architect, supercollectivization, Kuzmins utopia,
according to most scholars, marks the culmination of the development of the house-commune
experimentation.27 Again, family life has been abolished with the separation of children from
parents, but even more radically, Kuzmin removed the individual unit in favor of communal
sleeping arrangements of six men and women in separate rooms, or in pairs [former husband
25

Bliznakov, Soviet housing, 116.

Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 201.
27
Unfortunately, due to the experimental nature of most of the house-commune projects, images are not readily
available. However, for the purposes of this paper descriptions of the project can be found in the following sources:
Kopp, Constructivist Architecture in the USSR, 81; Kopp, Town and Revolution, 152-155; and non-specific
references in Brumfield and Ruble, Russian Housing in the Modern Age, 116-117.
26

10

and wife]. The rooms are intended only for sleeping. The children sleep according to age
groups28 In fact, Kuzmins plan was so aggressively regimented that he even provided for the
adults a daily schedule of activities that governed every minute, including toilet time!
It is not too surprising that the two projects from 1929 are the most removed from the
initial motivations of the house-commune. By this time most everyone in the Soviet Union,
especially professionals depending on the funding of the government, felt the impact of Stalins
plans to spring Russia onto the international economic stage through massive industrial
expansions. The most obvious reasons for the subversion of the issues of womens emancipation
could be cited in terms of economics, the redirection of government funding, and the subsequent
shift in the architects attention from social issues to those of economics. Broadening the scope,
however, to include a contemporaneous shift in family values, especially those advocated by
Stalin, reveals the symbolism inherent in the emancipation of women as contradictory to Stalins
goals of industrialization rather than merely as superseded.
While the expansion of industrialization remains as the primary interest even in this
alternate scenario, the family issue is the crux upon which this shift takes place affecting
simultaneously the initiatives of the house-communes of 1929 and the issue of the emancipation
of women. A Bolshevik himself, Stalin advocated the emancipation of women to egalitarian
status, but there remained a continuous pressure to increase the number of women in the
workforce as the economic situation of Russia improved. Evoking earlier connections to Engels,
Marx, and specifically Fourier, Stalin claims:29
Not a single great movement of the oppressed in the history of mankind has been able to do
without the participation of working women. Working women, the most oppressed among the
oppressed, never have or could stand aside from the broad path of the liberation
28

V. Kuzman, Project statement as quoted in Kopp, Town and Revolution, 155.

Gail W. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change, (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 98 and Stites, Womens Liberation Movement in Russia, 385.
29

11

movementWorking womenworkers and peasantsare the greatest reserve of the working

class. This reserve constitutes a good half of the population. The fate of the proletarian
movementdepends on whether or not the reserve of women will be for or against the working
class. That is why the first task of the proletariat and its advance detachment, the Communist
Party, is to engage in decisive struggle for the freeing of women workers and peasants from the
influences of the bourgeoisie, for political education and the organization of women workers and
30
peasants beneath the banner of the proletariat.

Stalins advocacy for the emancipation of women most notably differs from Engelss, especially,
in the discernable deficiency of references to domestic chores. Still yet, he understood and
advocated the necessity of communal facilities in order to put women back into the workforce.
Looking to relieve the shortage within the labor force during 1928-29, the government set forth
initiatives with the First Five-Year Plan to increase communal facilities for women in the hopes
of an increase in their participation in industry.31 Although the outcome might have been the
same, Stalin did not promote these facilities as emancipators of women, a socialization goal; it
was a goal of industrialization.
As evidenced by the house-commune projects of 1929, architects (especially the
Constructivist architects) undertook this increase in demands for communal facilities and
focused on the collectivization. Indeed, it was a project very much in synch with their already
developed ideas regarding the transformation of humanity under the idealism of a socialized
society. However, their subversion of the issue of the liberation of women (from symbolic of the
communal kitchen to the advancement of industrialization) points to a realignment of these
architects with the concerns of the state.
Yet, to be noted, their projects remained unbuilt by the Soviet government. Consequently,
as women steadily filled the burgeoning urban workforce the communal facilities intended to

30
31

Stalin, A Political Biography as quoted and translated in The Woman Question, 44.
Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, 98.

12

relieve them of their domestic chores failed to keep pace.32 While likely due to the redistribution
of funds towards industrialization, perhaps more provocatively, I would suggest these projects
remained unfunded due to the nature of collectivization as both symbol and reality of the
dissolution of the nuclear family. It was becoming apparent that the undermined structure of the
nuclear family under the early tenets of Communism was not being replaced by the state in the
rearing and education of children. Civilization was teetering on chaos as children were neither
supervised in the home nor in community daycares. Since the state could not afford these
socialist services on a large scale, the employment of free-labor, i.e. women, would eventually
become necessary in order to maintain some semblance of social order. Women would have to
bear a double burden in order for the country to continue in industrial expansion. The
abandonment of womens issues was not enough for the ideology of the Constructivist architects
to remain viable to the state. They would have to abandon, too, their ideas of eliminating the
family as the structure of the family became an unforeseen necessity in the industrialization
project. Their focus on socialization issues proved detrimental to their relevance to the goals of
Stalins new socialist society.
The divergence of the issues of socialization and industrialization under the early years of
Stalins First Five-Year Plan is a narrative that can be intelligibly told through the transformation
of the symbolic nature of the communal kitchen in early Soviet Russia. Although the communal
kitchen was a largely unsuccessful undertaking that resulted in multiple stomach aches and
familial dissatisfaction,33 it served a larger purpose than that at hand as symbolic of a liberation
movement that was glorious and highly successful in its nascent years only to be reverted to
conditions worse than those that preceded it. As El Lissitzky so aptly noted, architecture
32

Ibid., 100-101.
Greg Castillo, Stalinist Modern: Constructivism and the Soviet Company Town, Architectures of Russian
Identity: 1500-Present, James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland, eds., 144.
33

13

becomes the expression of a social condition and attains new validity by becoming an effective
element in the life of society.34 The communal kitchen was the expression of a society initially
intent on liberating all humanity to unprecedented levels of egalitarianism. The Constructivist
architects focus on transforming humanity, however, became their undoing in the last years of
the First Five-Year Plan even as they attempted to alter their ideology to align more closely with
Stalins new vision. The symbolic representation of the communal kitchen in the experimental
house-commune projects reveals quite well this transforming social condition.

34

El Lissitzky, Russia: An architecture for world revolution, Eric Dluhosch trans. (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1970), 36.

14

FIGURE 1

G. Vegman: Two-level living units, entry in the OSA competition, Moscow 1927

15

FIGURE 2

I. Sobolev: Two-level living unit, entry in OSA competition, Moscow 1927

16

FIGURE 3

STROIKOM: F Type Plans, five variations 1928

17

FIGURE 4

STROIKOM: K Type Plans 1928

18

FIGURE 5

M. Barshch and V. Vladimirov, Design for a house-commune 1929

19

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_____. Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning 1917-1935. Trans.
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