Belyayevo Forever

Ana Chorgolashvili in conversation  with Kuba Snopek

How did the idea of the book Balyayevo Forever come to you, as well as adding the typical Soviet micro-district to the list of UNESCO World Heritage?

The essay “Belyayevo Forever” was first published in English and Russian in 2013. It was a development of the work I have conducted at the Strelka Institute two years earlier under the tuition of Rem Koolhaas.

This work has had multiple layers, but the primary angle from which I looked at the Soviet cityscape was heritage preservation. Preservationists ask immensely important questions about cities: what parts of the heritage do we want to keep? What elements of the urban tissue are most valuable? How do we define this value? “Belyayevo Forever” is, in fact, an interrogation of Khrushchev-era mass housing with the use of exactly these questions.

It appeared that applying the tools of heritage preservation to Soviet-era mass housing is not an easy task. The Western heritage preservation framework is strongly inclined towards preserving tangible assets: buildings, objects, artefacts. Moreover, most preservation strategies are focused on uniqueness: if a building is unique, it’s seen as more valuable than something that’s repetitive. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the Soviet architectural heritage is obviously lacking uniqueness. Since the 1950s, housing was built in gigantic factories; even before, Soviet architects were experimenting with prefabrication, repetitive projects, etc. Other typologies – schools, kindergartens, etc. – were also prefabricated. According to the Western understanding of heritage preservation, a Soviet-era microrayon has no value.

The paradox is, that there is value in these neighbourhoods. After 50 years since they were built, at least two generations have managed to live in these spaces, and they have created a sophisticated culture of the microrayon. But the value and the uniqueness of specific neighbourhoods come not directly from buildings, but from the people, who were inhabiting them: their culture, their art, etc.

In my investigation, I focused on the Moscow neighbourhood called Belyayevo, which I consider an extreme example of such a space. On the one hand, it’s completely devoid of architectural uniqueness – the buildings are indistinguishable; on the other hand, it has an immense cultural value. It was one of the cradles of Moscow Conceptualism, one of the most important – and my personal favourite – currents of Soviet art. Belyayevo was also space, where extraordinary events, like the “Bulldozer Exhibition, have taken place, and extraordinary characters, like Dmitri Prigov, have lived and created their works.

What are the unique features of Soviet mass housing and what distinguishes it from its Western analogies?

There are no Western analogies – that’s the biggest difference. One could say that particular neighbourhoods in Moscow resemble particular neighbourhoods in Stockholm, London, Paris, or Frankfurt. But the difference is in scale. In Moscow – and other Soviet cities – the microrayon is the basic block of urban tissue, while in Paris or Frankfurt, a housing estate is a unique and remote space of a city that is, in general, organised in a different way. The scale of the microrayon urban landscape is immense because the scale of the radical political program of the Khrushchev era was immense.

How did Krushchev’s ‘Manifesto’, as you describe it, change the trajectory of the development of Soviet architecture? What kind of changes and processes of re-thinking is it related to and on what scale did it influence the spatial-composite planning, as well as the aesthetics and people’s individual experience of perceiving the city as such?

The architecture was an important building block of the Soviet identity from the very first days of the existence of this state. The 1920s were the times of experiments, where most talented architects proposed politically-loaded, idealistic new solutions: housing typologies, social condensers, workers’ clubs, etc. This short period of generating ideas has had a great influence on the architecture of the USSR and the World. But it abruptly ended, when Joseph Stalin consolidated power. In the times of his rule, the priority was to build industry and creating representative spaces of power.

With Khrushchev, the idealistic program of the 1920s came back, but in a different form. The new priority was to build housing for the citizens of the Soviet state. This postulate is, by the way, coming back today, when inefficiency of the market economy in providing housing is becoming apparent. Khrushchev understood that the only way to provide apartments for everyone was to reduce the price of construction. This, in turn, was only possible to obtain by turning towards industrial mass-production of houses. Again, we have the same trends today: in places of the biggest housing scarcity, like the Bay Area in California, developers are turning towards fully-industrialised production.

In December 1954, Khrushchev has taken a decision to turn entirely towards the mass production of architecture. This meant building factories of houses, consolidating design offices into big organisations, creating libraries of components, and a series of houses. This turn has had, of course, consequences for architectural design. Now, the architects were designing in a completely different scale: instead of designing particular homes, they changed their focus to composing particular neighbourhoods (microrayons).

This, in consequence, resulted in a completely different, “pre-fabricated”, city-scape. Since the Khrushchev times, the socialist city is a territory covered with simple houses that are surrounded by vast wastelands and greenery. More importantly, the Khrushchevean city created certain types of social infrastructure, which strongly influenced the life within such neighbourhoods. The microrayon had its schools, kindergartens, cultural centres, art spaces, etc. This social infrastructure has often survived the fall of the USSR, and, until today, adds value to the lifestyles of the residents of such neighbourhoods. One of the examples is the Belyayevo Art Gallery. It has existed since the Soviet times. For the last few years, it has been creating cultural programs around the local culture described in my project. Lately, they have even curated and opened an exhibition devoted to the local history of Belyayevo.

What were the roles and functions of the architects in the framework of Krushchev’s ambitious ‘project’ and the excessive industrialization of construction, as well as the reduction of everything into typical elements?

The role of architects varied. Some, like the famous architect Vitaliy Lagutenko (by the way, the grandfather of Ilya Lagutenko, the leader of the group Mumiy Troll), were designing standardised buildings. Vitaliy Lagutenko was the author of the K-7, the most basic “khrushchevka”. Others started working in gigantic design institutes, designing entire housing estates. In my book, I have described the work of architect Yakov Belapolskiy, the author of Belyayevo and other housing mega-projects.

What circumstances are we talking about when reminiscing the typical Soviet micro- districts of the 50-the 60s? Where do their material and/or non-material values stand and how should we define them? Lastly, why do you think the monotonous space of Soviet micro-districts (on the example of Balyayevo) of the 70s, became the place of representation of the Soviet nonconformist art and the polygon for the conceptual artists in a wider sense?

My research of Belyayevo gave me a framework of thinking about what’s valuable in a city. Every urban area consists of the tangible space (we can also call it infrastructure), and the intangible values: culture, art, or, in general, the life that happens within this space. Importantly, one is inseparable from another. Architectural form strongly influences the life within it, and the life shapes architecture.

In the case of Belyayevo, the cultural component was extremely vibrant and inspiring. The tangible component – buildings – can at first seem blunt and uninspiring, but it influenced the culture on many different levels. First, art created in Belyayevo wouldn’t have happened, if not for the vast spaces between buildings allowed for the events like the Bulldozer Exhibition to take place. The huge amount of empty space was not controllable, even for the authoritarian Soviet regime, and allowed for artistic expression. This might seem like a minor point but is very actual today: in the market-driven contemporary city, there is simply much less free space, where artistic, political, or any kind of expression, can happen.

Second, the abstract, repetitive form of the microrayon influenced the art. Artists like Prigov interpreted this space in their art: they treated the microrayon as a material, from which they created their graphics, poems, paintings, and actions. The compositional features and aesthetics of the microrayon can be easily traced in the works of dozens of artists. 

Last, but not least, the microrayon in general, and Belyayevo in particular, provided institutional support for art and culture. Cultural spaces, galleries, houses of culture, gave an opportunity of expression to a generation of artists, from Dmitri Prigov to Victor Tsoi. 

The tangible and intangible values are inseparable. We should not look at a city only as a collection of houses, or a visual composition of streets and parks. Spaces like Belyayevo and other microrayons often have features, which are not instantly visible, but still immensely valuable. More importantly, these features were intentionally designed: like the design of the network of local institutions, or the surplus of empty space.

* Photography courtesy of Max Avdeev