Note 479 — CHAPTER 22 THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER, MIES VAN DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH
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As building activity increased in Russia in the late twenties there was considerable experimentation, mostly along Constructivist lines, and a growing acceptance of the new architecture of the western 467world. This continued into the early thirties. But the competition for the Palace of the Soviets of 1931, to which Le Corbusier and Gropius as well as Poelzig and Mendelsohn were among the over two hundred architects who contributed projects, represented a major turning point. This was won by the Soviet architect B. M. Iofan (b. 1891) with a very monumental scheme designed in a variant of that megalomaniac mode of scraped classicism which had been popular for large-scale architecture in Germany under the Second Reich and which returned to favour in 1933 under the Third Reich, just after Iofan’s scheme triumphed. By 1937 this relatively severe project had been elaborated by Iofan and his collaborators W. G. Helfreich and V. A. Schouko until it rose—and to the same tremendous height as the Empire State Building in New York—like a telescopic wedding-cake, terminating in a statue of Stalin a third as tall as the whole structure below.
Henceforth the ‘scraping’ of Classical forms ceased and Stalinist architecture in general aimed at an elaboration that was at once Baroque and Victorian in its coarse exuberance and in its illiterate use of academic clichés all but forgotten in the western world. During the later Stalinist period official Soviet criticism decried the modern architecture of the western world as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois formalism’.
Since the end of that period the denunciation of its characteristic architecture by Soviet leaders implies some return towards the contact with advanced western ideas which was evident in the twenties and early thirties. For the production of the Stalinist period, which would rate anywhere else as very low-grade ‘traditional’ architecture, see Dreissig Jahre sowjetische Architektur in der RSFSR, Leipzig, 1950.