Among the leading early Soviet architects, Ilya Golosov was perhaps the most successful in adapting the rigorous, unadorned geometric volumes of Constructivism to the social goals of the new regime through a series of workers’ clubs that have become landmarks of Russian architecture. In Golosov’s best work, the apparent austerity of 1920s modernism acquired a dramatic—indeed, romantic—cast. In this regard, it is telling that during the early 1920s, Golosov led a theoretical movement known as “symbolic romanticism.”
Born in Moscow, Golosov entered Moscow's Stroganov School of the Arts in 1898, where he completed the full eight-year course. He continued his professional training at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1907 to 1912 and then moved to St. Petersburg, where he studied at the Academy of Arts until 1915. This extended academic education grounded Golosov in the principles of Neoclassicism, and at the beginning of his career, he came under the influence of the leading neoclassical revivalist, Ivan Zholtovskii. Even as Golosov accepted modernist architectural concepts, the order system retained its underlying importance in his understanding of form.
In the early 1920s, Golosov taught with Melnikov at VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN, and, like Melnikov, he built or projected a number of wooden exhibition pavilions. At the same time, he produced rather eclectic, “romantic” sketches for competitions on a grand scale, such as the Moscow Palace of Labor project (1922-23), with the arched roof of its central auditorium suggesting the shape of a dynamo. By 1925, Golosov’s acceptance of Constructivist principles became markedly evident in a number of large office building designs, streamlined and reduced to a carefully considered balance of rectilinear elements. Golosov’s articulation of form centered on the concept of “lines of gravity” that created a logical, organic frame on which structure took shape. Like other modernist theoreticians, Golosov also explored the innate properties of basic geometric forms, such as the square and circle.
The juxtaposition of the square and circle is developed in depth by Golosov in his Zuev Workers’ Club (1927-29). Many such clubs were built in the late 1920s and 1930s, and in the most pragmatic sense, they were intended to provide a meeting and recreational space for both workers and professionals (whose alternative might have been the tavern). On the level of ideology, the workers’ clubs provided an opportunity for the integration of architecture and social politics in the creation of communal structures, and they firmly announced the leading role of the Communist Party in the creation of a new society. It is not surprising, therefore, that the club concept (or “palace of labor”) stimulated some of the most interesting designs of the period.
The Zuev Club has deteriorated over time, like most Constructivist buildings, but the vigor of Golosov’s concept has not diminished. The large corner cylinder, containing a stairwell enclosed in glass, is clenched with a rectangular extension of one of the upper floors. The resulting contrast of shapes epitomizes Constructivist architecture both in its display of unadorned steel, glass, and concrete and in its massing of sharply defined volumes. A new industrial aesthetic created a building that resembles a machine, symbolizing the machine age. Yet the bold modeling of its forms recalls the work of architects such as Bazhenov, whose neoclassical designs display a similar volumetric approach. (The closest example is Bazhenov’s Iushkov mansion, which also turns on a corner cylinder and, by fitting coincidence, served as the main location of VKhUTEMAS.)
The organization of interior space at the Zuev Club also devolves on the staircase cylinder, whose wall of glass not only illuminates with a brilliance unusual in Moscow architecture but also highlights the radial construction of the reinforced-concrete beams beneath the upper landing. The dynamism of this machine-like space, which served to concentrate motion within the building, is both functional and lyrical in its relation to the urban landscape beyond the walls. Like Shekhtel, Konstantin Melnikov, and Le Corbusier, Golosov was particularly attuned to the properties of the glass membrane in defining the relation between interior and exterior space, but he went beyond them in his use of glazed components to endow the structure with the sense of a living organism whose interior workings—people moving from one level to another within the building—were exposed to view. Unfortunately, in the few of Golosov’s projects that were realized (primarily apartment buildings), the divergence between the crisp lines of his drawings and the realities of Soviet construction methods is all too evident.
By 1933 Golosov, like many of his contemporaries, had abandoned the idealistic view of transparent structure in favor of a massive, opaque neoclassicism. One of the most obvious and best-preserved examples of this later phase is the large apartment house (1934-36) on Yauza Boulevard. In this and other administrative buildings of the late 1930s, Golosov melded the neoclassical principles of his early career with the formal restraint of his modernist period.
Throughout the prewar decades, Golosov’s architectural work was complemented by that of his older brother, Panteleimon Golosov (1882-1945). Although the two did not collaborate as closely as the Vesnin brothers (Alexander, Leonid, and Viktor), their careers followed similar paths, from early study at the Stroganov School and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture to teaching positions at VKhUTEMAS-VKhUTEIN and the Moscow Architectural Institute. Panteleimon Golosov’s most successful modernist structure was also one of the last: the Pravda Building, designed for the publishing empire of the same name and still very much in use. The building combined a nine-story office block, fronted by the lower printing plant, with its streamlined, horizontal window lines.
The parallel paths of the two Golosov brothers continued with the turn of Panteleimon Golosov to the design of classically articulated apartment buildings at the end of the 1930s. Although their careers can be seen as a successful example of the transition from modernist, functional architecture to the more conservative political and cultural environment of the 1930s, it seems evident that the pressures of the prewar and war years led both to a premature death in the same year, 1945.
WituiaM C. BRUMFIELD
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.
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