The Chaplin Machine by Hatherley Owen

Author:Hatherley, Owen.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Mosselprom Building, Moscow (2011 photograph)

Mayakovsky and Rodchenko decorations on the Mosselprom Building (2011 photograph)

The Mosselprom building is in a sense a built example of the montage tower envisaged by Vladmir Krinsky. It is not something rising out of the city ex nihilo, but a reconstruction and re-imagining of an existing part of the cityscape. The concrete-framed building is usually credited to a relatively young Vkhutemas graduate, David Kogan. Richard Pare writes that: ‘this building was developed from an existing apartment block as the headquarters of the Moscow Association of Establishments for Processing Products of the Agricultural Industry; at the time it was one of the tallest structures in Moscow’.33 The alterations centre on two areas. First, the rear is given over to a display of advertisements by Rodchenko for various consumer goods – chocolates, drinks; and second, the building’s corner had added a few extra storeys to the point where it would have been regarded as skyscraping perhaps in Louis Sullivan’s time, if certainly not in the 1920s.

This deficiency is covered by re-imagining. The building is always depicted, in the ephemera/iconography of the time, from a corner, again a miming of the quirks of the New York zoning code – this time, the Flatiron building’s geometrically improbable thrust towards the road. Formally, this can then be depicted in varying ways depending on the particular desired effect. A package for Extra cigarettes features it with a central clock, smoothing it into a more Americanist, art deco form and (in the manner of the aforementioned technology companies advertisement) infusing the surrounding cityscape which now becomes a series of tall, brightly-lit blocks.34 Rodchenko’s more famous poster abstracts it, emphasising the frame. But this structural emphasis is undercut by the work Rodchenko did on the building itself, covering it in advertising in Grotesk typography, accentuating the bright colours and the lack of naturalism – while in American skyscraper design the opulence of the materials would be of the essence, here the building is a mere canvas for the application of slogans, a principle easily extended from the sphere of the commodity to the party-political.

An early Mayakovsky poem, ‘To Shop Signs’ is an embryonic instance of this infatuation with the advertisement. In it, the Taylorist poet Gastev’s observation that Futurism is an essentially consumerist aesthetic system35 is partly confirmed – what interests isn’t so much the commodities themselves but the web of images and signs that are woven around them, which seem to generate abundance all by themselves.

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