The Lenin Tribune designed by El Lissitzky from 1920-1924 is an oft rebuilt icon of Modern “graphic” Constructivist architecture. In 1984 (a fitting Orwellian year for celebrating utopia) Paul Groenendijk and Piet Vollaard issued a set of five avant garde architectural cut-out and paste-up models, of which the Tribune was one. They are now quite rare.
Lenin Tribune sits along side of many of the so-called “paper architecture” projects of the 1920s. The New World Encyclopedia notes:
. . . the Lenin Tribune by El Lissitzky (1920), a moving speaker’s podium. During the Russian Civil War, the UNOVIS group centered around Malevich and Lissitzky, designing various projects that forced together the “non-objective” abstraction of Suprematism with more utilitarian aims, creating ideal Constructivist cities (see also El Lissitzky’s Prounen-Raum or the “Dynamic City” (1919) of Gustav Klutsis). In this and Tatlin’s work the components of Constructivism could be seen as an adaptation of various high-tech Western forms, such as the engineering feats of Gustave Eiffel and New York City’s or Chicago’s skyscrapers, for a new collective society.
The examples here are from the kit, which owing to my inability to use an Xacto without harming my outer and inner extremities, has remained intact, waiting for a dexterous student willing to cut and construct this historic monument. In fact, it would take an architectural model maker to build this so it doesn’t fall down.
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