Review: Trans. Alessandro de Magistris and Gianluigi Giacone by Alessandro de Magistris, Irina Korob'ina, editors

Abstract

Alessandro de Magistris and Irina Korob'ina , editors, Ivan Leonidov, 1902–1959 . Trans. Alessandro de Magistris and Gianluigi Giacone , Milan: Electa/architettura, 2009, 324 pp., 207 color and 130 b/w illus. €110, ISBN 978883705761 In 1978 the Architectural League of New York opened a small exhibition about a then-obscure Soviet architect, Ivan Il’ic Leonidov. Two decades later, in 2002, Rem Koolhaas declared in Moscow, at the celebration of Leonidov's 100th anniversary, “If the entire twentieth-century architecture of the world was destroyed, it could be brought back to life through the genetic code of Leonidov's architecture” (117). Koolhaas also suggested that Leonidov's three idiosyncratic ceramic, glass, and steel towers for the 1934 NARKOMTJAŽPROM competition be raised at New York's Ground Zero. What is certain is that his discovery of Leonidov's architecture in 1971 at the exhibition Art and Revolution , organized by Oleg Svidkovskij at the Hayward Gallery in London, was the catalyst that propelled the Dutch architect to abandon his career as a filmmaker in order to become one of the most important architects of our day. Kenneth Frampton was no less emphatic when he wrote in 1981, in the preface to the American translation of the first monograph the Soviets dedicated to Leonidov (published in Russian in 1971), “There is probably no figure of the modern movement who haunts the stage of the twentieth century with such persistence as Ivan Leonidov.”1 Indeed, both the Parc de la Villette in Paris and analogous cultural and recreational facilities in Japan are avowed progeny of Leonidov's radical concept of a Palace of Culture (Dvorec Kultury) designed for a Moscow competition in 1929. I. M. Pei's glass pyramid for the Louvre—a Palace of Culture par excellence—echoes Leonidov's Palace of Culture glass pyramid, with a dirigible hovering above. Leonidov, a passionate adept of aircraft, was playing off the image published in the Soviet press in the 1920s featuring a dirigible cruising above the pyramids of Luxor. It is no less true, even if unacknowledged, that Le Corbusier's …