Tatlin’s Tower Rises

Architizer News

Tatlin’s Tower Rises

October 17, 2011

Tatlin’s Tower at the Royal Academy. Photo: Miguel Santa Clara

Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International would have soared 400 meters in the Soviet skies above Petrograd (now, St. Petersburg), a towering and terrifying colossus realized in “iron, glass and revolution.” Although Tatlin’s seminal project would never be built, it would appear repeatedly in innumerable architectural projects (both built and unbuilt) throughout the twentieth century and beyond. This past week, a 1:40 scale replica of the iconic tower has been erected in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. More after the jump!

Photo: Miguel Santa Clara

The tower consisted of a spiraling assemblage of vertical and diagonal iron bracing, bent at a 23.5 degree-angle over the Petrograd skyline. It’s corseted body housed three large glass structures, each an autonomous Platonic mass dedicated to a different function: a cube, towards the base of the tower, would serve as a grand assembly hall; a pyramid would hover above wherein the executive bodies of the state would convene; and, a cylinder, the uppermost chamber, would be reserved for a newspaper and the proliferation of information. Each of these crystal palaces would revolve at various speeds, from yearly to monthly to daily, respectively. A large radio mast installed atop the structure would transmit the Communist message of brotherhood to the furthest reaches of the Motherland.

The recently-completed installation was constructed to coincide with the Royal Academy’s “Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35,” an exhibition that surveys the work of artists and architects, from the Constructivists to Le Corbusier, who would envision the utopia promised by the loftiest aspirations of the Bolshevik Revolution. The 10-meter tall structure stands adrift in the academy’s courtyard, boarded on all sides by weighty Neo-Palladian halls. The architectural firm Dixen Jones were tasked with the project of building Tatlin’s tower in miniature, which began with a fully realized computer model before being built over a two-month period offsite.

Visualization of Tatlin’s Tower looming over Petrograd (now St. Petersburg). Image: Royal Academy

Nearly a century since its creation, Tatlin’s Tower has become a universal cultural artifact, an iconic yet critical work of art imbued with a restlessness that refuses the comforts of the historical archive. Its continual potency lies not only in its daring and evocative form, which is undeniable, but also in the heady optimism embedded within the vortices of its coiling body as it launches the utopian dream upwards and outwards.