The Infinite City. Vision and Reality in Ivan Leonidov’s Urban Designs

The debate on the Socialist City during the late ‘20s and early ‘30s is one of the largest urban laboratory of the 20th century. One of the most radical positions considers the idea of the city as a superstructure of the bourgeois-capitalist modes of production made obsolete by the Bolshevik revolution which, as such, must be overturned. For “disurbanists”, from the collapse of the tsarist city urban entities must be dissolved in the territory, using to this purpose the new infrastructural network planned (dreamed) by the Soviet Power (cars, trains, airplanes, airships, spacecraft!). The city will no longer have a form but will be reduced to pure process, derived from the “daily life program” developed by bolshevik social engineering, designed starting from the distances to be made for commuting with the factory sites, from the sinusoidal diagrams of the circadian rhythms of workers and from the consequent “industrialization” of their sleep and rest periods. The new city is literally built on the relationship between nature and architecture and on a general rethinking of its dimension whose scale descends, in order, from the continental extension of the Soviet Union, from the new infrastructural network, from the industrial compounds strategically dispersed from Leningrad to Vladivostok. In 1928-30 Ivan Leonidov designed an idea of city irradiating itself all along the Soviet Union: a ribbon-like and infinite urban structure colonizing that boundless territory, innervated by productive kombinats, residential compounds, public buildings. The goal is to build a city-nature, unlimited but endowed with the measure given by a grid attaining a geographical dimension before an urban one. A centuriatio that potentially goes from Moscow to the Urals, a linear disarticulation of the American Jeffersonian grid, an “all program and no form” plan – as Koolhaas would say – that is concretely tested in the design for the new mining town of Magnitogorsk. Or it becomes a network whose nodes are constituted by institutional and representative buildings whose distances are calculated on the basis of the power of the radio signals that connect them (project for the Social Club of a “new type” versions A and B). A new city, sparse but large as the whole country, connected by an immaterial infrastructure: a net of radio receivers in a sort of precognition of what a smart city is.