Building the New Man: Ivan Leonidov, House of Industry (1929-30)

Ivan Leonidov’s House of Industry (1929-30) is a project for an office complex over one hundred meters high. It is. It should have risen along the Moscova, at short distance from the Cathedral of St. Basil, the citadel of the Kremlin and the Red Square, closely related to some symbolic places of Russian as well as Soviet history. Leonidov's proposal is conceived on direct connection to what it would have been the main work of Staliniant Moscow, the subway, in order to become an urban ganglion transforming the incessant horizontal movement of Muscovites into a vertical direction. It is designed as a glazed parallelepiped in curtain wall, cut by spaces for collective floors, restaurants, winter gardens. Inside the building, along spaces for office work, arranged in anti-hierarchic way, there are swimming pools, winter gardens, saunas, showers, relaxation rooms, tea rooms, athletics tracks. In the Socialist society that Leonidov and the avant-garde dream of, it is not only the owner of the means of production that has changed, but also the sense of work, which is "liberated" only if, in addition to being a practice of transformation of the world, it becomes a moment of full realization of the human being. In this sense, the House of Industry represents the supreme phase of the NEP, the monument for the communist society in that phase of its historical evolution as a total and totalitarian work of art: at the same time it is a place of intellectual elaboration, a factory of slogans, a social condenser, a "gym of Communism", "Health palace", square, garden. The user too is a product, he is processed by architecture, "in his physical and metaphysical state, in his energy flows and in his matter", through mystical rituals not so different from the ones of the Orthodox church.