Modernism and Mobilization: From Viktor Sokolsky’s Economic Principle to Interwar Architectural Planning

Abstract

This article blurs established boundaries between the radical and the regressive in modern architecture by uncovering how the histories efficiency, climate, and ultimately health converged with military history, reframing avant-garde projects such as Moisei Ginzburg's celebrated Narkomfin building in Moscow. To do so, it explores early-twentieth-century developments in military construction theory, in particular, in the design of military barracks, the area of special importance in the years between the Russo-Japanese War and the beginning of the First World War. Forgotten today, the work of imperial military architect Viktor Sokolsky (1869-1913), whose calculations on the efficiency of construction continued to be studied in the aftermath of the revolution of 1917, exerted a seminal influence upon the modernists' thinking. Mining the genealogy of such Ginzburg’s projects as the Narkomfin and the Green City, the article points to their roots in two typologies well-developed in imperial military architecture: the barrack and the field hospital. It argues that the emergence of modern, mass, warfare led to an elaboration of the principles of modernist, mass architecture with its ethos of hygiene, efficiency, and economy.