Wolkenbügel is the first definitive account of El Lissitzky's most ambitious architectural proposition — a horizontal skyscraper for Moscow that drew on photography, typography, exhibition design, and the alphabet itself to redefine what a paper project could do.
About This Book
In 1924, El Lissitzky — already celebrated as a painter and designer — turned his attention to architecture with a single, radical proposal: eight horizontal structures perched on slender pillars at major intersections along Moscow's Boulevard Ring, threading together tramlines, subways, and elevators. He called them Wolkenbügel. Richard Anderson's study of this project goes far beyond formal analysis, tracing how Lissitzky translated visual and textual media into spatial thinking. Drawing on surviving drawings and archival materials, Anderson reconstructs the conceptual framework behind the project and its role in shaping interwar avant-garde culture across Europe. For architects, historians, and scholars of modernism, this is essential reading on the representational politics of architectural ideas.
Key Features
- 380 pages of scholarly analysis supported by surviving drawings and archival artefacts related to the Wolkenbügel project
- Author: Richard Anderson
- Published by MIT Press
What You'll Discover
- How Lissitzky synthesised photography, typography, exhibition design, and elementary letterforms as generative tools for architectural thinking
- The Wolkenbügel's integration of Moscow's tramlines, subways, and vertical circulation — and what this reveals about infrastructure as urbanism
- How the production and reception of a paper project became a vehicle for connecting the worlds of art and architecture across national borders
- A revised account of internationality in modern European architectural culture, seen through the lens of a single, unrealised but historically consequential project
About the Author
Richard Anderson is a scholar whose work centres on the conceptual and representational dimensions of modern architectural history. In Wolkenbügel, he brings sustained archival research to bear on El Lissitzky's most complex built proposal, situating it within the broader dynamics of the interwar avant-gardes.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 380
- Dimensions: 22.9 x 28 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780262048781
- Publisher: MIT Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architectural historians, scholars of the interwar avant-garde, practitioners interested in the relationship between representation and spatial ideas, and anyone working across modernist art and architecture.