In Paustovskij's 1930 short story, comradely
meeting of
the Construction Bureau. The feature writer, Mett, calls the Fifth Day
Beautiful!
while the reporter, Danilov, excoriates it
for being, lifeless,
and something of the
crematorium,
although, we are told, by the narrator, that
a famous French architect considered Hoffman's project a work
of genius.
That famous French architect,
strongly resembles Le
Corbusier, whose modernist theories of rationalism and functionalism
were promulated in the USSR among avant-garde architectural circles in
the 1920s, and who designed the Centrosojuz Building erected on
Moscow's Mjasnickaja Street between 1928 and 1935. Written on the cusp
of increasing hostility toward modernist-constructivist tendencies in
Soviet architecture, Moscow Summer
mirrors the
ideological antagonisms of its day by employing architecture to
metaphorically illustrate the growing institutionalized tendency in
favor of Stalinist Classicism.
This paper examines and contrasts Paustovsky/Hoffman's Fifth
Day,
its polemic, and Le Corbusier's aesthetic with
what—in two years after the story's publication—would
become Socialist Realism. Accompanying this paper are recently-taken
slides at Le Corbusier's newly-restored Villa Savoye in Poissy, near
Paris, that illustrate the architect's concept of the house as a
machine for living,
and relate the Villa to Hoffman's