Word: constructivist
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...National Gallery -the austere and nearly functionless square of glass and black steel that was Mies van der Rohe's chief legacy to Germany. This Prussian pantheon, overlooking the bombed-out paddocks where Hitler's chancellery once stood, is as perfectly suited to a constructivist show as St. Peter's is to Bernini's papal tombs; box and contents are one. The idealism, the formal absolutism and the faith in a new social order, coupled with the abstracted indifference to verifiable human needs that lay at the core of the constructivist enterprise, are all written large...
...constructivist impulse to pure didactic form began before World...
...theme of constructivism: a design like J J Pieter Oud's Cafe Restaurant De Unie, 1925, is not to be imagined with a scintilla of city grime on it. Steel, chrome, tile, gloss paint were the rudiments of utopia, but, above all, glass. Paeans were written to the constructivist cathedral, the transparent tower. "Life is a burden without a glass palace," rhapsodized the poet and designer Paul Scheerbart...
Thus, in its different ways, constructivism aspired to become the last universal style. Its victory would bring the history of art to an end and accomplish the millennium. The constructivist vision was art's analogue to the reigning fantasy of Marxism: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its ideal order would wipe out nostalgia for older styles and set up a "permanent revolution" of design. Alas for the designers, this did not happen. Most of the triumphs of constructivism survived in the fictional space of painting or sculpture, theater or typography. As soon as ideal form moved into the real...
...change from the Constructivist "avant-garde" back to Realism is dynamically shown in photos of the Competition for the Palace of Soviets in 1932. All Constructivist entries were rejected in preference to a "social realist" structure, not unlike a giant birthday cake with the crowning one candle to-grow-on in the shape of Stalin...