Wolkenbügel

How a visionary, never-realized architectural project, devised by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, shaped architectural culture in Europe between the world wars.

After achieving international acclaim as a painter and designer, El Lissitzky set out in 1924 to convince the world—and himself—that he was also an architect. He did this with a project for a “horizontal skyscraper,” which he gave an obscure and untranslatable name: Wolkenbügel. Eight of these buildings, perched atop slender pillars, were intended to stand at major intersections along Moscow’s Boulevard Ring, integrating the flow of tramlines, subways, and elevators. In Wolkenbügel, Richard Anderson explores Lissitzky’s translation of visual and textual media into spatial ideas and offers an in-depth study of the surviving drawings and archival artifacts related to Lissitzky's most complex architectural proposal.

This book offers a new and definitive account of how Lissitzky expanded the conceptual and representational tools available to the modern architect by drawing on many sources—including photography, typography, exhibition design, and even the elementary forms of the alphabet—to create the Wolkenbügel. Anderson shows how the production and reception of a paper project served to link key ideas and relationships that animated the worlds of art and architecture, offering a new view on received histories of the interwar avant-gardes. By attending to Lissitzky’s singular architectural project, Anderson reveals the dynamics of internationality in the constitution of modern architectural culture in Europe.Introduction
Chapter 1: It’s boring here. Nobody comes to Zurich
Chapter 2: The Genus of the Skyscraper
Chapter 3: Directions for Use
Chapter 4: International Architecture
Conclusion
Archival Sources and Abbreviations
Notes“Gorgeously produced, highly readable account of a fascinating and wily figure.”
—The Wall Street Journal

"Anderson makes the Wolkenbügel the focal point of his volume, reconstructing extensive dialogues between Lissitzky and his global interlocutors, and transforming the skyscraper into the centre of gravity for Lissitzky’s other projects. With his assistance the Wolkenbügel emerges as the glue that bonded Lissitzky’s universe of disparate artefacts and connected him to the rest of the world."
—The Times Literary Supplement
“This archaeology of the Wolkenbügel expands the reality of the unbuilt paper project beyond architectural drawings, exhibition panels, and publications into a consideration of paper artifacts such as envelopes, postcards, and letterheads. Anderson's captivating story reveals another site for the construction of modern architecture: the infrastructural space of the postal system.”
—Mari Lending, Professor of Architectural History and Theory, Oslo School of Architecture and Design

“Wolkenbügel is a magisterial lesson in architectural history. It unpacks one of the most enigmatic projects of the interwar avant-garde in all its dimensions and realities, as plan and building, sign and media, structure and infrastructure, artwork and organizational complex, while paying due tribute to a proposal that literally bridged different disciplines in its ambition to reinvent architecture.”
—Laurent Stalder, Professor and Chair of the Theory of Architecture, ETH ZurichRichard Anderson is Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. He is the editor of Ludwig Hilberseimer's Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays and the author of Russia: Modern Architectures in History.