Temporal Disjunctures

Narkomfin Building, Moscow. Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis, 1928.

A major influence on Le Corbusier, the Narkomfin building was designed for workers at the Commissariat of Finance. The apartments were to form an intervention into the everyday life of the inhabitants and foster  a socialist way of life that would take women out of their traditional roles. The structure was thus to act as a ‘social condenser’ by including within it a library, communal kitchens and laundry areas, creches and a gymnasium.

This was the expression of constructivist architectural theory. Urbanist Leonid Sabsovich imagined the new society as consisting of Dom Kommuny (house-collectives), the design of which would obliterate marriage and property, with apartments for individual men and women, inaugurating a new sexual politics. Everyone in the dom-kommuna was a potential bachelor, husband or wife, “to the extent that today’s bachelor may be tomorrow’s husband and today’s couple may tomorrow be separated”. Divorces could be achieved by sliding the partition walls. Such houses were cracked down on under Stalin partly because of their loose sexual morality.  

In his 1931 book, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality, Wilhelm Reich describes the unfolding pragmatic sexual utopianism as a “moral atmosphere that seemed, at first, ascetic: no sexual importuning in the street; reserve and seriousness everywhere… If a man dared slap a woman’s backside he might well be prosecuted before the party tribunal. But the question of whether one wanted to become a sexual partner was being asked more and more openly and unhesitatingly: sexual companionship without any underhandedness”.