Tatlin’s Tower, One of the Most Ambitious Buildings That Was Never Built

It’s no small project to found a new soci­ety, espe­cial­ly when you’re doing it on the scale of a place like Rus­sia. Apart from the con­sid­er­able prac­ti­cal chal­lenges it entails, there’s also the need for sym­bols bold enough to rep­re­sent the under­ly­ing ide­al. The avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin took it upon him­self to cre­ate just such a sym­bol in the years after the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. The result is offi­cial­ly known as the Mon­u­ment to the Third Inter­na­tion­al, named for the orga­ni­za­tion tasked with the pro­mo­tion of world com­mu­nism (often abbre­vi­at­ed to Com­intern). But it’s more com­mon­ly referred to as Tatlin’s Tow­er, per­haps in trib­ute to the artist’s par­tic­u­lar vision — one too ambi­tious for its real-life con­struc­tion even to begin.

“As part of a large-scale pro­gram to replace old czarist mon­u­ments with mon­u­ments to the rev­o­lu­tion, the huge struc­ture was both a sym­bol­ic sculp­ture and func­tion­al archi­tec­ture,” write Smarthis­to­ry’s Charles Cramer and Kim Grant. “Designed to strad­dle the Neva riv­er in St. Peters­burg, the 1300 foot (400 meter) iron and glass Mon­u­ment would sur­pass Paris’s Eif­fel Tow­er in both scale and com­plex­i­ty.”

Indeed, it would stand taller than the yet-to-be-con­struct­ed Empire State Build­ing, at least if you don’t count its anten­na. Con­sist­ing of “a con­tract­ing dou­ble helix that spi­rals upward, sup­port­ed by a huge diag­o­nal gird­er,” Tatlin’s Tow­er would con­tain four sub-struc­tures, each rotat­ing at a dif­fer­ent speed.

Yes, rotat­ing, and “com­plet­ing a full rev­o­lu­tion in accor­dance with the impor­tance of the insti­tu­tions con­duct­ing their busi­ness on the inside,” as Tim Brinkof writes at Big Think. “The cube that con­tains the leg­is­la­ture would have com­plet­ed a full rota­tion once per year. The pyra­mid above, hous­ing the offices of par­ty exec­u­tives, would have need­ed a month. The infor­ma­tion cen­ter, locat­ed at the very peak, would have rotat­ed once a day, offer­ing a 360-degree view of Pet­ro­grad,” as St. Peters­burg was known in 1920. (It would be re-named Leningrad in 1924 before going back to St. Peters­burg in 1991, after the end of the Sovi­et era.) You can learn more about how it all worked from the Archi­tec­ture Enthu­si­ast video at the top of the post, and the one from Side­pro­jects just above.

“Tatlin’s Tow­er was designed dur­ing a time when Com­mu­nist rule was still nascent and par­ty lead­ers sought to estab­lish a new and dis­tinct­ly social­ist iden­ti­ty through art,” writes Brinkof. Ide­al­ized rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the rul­ing class hav­ing been aggres­sive­ly scrapped along with the rul­ing class itself, the Bol­she­viks wel­comed any style that could shore up their rev­o­lu­tion­ary cause, total abstrac­tion includ­ed. Alas, though many par­ty offi­cials approved of Tatlin’s design, they com­mand­ed noth­ing like the resources to build it: “Rus­sia would go bank­rupt if it tried to acquire the insane amounts of steel and iron need­ed for the tow­er’s skele­tal frame­work.” Per­haps Leon Trot­sky, one of the pro­jec­t’s dis­senters, was right when he called it “imprac­ti­cal and roman­tic” — and per­haps those are the very qual­i­ties that keep Tatlin’s Tow­er an object of fas­ci­na­tion more than a cen­tu­ry lat­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Utopi­an, Social­ist Designs of Sovi­et Cities

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

What Makes Kaz­imir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) Not Just Art, But Impor­tant Art

The Unre­al­ized Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright Get Brought to Life with 3D Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tions

An Intro­duc­tion to Bru­tal­ism: the Icon­ic Post­war Archi­tec­tur­al Style That Com­bined Utopi­anism and Con­crete

The Futur­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Designs Cre­at­ed by Éti­enne-Louis Boul­lée in the 18th Cen­tu­ry

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.