Russia's official style of architecture has long been stuck back in the Woolworth Building era. But the design of the U.S.S.R.'s hangar-like pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair, with its glass walls and trussed cantilevers, shows that Soviet architects are striving to catch up. If they want to take some tips from American building, they have an opportunity in a handsome, 82-panel photographic display of what is best and most typical in U.S. architecture today, on view this week at Moscow University. The first exhibit of U.S. building in the U.S.S.R. since World War II, it was sent by the American Institute of Architects for the Fifth Congress of the Union Internationale des Architectes, is drawing some 4.000 Muscovites a day.
Designed by Manhattan Architects Peter Blake and Julian Neski around the theme of transportation, the exhibition, using a figure of 60 million as its U.S. auto census, shows how Americans use and enjoy their cars, and how architects try to solve the problems of resulting congestion. The display includes the maze of Los Angeles expressways, multiparking garages and motels. It shows the plazas of Rockefeller Center. I.M. Pei's Denver Mile-High Center, and Mies van der Rohe's Manhattan Seagram Building. It chronicles the mass move to the suburbs by displaying a variety of housing, ranging from Rafael Soriano's garden apartments in Los Angeles to the up-to-date housing of Levittown, Pa. and suburban shopping and industrial centers, e.g., Eero Saarinen's General Motors Technical Center outside Detroit.
Taste for Gingerbread. Some Muscovites were astonished, some were critical, and all who came seemed interested. A group of women construction engineers found the simple, graceful lines of modern architecture distasteful, said they preferred Russian gingerbread. They failed to find esthetic interest in chimneys or fireplaces, passed them off as backward and primitive. All were amazed by the low-cost housing, though some skeptically assumed that it represented a dream of the future, not an existing fact.
While the model kitchen evoked a unanimous "so convenient," the many-storied parking garages, the interlocking multitiered roadways, the sheer number of cars on the roads caused the greatest awe. Visitors stood openmouthed in front of a photo that showed cars parked on a rooftop, bewildered about how they got there. Some also wondered whether Americans had thought of any practical alternative to riding elevators up in skyscrapers, because the ride must surely make a lot of people ill.
Arbiter of Style. The reaction of visiting architects and the official press tended to be favorable. Professionals were struck by the U.S. technical know-how, analyzed plumbing, wiring and heating systems, wondered (along with many an American) "how you keep them in repair." No less an authority than Nikita Khrushchev endorsed modern architecture over the Russian style. Speaking to leaders of delegations to the architectural congress, Khrushchev said that the very buildings at the university, where the congress was held, are too elaborate and ornate. He recommended simpler buildings. And that, as one American in Moscow put it, should be enough to set a new style in Soviet architecture.