Constructivism: Pragmatic Utopianism

This article provides an overview of the history of Constructivism and its essential theory and practice in Soviet Russia of the 1920s and early 1930s, focusing particularly on various areas of design activity, including architecture and furniture, graphic design and photography, sculpture and textiles. Consequently, it analyses in detail several designs that embody most clearly the Constructivist approach. Some of these were produced by the original members of the Working Group of Constructivists (Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Aleksei Gan, etc.), while others were devised by artists who never officially joined the group but embraced Constructivist ideas (The Vesnin brothers, Gustavs Klucis Gustav Klutsis, Lyubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin, etc). The author acknowledges that the Constructivists’ aspiration to transform the Soviet material environment could be considered utopian in the conditions of Russia’s social, economic, and industrial circumstances of the early 1920s, but she stresses that there was also a very strong element of pragmatism in Constructivist theory and practice, which is evident in the way they tackled real problems and offered eminently practical solutions to everyday difficulties. This argument is supported by detailed analyzes of certain Constructivist objects.