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.

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.

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!

Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.