Aerials

Found this lovely '20's drawing by the Vesnins, no doubt for a workers something or other. Many things about it might intrigue us, not least it's painterly quality, but what got to me was the bloody aerials. Of course the aerials represent the real function of the building. At a moment of desperate importance, the spreading of the word means aerials above architecture. In constructivism we tend to get loads of planks at angles with hooters and aerials on top and that's just fine, but does it represent also the supremacy of the word, perhaps?

(I was also looking at Tessenow's music academy in Hellerau (1910 above) which looked pretty lovely. I'm sure it was lovely for him to until everybody for the last hundred years has run around declaring it fascist. Tessenow was infact more communist than fascist, and also tended to shut up in conversation about such things. He was not inclined toward the word.)

The other thing that plagues me about this sketch is that it represents the importance of those aerials above what we might call a nebulous heap of program, and further that I shall be seeing many many sketches just like this but without the aerials from all my students from here on until the summer holidays. I wonder what that means.