Internationality is an asset of our epoch.
Richard Anderson is professor of architectural history and theory at the University of Edinburgh. He is the editor and principal translator of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays (GSAPP Books, 2012) and the author of Russia: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Books, 2015) and Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect (MIT Press, 2024).
After achieving international acclaim as a painter and designer, El Lissitzky set out in 1924 to convince the world—and himself—that he was also an architect. He did this with a project for a “horizontal skyscraper,” which he gave an obscure and untranslatable name: Wolkenbügel. Eight of these buildings, perched atop slender pillars, were intended to stand at major intersections along Moscow’s Boulevard Ring, integrating the flow of tramlines, subways, and elevators. This talk is based Anderson’s 2024 book Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect and explores Lissitzky’s translation of visual and textual media into spatial ideas, offering an in-depth study of the surviving drawings and archival artifacts related to Lissitzky’s most complex architectural proposal. It shows how the Wolkenbügel manifested and shaped the conditions of internationality from which modern architecture was born.