Monument to the Third International
by Vladimir Tatlin

Takehiko Nagakura
Associate Professor of Architecture, MIT

There are many interesting buildings in history which all architects know but no one has ever seen. With the help of the computer graphics technology we are trying to build them in a virtual space. We are trying to actually be in it, to walk around and to experience the space.

Why? There are a few reasons. But the motivation of this project, first, was a very simple motivation. We wanted to look at these spaces that we have never seen. If you're an architecture student your history teachers always show you the drawings of these buildings as the prime examples of 20th century architecture. But we've never been able to be there and actually feel the space.

Everybody knows these wonderful movies by Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas. These Hollywood people can make a fantastic world which doesn't exist in reality. When we look at something like that, as architects, we see the possibility of actually building these very famous, but unconstructed, structures in the virtual world. Then we can actually experience them.

So there are many buildings like this, which were never built, but are very famous among architects. For instance, there's a very large tower designed by a guy named Vladimir Tatlin at the beginning of the century. And it was supposed to be 400 meters high and supposed to be inserted in the city of St. Petersburg. It was supposed to be the expression of the new revolutionary culture of the new Russia. But of course the tower was too high and the design too radical, and for many reasons it was never built.

The tower was designed in 1919, very shortly after the Russian Revolution. There was this short period in the history of the Soviet cultural revolution where the authority was encouraging every artist to do something really avant garde-ish, something really new. Vladimir Tatlin was somebody like Leonardo Da Vinci of the period. He was a painter and sculptor. He designed architecture and this tower, and he was even interested in designing a flying machine, just like Leonardo Da Vinci.

Tatlin was trying to come up with a very different form from the one that was dominant in that period of Soviet architecture. St. Petersburg was very well known as a classical capital. It was a city for the Czar, and the Czar built up this extraordinary amount of classical architecture. It was a city built in very classical languages. And at the time, Tatlin was looking for a site to build his new tower, which represented the coming of the new society, or the coming of new ideals. He was trying to come up with a new form of expression.

So he came up with this very wild double-spiral-carved shape of a tower, and then he wanted to insert that really radically different shape into a historical city. And so there's a contrast of architectural language-- the formal language between the city and the tower.

And on top of that, there was a contrast of the scale between the tower and the city, because he wanted to make it as high as possible, of course. If you build something extraordinary as an expression of a new, strong nation, you want to make it number-one in the world. One of the highest structures that existed in that period was the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which was about 300 meters high. So Tatlin wanted his tower to be much higher, say, 400 meters.

In all senses his tower was a big contrast to the old city, the old society. And that was one of the reasons many architects were excited about his design. But unfortunately, it was not built. Probably one of the reasons was it was impossible to build something as wild in form as that. It was probably not realistic economically, also.

Tatlin, in the end, left a very strong documentation of his idea in the form of models and schematic drawings. So from them we can kind of imagine what kind of shape the building would have been. And so that's the beginning of our project.

What we wanted to do was to insert his tower in the city. So two of my students went to St. Petersburg and they shot live footage of the city from many corners, towards the direction of the site. And when they brought these video clips back, we superimposed our virtual computer graphics generated tower into the cityscape. This extraordinary tower was inserted into the city. To look at it for the first time was so exciting.