‘Hidden Urbanism’ is a useful and informative guide to the Moscow Metro, but one of the greatest artworks of the twentieth century still awaits its definitive account, says Owen Hatherley

Words
Owen Hatherley

‘Hidden Urbanism: Architecture and Design of the Moscow Metro 1935–2015’
Edited by Philipp Meuser and Anna Martovitskaya
DOM Publishers, 352pp, £65

Moscow’s underground system is among the greatest architectural and engineering achievements of the twentieth century – or any century. Its spaciousness, opulence and rich and occasionally unnerving narrative and propaganda content make it almost unique among transport systems of any kind, but for the several similar systems built in its image across the USSR, in Kiev, Tashkent, St Petersburg, Baku and elsewhere. However, practically the only serious information you can find on the Moscow Metro in English is in the tourist photobooks that have been produced since the first stations opened in 1935 – heavy on architectural porn, urban myths and, recently, grisly stories, but light on serious history, even though the subject is practically begging for it.

Komsomolskaya station on the Koltsevaya line by AV Shchusev, VD Kokorin and AY Zabolotnaya, 1952 (ph: AP)

‘Hidden Urbanism’ promises to fill the gap. It’s part of DOM Publishers’ recent effort to produce informative, archive-based books on various aspects of Soviet urbanism and architecture, from prefabricated mass housing to Stalinist town planning, to the modules of the space programme, so you’d hope that this would be the history that the Moscow Metro deserves.

It is, like the tourist guides, a semi-official product, carrying the imprimatur of City Architect Sergey Kuznetsov, and also marks an apparent crossroads for the Moscow Metro. In order to deal with the growth of the Russian capital, the network is to be expanded massively, with 78 new stations planned. Rather than being designed, as has been the case for decades, by the in-house design bureau Metrogipotrans, many of these are being put out to competition, breaking with a remarkable level of consistency since the 1930s.

One of the most striking things about touring the Moscow Metro – something that can afford literally hours of joy, until the dirt starts to show under your fingernails – is its unbroken nature. Whereas Moscow’s surface architecture had a truly ghastly 1990s and 2000s, the Metro’s designers never lost the plot, and its dreamlike yet utilitarian subterranean world has always been maintained far better than anything above. So this book works both as a valediction and a promise of something quite different to come.

Sculptural decoration at Ploshchad Revolyutsii Station, 1938

The book features panoramic photo-essays by Alexander Popov, an essay by Kuznetsov (who manages to get numerous important facts wrong), and a short text on the Metro’s signs and maps (which have never been its strongest point compared with London or Paris), but the bulk consists of a history by Alexander Zmuel, which is by far the most interesting and useful part, making clear the discrete periods into which the Metro’s architecture can be divided.

The first projects for the Metro, circa 1932, were Constructivist, as evidenced in the rare drawings printed here of glassy pavilions and straightforward Paris-style stations with tiles and adverts. What actually got built was an amalgam of modernism, classicism and deco, with lush materials – coloured marble and granite quarried across the USSR’s vast territory – but not much of the later statues, chandeliers and propaganda mosaics.

I Nikolayev’s ‘Tree of Friendship of Soviet Nations’ at Borovitskaya station (ph: Philipp Meuser).

This changed in 1938; stations such as Ploshchad Revolutsii and Mayakovskaya – both by the Metro’s most unusual and talented designer, Alexei Dushkin – created an unprecedented gesamtkunstwerk of lofty halls, shimmering stone and chrome, and narrative agitprop, celebrating the Soviet state’s revolutionary foundation and Stalinist present.

The 1950s was a decisive decade: at its start the Circle Line reached an astonishing, oppressive height (or should that be depth?) of grandeur, propaganda, fuss and frippery, with each bomb-shelter-deep station packed so full of chandeliers, majolica, stained glass, uplighters, pilasters and Corinthian columns that they almost began to encumber the buildings’ functional usefulness. By the end of the 1950s, all this had been brought to a sudden halt by Khrushchev’s campaign against architectural ‘superfluities’, with much extraneous decoration stripped from already commenced stations. A standardised station type was introduced, informally known as the ‘centipede’, with marble-clad columns running along tiled halls, like a slightly swisher version of Berlin’s U-Bahn. Dozens were built as the Metro extended out into new prefab ‘microrayons’ on the city’s outskirts.

What happens next is the least-known part of the Metro story. Contrary to Kuznetsov’s claim that the mid-1970s saw the Metro’s nadir, it is precisely in this decade that it returned, at least partially, to the spatial extravagance, atmospheric lighting effects and integrated artworks of the Stalin era, albeit never again at the Ring Line’s ludicrous levels of imperial display. This shift was actually heralded by the Baku Metro, opened in 1967, and here as elsewhere it’s a shame the authors don’t open out the story beyond the capital; this was always a national project in the USSR, informed by and with huge effect on outlying republics.

The stations of the 1970s and 1980s are fascinating in their integration of space-age modernity and heavy, expensive materials. Unfortunately, they aren’t fully illustrated here, with some beautiful examples left merely to Zmuel’s powers of description. But what is brought out very well is just how little disruption there was between the Metro of this period and that of the 1990s and 2000s. It “can be compared with a Gothic cathedral which organically absorbs the… styles of all the different ages during which it was constructed”, while remaining one continuous object, instantly recognisable.

The new stations break with the Metro’s ‘classic’ look in favour of something lighter and, dare I say, more fashionable. It suggests that in future, the Metro will be a bit more normal. But however ordinary its purpose, Moscow’s Metro was never ‘normal’, and although ‘Hidden Urbanism’ is a useful and informative primer, it cannot fully capture the horror, beauty and complexity of this masterful, disturbing collective artwork.