Richard Anderson: Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect

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, and the book of the same name, explores Lissitzky’s translation of visual and textual media into spatial ideas and offers an in-depth study of the surviving drawings and archival artifacts related to Lissitzky’s most complex architectural proposal.

Richard Anderson is Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. He is the editor of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays (2012) and the author of Russia: Modern Architectures in History (2015) and Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect (2024).