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– DACHA – impossibility of freedom in captivity was really manifest in the spaces people created.4 By 1960, Soviet urban planners declared that the USSR led the world in the number of apartments built per 1,000 persons. In 1959, Great Britain built 5.4 apartments per 1,000 citizens, France 7.2 and the USA 7.9. All the while the Soviet Union counted 14.5 units per 1,000 citizens. The Soviet construction program for 1966–70 aimed to move 65 million people into new housing but it was not expected to solve the housing crisis. Much of the new construction was flawed to the extent that immediate repairs were needed: the roofs leaked, the top floors sometimes didn’t have running water, the doors and floors were warped and the walls cracked.5 Nothing quite worked in the Soviet Union and everything was in need of endless repairs. One of my American friends expressed it best, saying that so much in the former Soviet Union looked as if it were 4 This kind of inventiveness was not limited to summerhouses. The Russian artist Vladimir Arkhipov created a project called Folk Forms – a collection of household practical objects created, repaired or improved by ordinary people. The online interface has many images: the artist is looking to identify the authors of the objects. He also welcomes submission of pictures of such objects. The site includes several pictures of gates and other architectural elements as well. The photographs of the objects were included in several exhibitions, including the Ostalgia at the New Museum in New York in 2011. 5 DiMaio gives examples of Soviet cartoons on the topic and cites citizens’ complaints published in the Soviet press. But the recognition of the problem did nothing to resolve it.
page 163
– Dasha Shkurpela – built by somebody whose hobby was popular mechanics. I only recently understood the accuracy of this ­observation. In the 1950s there was a lot of enthusiasm about the Gorkii methods of voluntary labor in housing construction, which was lauded in the 1957 Decree on Developing Housing Construction in the USSR. The Gorkii automobile workers were constructing houses themselves in their spare time, often using industrial waste and cheap materials. The Decree expressed hope that this experience would become an important nation­wide movement. Although some houses were built in such a fashion, all poorly constructed, the movement never took off on the aspired scale. It certainly blossomed in the dacha construction. — In their essay ‘Mourning in the hollows of architecture and psychoanalysis’ Maria McVarish, a practicing architect, and Julie Leavitt, an MD and a psychoanalyst, remarked: A further complication of space, in the everyday sense in which we use this word, is the extent to which our bodies are in it and of it, reflexively. We internalize the standards of everyday architectural space to such a degree that we rarely reflect on what its walls, windows, and roofs keep from us. Through lifetime of repeated movement, we incorporate the spatial conventions of environmental design down to their smallest and most detailed nuances: the feel, in one’s feet and 151

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– DACHA –

impossibility of freedom in captivity was really manifest in the spaces people created.4

By 1960, Soviet urban planners declared that the USSR led the world in the number of apartments built per 1,000 persons. In 1959, Great Britain built 5.4 apartments per 1,000 citizens, France 7.2 and the USA 7.9. All the while the Soviet Union counted 14.5 units per 1,000 citizens. The Soviet construction program for 1966–70 aimed to move 65 million people into new housing but it was not expected to solve the housing crisis. Much of the new construction was flawed to the extent that immediate repairs were needed: the roofs leaked, the top floors sometimes didn’t have running water, the doors and floors were warped and the walls cracked.5 Nothing quite worked in the Soviet Union and everything was in need of endless repairs. One of my American friends expressed it best, saying that so much in the former Soviet Union looked as if it were

4 This kind of inventiveness was not limited to summerhouses. The Russian artist Vladimir Arkhipov created a project called Folk Forms – a collection of household practical objects created, repaired or improved by ordinary people. The online interface has many images: the artist is looking to identify the authors of the objects. He also welcomes submission of pictures of such objects. The site includes several pictures of gates and other architectural elements as well. The photographs of the objects were included in several exhibitions, including the Ostalgia at the New Museum in New York in 2011. 5 DiMaio gives examples of Soviet cartoons on the topic and cites citizens’ complaints published in the Soviet press. But the recognition of the problem did nothing to resolve it.

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