ie School of Architecture

The horizontal skyscraper

The Wolkenbügel is an office building raised almost seventy meter above the square, which Lissitzky proposed as a horizontal variation to the American skyscrapers. It was made up of a h-shaped horizontal piece with three floor offices which was supported by means of a series of double stainless steel girders, to be manufacturates by Krupps, from which the cantilever platforms protruded. These great one hundred meter long girders rested on three translucent towers which housed a complicated system of double stairs and lift units.

Lissitzky drew the Wolkenbügel in detail, he made several photomontages of the building in Nikitsky Square in Moscow where it would fly above the buildings which surrounded the square. Lissitzky was not thinking exclusively about a proyect for a building that could have more or less typologial interest, he was thinking about a system, about the infrastructure of the city. The project had the structure, size and approach of a great civil work without important variations.

In the plan published in ASNOVA, LIssitzky dre the eight Wolkenbügel oriented radially towards the Kremlin. Among them, therefore, there is a tension which puts them in order, as if they were the gates of the city, precise points whose geometry does not depend on the specific urban space where they are situated, but whose position and shape obey the laws of scale of the city. It was the intention of the architect to alter the urban landscape.

ie School of Architecture lo descubrió en diciembre de 2009

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