Monument to the Third International

The Monument to the Third International, or Tatlin Tower, was an architectural project by the Russian sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, which was presented in the early twenties to be built in Petrograd as a monument and headquarters of the Third International. It announced the "glorious future of communism", but due to the increase in the cost of materials as a result of the Russian civil war, it was never built.

History

Model at the Royal Academy, London (2012).

The Comintern commissioned Vladimir Tatlin to design a monument to represent him in the Third International. The model of the monument was presented in Petrograd in 1920, coinciding with the anniversary of the Russian revolution.

The monument was never built, as the civil war increased the cost of materials, preventing the Tatlin Tower from going beyond the initial project phase.

Features

It was a constructivist-style tower about 400 meters high, surpassing the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It would consist of a spiral structure of iron and steel, turned to one side at the angle of the Earth's axis, containing four glass structures with different shapes inside: a cube, a pyramid, a cylinder and half a sphere. All these elements would rotate at different speeds. The cube would complete its rotation in a year, the pyramid in a month, the cylinder in a day, and the sphere in half an hour. According to T. M. Shapiro, who assisted Tatlin in building the model of the tower, its two enormous lower curvatures they had been designed to straddle the Neva River.

Inside it would be the headquarters of the Communist International, as well as a telegraph office and several restaurants. It would have a series of giant screens showing the latest world news. Emblem of the "socialist utopia", the monument was imagined as a beacon that illuminates the new world.

Legacy

In the late 1990s, Japanese architect Takehiko Nagakura made a detailed virtual animation of this project. He filmed where the tower was supposed to go from different parts of the city and then recreated the image of the structure using computer generated graphics.

Constructivist architecture, and the Monument to the Third International in particular, served as inspiration for the redesign of the CKA Ice Hockey Arena and Park in Saint Petersburg, proposed by architecture firm Coop Himmelb(l)au.

Several models of the tower have been built, one of the best known is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm (Sweden).