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Ivan Leonidov, Palace of Culture of the District of Moscow, Russia, Competition Elevation for the Center for Physical Education, (1930)
What appears to be a night scene in the Egyptian desert, with an arriving airship transporting modern tourists to a pyramid, is in fact a competition scheme for a sports center in the middle of soviet Moscow. On a striking black paper background, Ivan Leonidov isolates his pyramid, this one made of glass, one of four buildings making up his entry for the Palace of Culture, yet another prestigious, architecturally stimulating, but doomed project of the period.Within the great, open interior space, leonidov envisioned a gymnasium, fields for games, and a swimming canal with a sandy beach set up with chaise lounges and umbrellas. Reaction ranged from praise to denunciation. The journalist V. Sherbakov in the Construction of Moscow, (1931) wrote: “Without a doubt he is a talented architect, but he is an anarchist, a petit-bourgeois who works in an abstract vacuum.”
