Sunday, March 16, 2014
Congressional A (Omni Shoreham)
In 1916, the German-American psychotechnician Hugo Münsterberg presciently described the managerial milieu that would take root in countries like the Soviet Union upon the close of the war. After the pioneering experience of total war, there could only be total peace, and “national efficiency [could] never again be severed from scientific thoroughness.” This was a refrain that the Soviet avant-gardes could embrace—and one of these fronts was the problem of urban visuality. Münsterberg’s thinking was adapted to many aspects of Soviet vocational life, and it found its most intriguing expression in architecture, where his ideas about laboratory-based perceptual tests offered a startling proposition: that psychophysiological aesthetics could be harnessed to the task of defining new forms of spatial perception. Psychotechnics was borne out of the experience of the first World War, and it arrived in a discipline that had already seen significant formal and technological upheavals under the banner of Modernism, promising to synthesize and make empirical those transformations through a new human science that could account for both the production and the reception of architectural space.
This paper brings into dialogue two figures who sought to develop a newly revolutionary subjectivity though a marriage of psychotechnical testing and perceptual aesthetics, recasting the urban environment as a battleground—Pavel Rudik and Nikolai Ladovsky. Between them, we see a distinctly Soviet response to the transnational and interdisciplinary phenomenon of psychotechnics, borne of the first World War and of central importance to the artistic and political trajectories of the interwar period.
