The Afterlife of the Social Condenser
In the late 1920s, for a brief period, Soviet architects discussed a concept they referred to as a social condenser: a kind of architectural device which was intended to engender communist life. Recent scholarship has sought to recover this notion from its capitalist appropriation by Rem Koolhaas, and revitalise and repurpose the metaphor for 21st century struggles â well, not so much the metaphor, but the expression. The term "social condenser" has always been an almost pure example of rhetoric, containing barely enough substance to serve as an architectural formula. The words have a certain fascination due to the fact that they contain the verb "to condense" â "condenser" is an agent noun.
One of the most prolific scholars to have published on the topic is the London-based anthropologist MichaĆ Murawski, sometimes writing in collaboration with Jane Rendell. The adequacy of their understanding of the sociopolitical context is not in question, but the interpretation they give to the metaphor or the social condenser is doubtful.
Did the Soviet architects who coined the term have steam condensers or electrical condensers in mind? Nobody knows for sure. Perhaps they never decided on a canonical interpretation, using the word just because they liked the ring of it. The metaphor's active life was very short.
Murawski, along with a bandwagon of retrospective interpreters, favours an electrical interpretation. I don't take his reading as definitive, not because he is not a Man of Science, but because he hasn't taken seriously the metaphor's grounding in the (electrical) condenser as an actual device. If he had consulted an electrical engineer, he would have learned that the condenser is a rudimentary thing. Its characteristics are easily grasped. The highly technological nature of "scientific socialism" makes this kind of technical inquiry even more appropriate than it would be in a typical anthropological or historical research project. Instead, he chose to bluff his way through.
Here he is on video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X_GEJ3SGlw&t=128s. As a Youtube commenter remarked:
(I believe this commenter is not just a random Internet wise guy but the same Igor Demchenko who is based in the architecture department at TU Darmstadt.)
And here is Murawski writing about the metaphor, conflating condensers with transformers:
The term âcondenserâ itself derives from the word for an electrical transformer â a device used to re-deploy and intensify electric currents. In line with the futurist electricity-fetishism typical of early 20th century radical movements â best expressed, as Russian literature scholar Katerina Clark has observed, in the Soviet context by Leninâs famous proclamation, âcommunism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire countryâ â the idea of the Social Condenser is suffused with vivid connotations pertaining to electricity, radiation, and magnetism.
For the Constructivists, social condensation was about filling architecture with a sort of revolutionary political electricity. As theorized, designed, and built, the Social Condenser was to be an architectural device for electrocuting people into a communist way of life (byt). Strelka Magazine, 2017 (archive link)
The social condenser is a theoretical concept developed by radical Soviet Constructivist architects in the 1920s. It is devoted to conceiving how architecture, the city and public space can coalesce into an integrated machine for bringing people into close proximity with each other, and â like a condenser or transformer in an electrical circuit â increasing the âvoltageâ or intensity of their interactions. The effect of this act of social condensation, for lead proponents Moisei Ginzburg and others, would be to transform people from alienated, isolated bourgeois subjects to self- and mutually fulfilled members of a collectively oriented, radical new society. Tank Magazine, Autumn/Winter 2020
It seems wrong to me that Murawski considers the programme of rural electrification to be evidence of fetishization of electricity itself, rather than a highly socially relevant and progressive public works project. In addition, there's the problem that electrocution technically refers to execution by electric shock.
It is worth noting that the paragraph Murawski references in Clark is directly after an inaccurate citation in her book: Katerina Clark quotes Catherine Cooke's words but attributes them to Moisei Ginzburg. Thus Cooke's (electrical) interpretation gains momentum in the literature and risks becoming canonical.
By 1995 Cooke herself had apparently pulled back from this definitively electrical framing of the metaphor, and wrote that the social condenser was "a chemical or electrical analogy (it is not clear which)".
Here is what Katerina Clark wrote, also in 1995:
Ginzburg is using "condenser," a term that denotes the apparatus where change occurs in a variety of physical processes, such as condensation of steam, in the specific context of electricity (where it means an apparatus for accumulating or increasing the intensity of an electrical charge). Thus he is implicitly identifying his theory with Lenin's famous maxim of 1920: "Communism equals socialism plus the electrification of the entire country. But the particular electrical apparatus Ginzburg chose as his central trope, the condenser, provides the added implication that the effect of the social condenser will be not merely to convey "electricity" but to intensify it, thus the end sought was not merely a more proletarian society, but also a society that had stepped up to a higher intensity of living.
Now, the first sentence of this quote is inaccurate: the term condenser is not a generic technical term that's used in a variety of ways: it's a term with two meanings that are scientifically unrelated: the electrical one, due to Alessandro Volta, and the slightly later steam-related one, related to the functioning of turbines and steam engines. The fact that the meanings are unrelated and cause confusion was the motivation for adopting the new name "capacitor" for the electrical condenser, a change which started in the 1920s. It is not clear whether Clark was aware of the ambiguity acknowledged by Cooke. We can't know whether Ginzburg was alluding to Lenin's ideas, let alone identifying the two programmes.
Murawski misinterprets Katerina Clark's first sentence in his own way, saying
Cultural historian Katerina Clark draws attention to the fact that Ginzburg makes use of the term âcondenserâ, referring to an apparatus which brings about changes in physical processes through electricity.
His rephrasing implies that the condenser causes physical changes through electricity, while Clark is making the more accurate (but still problematic) claim that condensers (in general) are the site of changes in physical processes.
The latter part of Clark's paragraph follows Catherine Cooke's electrical reading of the metaphor very closely. Cooke had written:
Low-voltage activity and a weak consciousness would be focused through the circuits of these âsocial condensersâ into high-voltage catalysts of change, in the habits and attitudes of the mass population.
Note that this claim itself is flawed, as an electrical condenser (capacitor) cannot increase the voltage of electricity. It can only store charge. Nor does a condenser contain circuits â it's much simpler than that.
Clark mentions another metaphor, that of the cell:
The communal house was to be a "cell" of a future utopia. (Clark, 1995)
This statement is somewhat perplexing, in the light of N.A. Miliutin's discussion of planning for the provision of an "individual residential cell (that is, for each person)". However unpalatable it may be to us now, the vision was of a large communal house consisting of cells, rather than constituting a cell. It was Miliutin who commissioned the Narkomfin building. Were large public buildings, such as clubs to be considered as cells as well? Their role as collective, rather than individual, accommodation would seem to complicate this description.
The Narkomfin building contained both individual living spaces (cells) and shared spaces such as dining rooms. Such a programme owes a great deal to the well-established typology of the military barracks. The social condenser's project of encouraging citizens to adopt a collective lifestyle seems to have a sociological flavour of regimented structural functionalism with a theoretical core of methodological individualism. This is what architectural determinism looks like: a place for everything, for the cultivation of every kind of approved behaviour, and for none of the deprecated behaviours.
The architectural historian Tijana Vujosevic has drawn attention to the Soviet programme's attention to the individual, rather than only the abstract collective. One Soviet building type she has investigated is the bath house, a place where personal hygiene and collective hygiene intersect, and equally a (warm, humid) social condenser where people who might not otherwise even come into contact with each other had the opportunity to interact informally.
There were two poles to these Soviet architectures: the individual cell inhabited by a single adult, and a variety of communal spaces that were used collectively.
The architect Rem Koolhaas was inspired in the late 70s by the architect Leonidov's writings and unbuilt projects, which included interpretations of the social condenser idea. For Koolhaas, it was the programmatic complexity and intensity of the buildings created by the idea which was attractive. Murawski, the cool kid, writing 40 years later, disparages the words of the no-longer-hip Koolhaas, describing them as "ungainly". Yet Koolhaas is no dummy, and his gloss of the condenser metaphor is pithy:
Programmatic layering upon vacant terrain to encourage dynamic coexistence of activities and to generate through their interference, unprecedented events.
There seems to be a close connection with the electrical metaphor, here, in the sense that the "vacant terrain" is the dielectric, and the layering of programmes corresponds to the plates of the condenser. It seems likely that Koolhaas investigated and/or intuited the metaphor's mechanics at least as deeply as Murawski and Rendell. At the same time, his 1979 paper The Future's Past doesn't even mention the term, while deploying the concept. My impression is that this was a shrewd decision. Koolhaas wanted to create a prescription for future architecture, not a divagation on quaint revolutionary propaganda.
As a metaphorical vehicle, the electrical condenser is itself ungainly, having multiple parts with no clear analogue in social interactions. The steam condenser has the advantage of being very simple in its structure: it is literally an empty, cooled vessel, a volume into which steam flows and out of which water can be drained.
I want to discuss the social condenser as if the workings of the metaphor mattered. There is the known revolutionary context, on the subject of which the historians and anthropologists are experts, and whatever interpretation we select must comport with the context.
As Murawski and Rendell write (in formalistic terms) the true intention of Ginzburg et al cannot be recovered:
Since, in any case, it is impossible to get into the heads of the Soviet Constructivists, to discover beyond any doubt what they âreally meantâ, we work towards formulating a redefinition of the âsocial condenserâ, deployable in the twenty-first centuryânot only on historical and theoretical grounds, but also on the contested terrain of practiceâto the design and use of the built environment itself.
To keep the metaphor "alive", it must have the flexibility to respond to and reflect its sociopolitical context. Yet a metaphor that is not understood at all as an image (by anyone) is rightly called dead.
First of all, though, I must acknowledge the countervailing desire to see the term remain an open signifier, freely applicable to such architectural entities as housing estates and pubs. Murawski and Rendell write that "the precise significance of the social condenser is difficult to pin down." Such a floating signifier can serve to represent a lack: nostalgia for the social condenser arises from melancholic feelings of attenuation and atomization of the social fabric. Victor Buchli, in an article about social condensers, quotes from Eng and Kazanjian's 2003 book Loss: The Politics of Mourning:
The ability of the melancholic object to express multiple losses at once speaks to its flexibility as a signifier.
I'm not sure the social condenser, as a concept or even just as a term, has the flexibility to cope with the demands that are placed on it, these days. MichaĆ Murawski's 2017 piece for the Architectural Review's Outrage feature refers vaguely to the ongoing loss of "sites of social condensation". What exactly does this verbing of the metaphor evoke, that couldn't be communicated more specifically? At times it feels that this terminology has little going for it other than its nebulous nature, its appeal to those who have a taste for obfuscation.
The psychoanalytic milieu is full of abstract concepts which cannot be visualized. The ability to operate at this schematic, imaginary level is central to psychoanalytic thinking. Thus, the nebulous character of the notion of a social condenser is entirely unproblematic to the psychoanalytic mind: it's just as (un)manipulable and (un)graspable as any other term of art in that field. Jane Rendell's writing seems to exist happily in that milieu. After all, condensation is also a psychoanalytic concept.
Yet from the first moment I heard the term, decades ago, I have been an enthusiastic believer in its power to evoke the forms of collectivistic architecture. I find the image of gas particles (molecules of water, in the case of steam) bouncing around in a container and coalescing into a liquid vivid and memorable.
The idea of using a scientific or technological metaphor to describe a place where people are brought together by architecture is not a complicated one. Here is an exemplary modern "living" metaphor of social interaction in architecture, based on the notion of collisions between individuals, seen as particles. (The building under discussion was by Steven Holl Architects.)
Instead of precisely defining the activities inside it, the Rubenstein Commons creates a space between â not just between walls, but between life and architecture. Like a hadron collider, the building smashes atoms (or, to paraphrase David Rubenstein, collides great brains together), in order to expand the horizon of our knowledge and collective human consciousness. (Anna Bokov, 2021)
This metaphor is so clear as to be almost trivial. What is it about the metaphor of the social condenser that makes it so fascinatingly elusive? I believe it's simply that it has not been understood.
Writing in the 70s, Anatole Kopp, while subscribing to the electrical interpretation of the social condenser, also presented a clear evocative image of proximity and coalescence:
Like electrical condensers that transform the nature of current, the architects' proposed "social condensers" were to turn the self-centered individual of capitalist society into a whole man, the informed militant of socialist society in which the interests of each merged with the interests of all.
Here Kopp asserts that electrical condensers "transform the nature of current", a grand claim that no electrical engineer would agree with. The next thing he says â about the merging of interests â would, in contrast, be a good fit for a steam condenser metaphor, as molecular water vapour ("the interests of each") becomes bulk liquid ("the interests of all"). This phase transition is a bona fide transformation â whereas the operation of an electrical condenser is a way of storing energy. The condenser is a device which transforms fine steam into coarse water.
Nevertheless, it is the electrical interpretation of the concept of a social condenser that has gained most support in the literature. So what is to be said about it, as a metaphor?
The most typical first encounter a student has with a electrical condenser (capacitor) in an educational context is as a device which can be charged up by applying a voltage. Having been changed, it can then release a jolt of current, usually brief and much more intense than the current which flowed when it was changing up.
In a more advanced sense, the capacitor can be understood as a circuit element that allows a current to flow which is proportional to the rate of change of voltage (whether increasing or decreasing). This means that alternating current can often flow through capacitors, while direct current quickly stops flowing.
The capacitor is one of four ideal electrical components, along with the inductor, the resistor and the memristor. Whether the other components can serve as sociopolitical metaphors is an open question. I'm pretty sure it's possible to understand the capacitor without understanding the other components.
Buchli's article on the topic insists on keeping the term in scare quotes throughout ("social condenser"), as if it is a delicate and potentially dangerous object to be analysed at arm's length, perhaps in a glovebox or with a remote manipulator. The distant, quasi-technical aura of the concept extends to its characteristics as an idea. As Tijana Vujosevic puts it, "utopia is traditionally discussed in terms of the abstract diagram".
In Kopp's book, the following propagandistic passage is quoted:
Under communism people receive a many-sided culture, and find themselves at home in various branches of production: to-day I work in an administrative capacity, I reckon up how many felt boots or how many French rolls must be produced during the following month; to-morrow I shall be working in a soap factory, next month perhaps in a steam laundry, and the month after that in an electric power station. This will be possible when all the members of society have been suitably educated.
This is the spirit of scientific Socialism â the spirit of diverse industrial experience, and at least a smattering of technical knowledge, for every member of the population. Much as the social condenser brought diverse individuals together in the same place, diverse experiences would accrue to each individual.
The writer Andrei Platonov, for example, who came of age at the time of the revolution, studied electrical engineering and worked in the field until 1927. There is no doubt that he knew what an electrical condenser was and how it worked.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics; Yevgeny Zamyatin trained as an engineer. These men would have interrogated the metaphor of the social condenser from the perspective of technical knowledge rather than revolutionary zeal. It's not an unrealistic standard to try to live up to.
As part of their research project on the topic, Murawski and Rendell had Moisei Ginzburg's original articles on the social condenser translated into English. These texts contain clues about the architect's own conception of the metaphor.
Ginzburg admiringly describes the equipment of the chemical (not electrical) industries including "[T]he complex process of a plant for the production of sulphuric-acid, with multiple, coordinated diagrams of circulation and schemes of specialised equipment."
He goes on to itemize the equipment: ""Illustrations 7, 8 and 9, (architect E. I. Norvert) offer a new and striking solution for a thermoelectric plant (with boilers), which functions by means of the subdivision of complex production processes into architectural sections, achieved, on the one hand, thanks to hoppers arranged on a flat plane, and, on the other, to cauldrons placed next to furnaces fed by workers."
It is striking that Ginzburg mentions the imposing forms and architectural disposition of the apparatus: boilers, hoppers, cauldrons, furnaces. The vision of a constructivist architect interprets these imposing objects, their orderly spatial adjacencies and relationships to a "flat plane", as geometric primitives, rather than understanding them as technical contrivances.
It is noteworthy that all thermoelectric plants in the 1920s had (steam) boilers, yet Ginzburg enthusiastically mentions their presence. A thermoelectric plant would have included, along with the boilers, one or more generator sets, each comprising steam turbines, their condensers, and an electrical generator or dynamo. The word dynamo (ĐĐžĐœĐ°ĐŒĐŸ) was, of course, adopted as the name of the Soviet sports association founded in 1923. While the steam condenser may appear to be a comparatively static, ancillary element in the generator set, it would have been on the same scale as the other industrial elements that so impressed Ginzburg. I consider it very likely that he had these steam condensers in mind when he formulated his the concept of the social condenser. Electrical condensers did not exist on the same scale; they did not manifest as impressive elements of an industrial ensemble.
That Ginzburg was inspired by the dynamism of factories is obvious from his 1924 book Style and Epoch. He writes
[I]f one were to think about what actually gives this image its vividness and tension, one would easily realize, of course, that it is first and foremost the machine. Take the machine away from the modern factory and you will immediately see the loss of that rhythm, that organization, and all that pathos of labor. It is precisely the machine, the main occupant and the master of the modern factory, which, having already exceeded its bounds and gradually filling all the corners of our way of life and transforming our psyche and our aesthetic, constitutes the most important factor influencing our conception of form.
The social condenser was to be a kinetic, operative piece of machinery, not a dead quotation of industrial forms.
Ginzburg, was, however, an architect, compelled to abstract the dynamism of machinery into purer, clearer forms. The design of a locomotive was explained (in Style and Epoch) as resulting from movement in a particular direction; every other aspect of its design, all of the intricacies, were abstracted away. Analogously, the volumetric form of a condenser could become, in the hands the constructivists, a glass drum. As such, it became something primarily formal, rather than a socially or technically motivated space. There is no better example of this than Ilya Gosolov's Zuev Club of 1926, with its huge cylindrical room lifted above the street corner.
