Brian Dillon on Vladimir Tatlin’s tower in St Petersburg | Books | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/25/vladimir-tatlins-tower-st-petersburg
L’emblème de l’URSS en fait !
In the heart of St Petersburg, on the north bank of the Neva, the spire of the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul lances the sky like a baroque syringe. But the spire has been surpassed, for height and force, by a structure that soars slantwise some 400 metres into the air, and prods the clouds like an accusing finger.
The building - if that is what it is - spans the river and presents to a viewer of its eastern aspect a flat, grey lattice that might be a crane or a vast gun emplacement levelled at the heavens. It soon resolves itself, however, into discrete but unified parts. The iron spine of the thing speeds out of the earth at an angle of 60 degrees. Encircling it, a double helix of the same metal, supported by vertical and diagonal struts, tapers to an oddly indeterminate apex. Inside this narrowing cage, an arrangement of three (or is it four?) huge glass geometric shapes is visible. Perhaps, as one strains now to take in the whole from a nearby bridge, there is a grinding of gears far above, and something revolves at the upper reaches of the tower, half lost in a flurry of snow.