Nikolai Krasil'nikov's Quantitative Approach to Architectural Design: An Early Example

This article introduces, and presents in a slightly edited translation, a paper written in 1928 by the Moscow architectural student Nikolai Krasil'nikov. Moisei Ginsburg, intellectual leader of the Constructivist group OSA (of which Krasil'nikov was a member), had built the course in architectural theory that he gave to the Vkhutemas diploma class around the procedures of his group's ‘functional method’, which has considerable historical interest in itself. It was, however, Krasil'nikov who saw the critical shortcoming of the method so far developed; he points out that, while it created a firm basis for the introduction of scientific, and above all, quantified methods into the analytical stages of the design process, it offered as yet no means of dealing with the crucial synthetic stage with a similar certainty. In this paper and in a later collaborative one, also quoted, he tried to ‘creep towards’ such procedures, which have interest as precursors of recent trends.