Workers' Club is a work by the Soviet artist, sculptor, and designer Alexander Rodchenko, a founder of constructivism. It was built for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1925. The artist aimed to create an optimal model space for self-education and cultural leisure activities, including playing chess. The display of the Workers' Club in Paris aroused great interest on the part of both artists and the general public. After the exhibition was over, the furniture set that made up the Workers' Club was gifted to the French Communist Party. Its current whereabouts are unknown, and the set is considered missing. Since the middle of the 20th century, several reconstructions of individual components of the club, as well as of the complete set, have been realized in various countries. The most complete and accurate copy of the Worker's Club was made in 2021 by experts of the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Design and Applied Arts from the original designs by Alexander Rodchenko and using the tools and techniques employed in the original.
History By the mid-1920s, Rodchenko, a founder of constructivism, was already an acclaimed and highly sought-after figure in several artistic fields. In addition to painting, graphics, sculpture, and photography, he proved successful in spatial and interior design, becoming one of the pioneering Soviet designers. Rodchenko combined his multi-faceted creativity with teaching at VKhUTEMAS: in 1923 he was elected chair of the Metalworking Department and, two years later, when the latter was merged with the Woodworking Department to form Metalworking and Woodworking Department – DERMETFAC (Russian: Факультет обработки дерева и металла — ДЕРМЕТФАК), he also chaired that new department. On the back of his achievements and authority in the country's artistic circles, as well as his good reputation in the eyes of government leaders, Rodchenko was brought in to work on the Soviet Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, held in Paris from late April to late October 1925. The project had great political significance – it was the first time the Soviet Union would participate in such a major international event. Yet the timeline for putting up the Soviet section at the exhibition was very tight, since diplomatic relations with France had only been established in October 1924, six months before the opening of the exhibition. As a member of the Exhibition Committee and deputy chair of its selection board, Rodchenko played an important role in selecting the design for the Soviet Exhibition Pavilion, with preference going to the project of the avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov. Once the competition was over and construction work began, Rodchenko was dispatched to Paris to design the Soviet exposition. It was Rodchenko who came up with the color scheme for the two-story frame pavilion – the contrasting combination of red, white and gray.
Creation and main characteristics
As a key element of the interior of the Soviet Pavilion, Rodchenko designed what he believed to be an ideal space for collective self-education and cultural pastime of the urban proletariat – a workers' club. Namesake public spaces which Leon Trotsky dubbed ″forges of proletarian mass culture″ were being set up by the thousands in the cities of the Soviet Union at that time, alongside reading cabins in the countryside. Workers' clubs were multifunctional, allowing to hold both propaganda and educational events, show films, put on plays, and initiate industrial workers into fiction and intellectual games. In 1924–28, the Proletkult even published the magazine titled ″Workers' Club″, which served as a conceptual aid for running namesake public spaces. Rodchenko designed the Workers' Club exhibit with the assistance of his students at the VKhUTEMAS in the weeks leading up to the Paris trip. The design fully embodied the artist's constructivist outlook. The basic principles that guided Rodchenko in the creation of the work were laid out after the exhibition in the Modern Architecture Magazine by his wife and creative associate Varvara Stepanova, who was also a renowned artist and constructivist designer, and who wrote for the magazine under the pseudonym Varst. The key project criteria were not so much aesthetic as practical:
All the furnishings of the Workers' Club were decided to be made of wood. In March–April 1925, they were manufactured to designs and sketches brought from Moscow by Rodchenko, at the furniture factory in the Parisian suburb Asnières. However, according to Stepanova's recollections, not all the elements of the original design could be made, due to the tight deadline and a more than modest budget of the Soviet exhibition section. As Rodchenko intended, all the components of the Workers' Club were extremely compact, devoid of decorative elements, and as functional as possible: most of them had several possible configurations serving various practical purposes. This was especially true for the most important element of the set — the multifunctional convertible unit dubbed ″the living newspaper″ which could be converted depending on the nature of events held at the club: several manipulations taking mere seconds allowed turning this light batten structure with joints into a lectern, a cinema screen or an adjustable-width wall for posters, geographical maps or theatrical scenery. The multifunctional unit was designed to be placed against a room wall, while two tables occupied the center of the set. One of them, a long table for meetings, writing and reading, was lined with twelve armless chairs with high frame backs with semicircular upper rails. The table consisted of two sections and could be divided into two smaller tables for six persons each. In addition, the folding tabletop allowed to instantly double or triple the table in size. The second table in the set was the chess table. Rodchenko considered chess an indispensable element of cultural pastime and an important aid to the intellectual development of the proletariat. The chessboard tabletop could be horizontally rotated to change the color of the player at the start of a new game without players having to get up from the table. The two chairs for chess players had armrests, rectangular backs made of four parallel vertical boards with a straight upper rail. The rectangular footings, on which they were mounted, were interlocked exactly under the center of the chess table.
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