For the 15 or so years of its existence, from the first years of Soviet power to the early 1930s, Constructivism endeavored to alter conceptions of architectural space, to create an environment that would inculcate new social values, and at the same time to use advanced structural and technological principles. Paradoxically, the poverty and social chaos of the early revolutionary years propelled architects toward radical ideas of design, many of which were related to an already thriving modernist movement in the visual arts. For example, El Lissitzky’s concepts of space and form, along with those of Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) and Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), played a major part in the development of an architecture expressed in “stereometric forms,” purified of the decorative elements of the eclectic past. The experiments of Lissitzky, Vasily Kandinsky, and Malevich in painting and of Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) in sculpture had created the possibility of a new archite...