Piccadilly, London

Space invader

An alien invader has appeared in the courtyard of the Royal Academy. It’s a scale model of one of the great unbuilt projects of Russian communism, the Monument to the Third International, designed in 1919–20 by Vladimir Tatlin and commonly known as Tatlin’s tower. The original was intended to be 400 m high and although known as a monument it was intended to house various functions of the Third International, also known as Comintern, the organization set up in 1919 to fight for communism in Russia and beyond. Inside the tower’s double spiral of twisted metal were to be four structures of steel and glass, each in effect a separate building. These inner structures – in the model they are made of wire – were designed to accommodate separate parts of Comintern. Each was to be a perfect form (a cube, a pyramid, a cylinder, and a hemisphere) and the three lower ones were meant to rotate at different speeds.

Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that this monster monument was never built. The constructional challenges were immense and the amount of steel required was enormous. But not for the first or last time, an unbuilt structure started balls rolling. The idea of its intricate steel network inspired architects and engineers, and the tower (and its enigmatic designer) has enjoyed a long afterlife in books about architecture, histories of the Soviet Union, and even fiction. Now architects Dixon Jones have built this replica to accompany the Royal Academy’s exhibition Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture, 1915-–1935, which is on at the RA until 22 January. The tower looks rather odd against the Palladian-Victorian background of Burlington House. As I was trying to photograph it, I longed for a neutral background. But the contrast between the constructivist steelwork of Tatlin’s tower and the stonework behind is, I suppose, part of the point. It was always meant to stick out and in its new incarnation in Piccadilly it still does.

There are details of the exhibition here.