By Richard Anderson

How a visionary, never-realised architectural project, devised by one of the twentieth century's greatest artists, shaped architectural culture in Europe between the world wars. After achieving international acclaim as a painter and designer, El Lissitzky set out in 1924 to convince the world—and himself—that he was also an architect. He did this with a project for a “horizontal skyscraper,” which he gave an obscure and untranslatable name: Wolkenbügel. Eight of these buildings, perched atop slender pillars, were intended to stand at major intersections along Moscow's Boulevard Ring, integrating the flow of tramlines, subways, and elevators. In Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect, Richard Anderson explores Lissitzky's translation of visual and textual media into spatial ideas and offers an in-depth study of the surviving drawings and archival artefacts related to Lissitzky's most complex architectural proposal.