Suprematism in Architecture & Interior Designing

The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than on visual depiction of objects.

Kazimir Malevich developed the concept of Suprematism when he was already an established painter, having exhibited in the Donkey’s Tail and the Der Blaue Reiter(The Blue Rider) exhibitions of 1912 with cubo-futurist works. The proliferation of new artistic forms in painting, poetry and theatre as well as a revival of interest in the traditional folk art of Russia provided a rich environment in which a Modernist culture was born.

He created a suprematist “grammar” based on fundamental geometric forms; in particular, the square and the circle. The centerpiece of his show was the Black Square, placed in what is called the red/beautiful corner in Russian Orthodox tradition; the place of the main icon in a house. “Black Square” was painted in 1915 and was presented as a breakthrough in his career and in art in general. Malevich also painted White on White which was also heralded as a milestone. “White on White” marked a shift from polychrome to monochrome Suprematism.

Polish-Russian artist Kasimir Malevich is mostly known for his paintings that accompanied the artist’s evolution from abstract art to suprematism.

From 1923 to the early 1930s, Malevich also produced several three-dimensional models, assemblages of abstract forms which appear similar to models of skyscrapers, called “arkhitektons“. The drawings accompanying the construction of the models are called “planits”.

The arkhitektons are mostly white plaster models made up by several rectangular blocks added one another. Usually a central bigger block is the main compositional element and smaller parallelepipeds are progressively added to it. No function is shown or translated into form, the final shape being the pure result of assembling abstract masses in vertical or horizontal. With their spatialization of abstraction and their formal non-objectivity, the arkhitektons embody Malevich effort to translate the suprematist principles of composition to three-dimensional forms and architecture.