In Praise of the Smalt Field
Half a million tesserae of glass and gold leaf, set in cold Moscow weather by women who were paid in bread tickets — and what we mean when we say a building “shines.”
I spent last November in the Stone Flower courtyard, scraping a thumbnail of frost off the lip of a tessera the size of a postage stamp. It was ultramarine, the color the chemists at the Lomonosov works called “number 9 smalt” — a glass cooked with cobalt at 1,420°C and then quenched into something resembling a sapphire that had been told to behave. Behind it, a sliver of gold leaf no thicker than a breath. The whole pavilion is built like this: forty thousand of these decisions, each one paid for, each one set by hand.
We have, in our century, learned to mistrust ornament. We say it lies. We say a building should declare its structure the way a good sentence declares its verb. I used to believe this. I no longer do — or rather, I believe it less, and only on weekdays. What the Stone Flower fountain insists on, with its sixteen gilded statues of the republics and its 1,400 square meters of glass mosaic, is that the structure of a building is not only its concrete and its steel. It is also its argument. And its argument here is: you, citizen, are owed brightness.
On the politics of luminance
The complaint against gilding is usually a moral one. Gold, the argument goes, is the costume the powerful wear to look inevitable. Fair enough — and yet the women who set these tesserae, working in two shifts through the winter of 1953, were not powerful. They were paid in ration coupons and in the right to call themselves mastera, masters. Aleksandra Pomerantseva, who supervised the harvest panel on the north wall, kept a notebook in which she recorded the failure rate of each batch of red-granite cubes from the Karelian quarry. The notebook is now in the archive on Krymsky Val. It is the dullest, most beautiful document I know.