Why Is Tatlin Significant As An Artist

Brian Wheeler

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Tatlin’s Significance as an Artist for the People

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I set out to write a paper proving that Tatlin was an engineer and an artist, and that had he been afforded better circumstances his dreams of flying machines and novel skyscrapers would have been realized. What I found was that Tatlin’s significance was not in the designs themselves, but how they influenced the people they were made for. This paper covers the engineering aspects of Tatlin’s designs, but also focuses on the social influence of his work as an architect, artist, and in some ways, an engineer.

Vladimir Tatlin was a Russian constructivist artist and architect. Tatlin was born in the rapidly growing city of Kharkov on December 28th, 1885. Tatlin

The constructivist movement was inspired and in many ways fueled by the October Revolution in Russia, when the Bolshevik party took power in 1917. Revolution was a primary motivator for the constructivist movement as people wanted economic prosperity and modernity, and the constructivist movement produced designs, products, and propaganda that complemented the people’s dreams of revolution and

Many artists and designers such as Da Vinci theorized different types of flying machines. The public reaction and success of their designs is most likely due to the innate human desire to fly. Letatlin could have looked like a promising solution to human flight, and in post-revolution russia, people’s dream of stepping out the window and floating to work was great enough to push the design to the success it became, but unfortunately there are a number of reasons that even with sufficient technology and funding it could not be flown.

The first issue with the design is that the wings do not carry enough surface area to generate the lift required to carry a human. The attachment of the wings most likely could not have been made strong enough with any material at the time.

The second fundamental issue with flight at this time is the square-cube rule, which in physics roughly states that the amount of surface area required for an object to fly by generating lift is proportional to the cube of it’s mass. Biology essentially tells us that the mass of a body grows as an exponential function in relation to the surface area. Basically the larger an object is, the larger the flying machine must be, which then adds more weight and so on and so forth. Materials with the correct strength to weight ratio were barely available at the time of Tatlin’s design, and would not have been readily available in post-bankruptcy