In the late 18th century, czarist Russia decided to relocate the majority of Jews west of Moscow, in a strip of land called the 'zone of residence" stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, up to the border with Prussia and the Hapsburg Empire. The harsh life in Belarus forced many families to emigrate: Noam Chomsky, Ayn Rand, Irving Berlin, Chaim Soutine, Mark Rothko, Kirk Douglas, Yitzhak Rabin, Ralph Lauren and Michael Bloomberg among others. Yet one city in particular stood out for its art school: Vitebsk. In 1918, the director Moishe Segal (Marc Chagall) invited the heads of the Suprematist and Constructivist movements, Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, respectively, to teach there. Malevich was expanding his group Unovis ("Champions of the New Art") with the motto "Suprematism shifts the centre of gravity to architecture". The most brilliant student, Lazar Khidekel, was quickly appointed professor. Born in Vitebsk in 1904, Khidekel soon made a series of sensational designs of futuristic aero-cities integrated with nature: raised above the shtetland part of lush landscapes or on the sea. These designs from the early 1920s had a revolutionary ambition, but they were also prophetic in their preoccupation with the environment; in fact, last year they were published in a book titled They Will Understand Us in 700 Years. Lazar Khidekel. If many Constructi vists were able to flee to the West, spreading their ideas critical of Stalin's "heroic realism" the same is not true with the Suprematists. For example, the twists and turns with Malevich's book, buried in a Berlin basement for nearly 30 years and published for the first time in 1962. Khidekel's aero-city anticipated, by over three decades, the Ville spatiale of Yona Friedman, who was a great admirer of his even after his death, because the Jewish Belorussian architect's work reached the West only posthumously (1986). As Bruno Zevi wrote in Ebraismo e architettura'(Giuntina, 1993) regarding Chagall, "man cannot live in the sky or on earth, yet with his imagination the chassidimcan temporarily occupy a middle ground, right above the sad shanties, right under a stormy sky. In this imaginary no-man's land, the force of gravity and the weight of heaven are overcome: all is harmony because it is absurd".
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