Some of the results were banal, but a lot of it was optimistic, free-form architecture. When Nikita Khrushchev condemned the “excesses” of Stalinist monumentality in 1956, Soviet architecture underwent the third of its many sudden stylistic switches, this time back to modernism. 6 | Dubulti Railway Station, Jū rmala – Igors Javeins, 1977 The best of the Moscow seven is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the upright, gothic rhythm gives the tower a sense of intimidation, horror and evil appropriate to its purpose at the height of the Cold War. Three more were built in newly acquired, or “fraternal” cities: Riga, Warsaw and Prague. Six of them were situated along Moscow’s Garden Ring – huge, monsters of buildings taking up entire city blocks and rising to spires modelled on those of the Kremlin, allegedly at the insistence of Joseph Stalin himself. ![]() Photograph: Gary Hershorn/Reuters 5 | Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Moscow – Gelfreikh and Minkus, 1948Īfter the war, the devastated Soviet state diverted precious resources into a seemingly whimsical project of seven triumphalist skyscrapers. View image in fullscreen With its chrome and marble halls, Mayakovskaya is the most beautiful station in Moscow’s metro system. ![]() Ironically, many of its ideas about social spaces in apartment buildings are widely accepted in luxury flats. The building itself, which sits on extremely valuable real estate, is falling apart. The social ideas behind the building were abandoned within a couple of years of completion, but its architectural ideas were plundered by west European architects like Le Corbusier, Wells Coates and Denys Lasdun. A sleek row of duplex flats, many of them without kitchens, are connected by walkways to a glass box with collective canteens, a library, gym and roof garden, as part of a programme for the reform (or elimination) of family life. This much more ambitious housing project was a showcase of what was called “the new everyday life” in the 1920s – a Constructivist communal housing scheme. 3 | Narkomfin communal house, Moscow – Moisei Ginzburg, 1928 Today it forms part of the Narvskaya Zastava district, a showcase for 1920s avant garde architecture. More comparable to Nordic Classicism in contemporary Sweden or Finland than to Soviet Constructivism, the estate housed workers at the Putilov engineering works, who had been the backbone of the Bolshevik ranks in 1917. Photograph: Alamy 2 | Traktornaya housing development, Leningrad – Gegello, Nikolsky and Simonov, 1925Ī peculiar outlier in Soviet architecture, and the first major housing scheme in the USSR, Traktornaya takes its cue from the classical tradition of St Petersburg, with its attractive colour scheme, calm and orderly layout, and its strange deconstructed triumphal arches. View image in fullscreen The monument to the ‘victims of the revolution’ in the city now called St Petersburg. What was actually constructed tells us a great deal as well: a state whose history is far from monolithic, lurching from openness to terror and back, its architecture from mass production to one-off spectacles, and from Russification to intense engagement with local tradition. As metaphors go, it sums up Soviet state socialism rather neatly. The most famous building in the 74-year history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was never constructed in fact, it’s unlikely it could ever have been constructed, though today’s technology makes it a lot more plausible than when it was first proposed in the 1910s. Placed on the banks of the Neva, its towering, tilting steel skeleton would have housed the Comintern in glass volumes whose rotation would symbolise revolution and the dialectic. A couple of years after the October revolution of 1917, the painter and sculptor Vladimir Tatlin submitted a proposal for the headquarters of the Communist International, as part of a public sculpture competition.
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