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| Mayakovskaya metro station, Moscow – Alexey Dushkin, 1938 The Moscow Metro – along with its later cousins in St Petersburg, Kiev, Baku, Tashkent, Kharkiv, Yerevan and elsewhere – has a claim to being the most astonishing project of Soviet architecture. Mayakovskaya could even be the most breathtaking underground station ever constructed. Its gorgeous chrome and marble hall was a result of one of the most brutal construction projects of the 1930s, with appalling safety standards, a high casualty rate and widespread use of convict labour. |
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| Crematorium, Kiev – Avram Miletsky, 1968-1981 Strange, maternal-looking creatures squat at the bottom of a hill near the Ukrainian capital’s main cemetery. Close up, the gates to these things (crematoria, it transpires) are twisted metal doors. The long gestation period reflects the fact that the crematorium was originally adjoined by a wall of relief sculptures on 20th-century suffering, something that Kiev saw more of than most places. Controversial from the start, it was covered up with a layer of plaster before the building was opened. |
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| Field of Mars, Petrograd – Lev Rudnev, 1917 This memorial to fallen revolutionaries, placed at the centre of a Tsarist era parade ground, was actually begun between the February revolution that overthrew the Tsar and the October revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. The square is surrounded by heavy slabs of red granite, topped with red flags, with inscriptions by the commissar of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky – the effect is spacious, original and imposing. Rudnev, its young architect, became notorious 30 years later for Stalinist skyscrapers in Moscow and Warsaw. |
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| Dubulti Railway Station, Jūrmala – Igors Javeins, 1977 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. Some of the results were banal, but a lot of it was optimistic, free-form architecture. This seaside railway station in Latvia is a superb example, showing an enthusiasm for sculptural concrete shell structures that the Soviets borrowed from the 50s architecture of California. |
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| Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Moscow – Gelfreikh and Minkus, 1948 After the war, the devastated Soviet state diverted precious resources into a seemingly whimsical project of seven triumphalist skyscrapers. 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. Three more were built in newly acquired, or “fraternal” cities: Riga, Warsaw and Prague. 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. |
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| Narkomfin communal house, Moscow – Moisei Ginzburg, 1928 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. 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 of family life. 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 and many of its ideas about social spaces in apartment buildings are widely accepted in luxury flats. |
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| Palace of Pioneers, Dnipropetrovsk – Amosov, Solodovnik, Garsia Ortega and Klever, 1991 The completion date for this building in eastern Ukraine’s industrial metropolis makes it one of a few candidates for “last Soviet building”. It shows another shift; this time to a lightness of touch, even a certain amount of wit, that would be lacking in most post-Soviet architecture as much as it was in Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR. This “palace” for young people is scaled to meet its users, but filled with goofy space-age details for their enjoyment, with portholes, mazes, flying walkways and bizarre multicoloured sculptures, on a secluded, verdant site near the Dnieper river. |
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| Traktornaya housing development, Leningrad – Gegello, Nikolsky and Simonov, 1925 A 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 color scheme, calm and orderly layout, and its strange deconstructed triumphal arches. 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. |
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| Ministry of Highways, Tbilisi – George Chakhava, 1974 This photogenic clustered high-rise office block consists of several mini towers intersecting on their way down a steep hill, facing the river Kura. Inspired by the pile-up of interlinked Persian-style houses in Tbilisi’s old town – according to its architect – it stands as a lone monument on the main road out of the Georgian capital, and the difficulty of pedestrian access is some sign of the Ministry of Highways’ success. |
Source: The USSR in 10 buildings: Constructivist communes to Stalinist skyscrapers
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