8 Notable Buildings in Moscow

The Narkomfin Communal House (Narkomfin Dom Kommuna) was designed by a team of architects and engineers headed by Moisei Ginzburg. Located on Ulitsa Chaikovskogo, just behind the Garden Ring Road in Moscow, this Revolutionary Rationalist masterpiece completed in 1929 was a key influence on Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (Housing Unit) design.

A blueprint for communal living, the Narkomfin building housed employees of the Ministry of Finance. It featured Ginzburg’s minimal F-units with their innovative, Frankfurt-style kitchens. As well as private living spaces with built-in furniture, the six-story building boasted communal facilities such as a solarium and garden on the flat roof. An adjoining two-story annex held a public restaurant, communal kitchen, fitness center, library, and daycare nursery.

The site and surrounding park itself was an attempt to realize a utopian vision, which came to underpin the aims of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s. It strove to overcome the divisions between city and country by the creation of new “disurbanist” landscapes across the Soviet Union: as Ginzburg put it himself, communes “where the peasant can listen to the songs of larks.” The park was retained with its complex of housing, communal dining, and freestanding laundry facilities all surgically inserted, preserving as much as possible of the forested, earlier Neoclassical landscape in which it was built.

The structure of the Narkomfin Communal Hall had deteriorated significantly by the turn of the 21st century, though restoration efforts sought to preserve it. (Victor Buchli)

A blossoming of avant-garde architecture, art, and design took place in 1920s, post-revolutionary Russia. Konstantin Melnikov was one of the most original Constructivist architects. He designed the Soviet Pavilion for the 1925 Paris Exposition as well as six workers’ clubs, including the Rusakov. Unusually for a private citizen in the Soviet Union, he designed his own house, just off the Arbat in Moscow.

The geometry of the house’s design is complex and ingenious. Two interlocking white cylinders, with walls pierced by dozens of hexagonal windows, meet at the point of a spiral staircase. This means that some rooms are wedge-shaped. The second-floor, double-height study has large, plate-glass windows. The studio above it is filled with diamond-shaped windows. There are 200 windows and apertures in the house, filling it with light. The door at the top of the stairs can open to allow access to both the living room and the sleeping area. A spiral staircase links the studio to the living area. The external walls of the cylinders are built of brick in diagonal frames, creating a honeycomb pattern. Modernist architecture was suppressed during the Stalinist era, but the house, completed in 1929, survived. Melnikov lived there until his death, and his son Viktor began restoring it in the 1980s, determined to respect the original integrity of his father’s creation. (Aidan Turner-Bishop)

As part of the new typologies emerging from postrevolutionary Russia, workers’ clubs were certainly one of the most successful. Most young architects of the period proposed buildings that tried to translate the new ideology into innovative architecture. Konstantin Melnikov was one of the few who actually built workers’ clubs, and he took the opportunity to turn this one into his most important building—a masterpiece of the Constructivist movement.

The Rusakov House of Culture, completed in 1929, visually separates itself from the rest of the city: its plan is introverted as it organizes three main auditoriums around a central space. Particularly forward-thinking for the time was the layout of the halls that could be used as a single space with room for 1,200 seats or subdivided into six distinct rooms through the use of mechanized, soundproof panels. The internal layout provides a number of relatively small spaces, but from the outside the building is monumental in scale. Inspired by the dynamism of a tensed muscle, Melnikov deployed a formal vocabulary composed of radical and distinct forms evoking an uncompromising relationship between the club and the surrounding context. This is largely achieved by irrepressibly exhibiting the programmatic elements as part of the aesthetic of the composition. The three bulky masses of the auditoriums stick out to create a perfect synthesis between form and function.

The building triggered much criticism. Stalinists labeled it “a left-wing deviation,” while Constructivists condemned Melnikov’s symbolism of the human body as too formal. Nonetheless, the Rusakov House represents one of the Modernist movement’s greatest peaks in its coupling of form and function and in Melnikov’s resolution of aesthetic and social issues. (Roberto Bottazzi)

This small but monumental tomb holds the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917 who died in 1924. It occupies an ambiguous position among great architectural structures. To some, the highly polished, ziggurat-like mausoleum is an eternal reminder of a past better forgotten; to others, it is an immortal monument to a cherished history and national leader. Alexey Shchusev was commissioned to design and build the mausoleum in a short space of time, and initially he erected a temporary wooden structure near the Kremlin Wall, where the stone tomb is now located. His plan was based on a cube, representative of eternity. A primary consideration was the need for a space that allowed a steady progression, from one side to the other, of the many people wishing to pay their respects to their dead leader. The initial wooden structure was replaced by a larger mausoleum, still wooden, with a stepped pyramidal form; there was a platform at its pinnacle from which party officials could make speeches. Eventually the mausoleum was rebuilt in stone. Shchusev was experimenting with Constructivism, while adhering to the example of ancient monuments.

The tomb’s skeleton consists of reinforced concrete, and the walls are brick faced with highly polished marble, labradorite, porphyry, and granite, creating a somber pattern of red and black throughout. The original floorplan was largely unchanged, with visitors entering through the main entrance and descending down a stairway into the memorial hall. They are guided around three sides of the sarcophagus before ascending stairs to the right of the hall and exiting through a door in the wall of the mausoleum. Shchusev’s design was considered a great success, and he was subsequently awarded the Stalin Prize and the Order of Lenin. (Tamsin Pickeral)

Until Stalin turned against the avant-garde, the confidence of the Russian Revolution tallied well with Modernist architecture’s hopes for a new world. Soviet interest in German and French Modernism was heartily reciprocated, with close links between the Bauhaus, Paris, and Moscow. It was in this context that Le Corbusier designed a characteristic project of the moment: a central office to administer Soviet grain supplies. Tsentrosoyuz is one of the largest buildings Le Corbusier built; it was faithfully carried to completion in 1936 by the Russian architect Nikolai Kolli after Le Corbusier fell out with the Soviet establishment.

The complex consists of three principal slabs of offices, each entirely glazed on one side and encased with red Armenian tufa stone with small square windows on the other. Within the site stands a curved mass containing a large auditorium. There were problems from the start, notably from the failure to put in the intended heating and cooling system in the glazed walls. In the Moscow climate this has made the offices a disagreeable place to work. Some ill-considered modifications have also done damage, although a lack of maintenance and indifference have preserved more of the building’s original features than employees within would perhaps have wished. Beneath its superb composition, however, is something darker: it is a vast, depersonalizing, totalitarian structure in its function, and the architects have intentionally heightened that impression by the endless repetition of identical windows and the factory-like implications of its movement of human traffic. The building displays the cold, mechanistic detachment that attracted Le Corbusier to totalitarian regimes. It also demonstrates his incomparable artistic genius. (Barnabas Calder)

In 1755, Moscow State University was founded in central Moscow by the scholar Mikhail Lomonosov. In the late 1940s, Stalin decided to build a new university building, designed by Lev Rudnev, on Moscow’s Sparrow Hill. Stalin’s consolidation of power saw the demise of the Constructivist architectural period in Moscow and its replacement with a new monumental style. He wanted to rebuild large areas of the city in “Stalinist Gothic” style. Seven matching skyscrapers, known as Stalin’s “seven sisters,” were erected at key points in the city, the idea being that wherever you stand in Moscow you can always see one of them. Moscow State University is the tallest of the sisters. Indeed, at 790 feet (240 m), it was the tallest building in Europe until 1988. The style is influenced by the Kremlin towers and European Gothic cathedrals. Built by German prisoners of war, it contains 20 miles (33 km) of corridors and 5,000 rooms. The star on top of the central tower is said to weigh 12 tons, while the facades are decorated with wheat sheaves, Soviet crests, and clocks. The terrace below is ornamented with students gazing confidently into the future. Newlyweds go to Sparrow Hill, which has panoramic views over Moscow, to have their picture taken, but with the city, not the university, as the backdrop. (Will Black)

In Moscow, a rather fundamental quality of the city’s architectural heritage is under attack: its authenticity. The reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior forms part of the “romantic” stage of reconstruction that began in the late 1980s. This cathedral was the largest and one of the quickest of these reconstruction projects.

The original cathedral, with its visual dominance and proximity to the River Moscva and the Kremlin, was always an emotive site. Capable of holding 15,000 worshippers, it was massive in scale. However, when Stalin stated his goal of “wiping clean the slate of the past…and rebuilding the world from top to bottom,” the cathedral was one of his many victims. He had it blown up on December 5, 1931. Stalin intended to replace it with a palace that at the time would be the tallest building in the world. The plan for the Palace of Soviets faltered, however, with the approach of World War II and the demise of Stalin. When the site flooded, it was turned into a huge public swimming pool.

The present cathedral, completed in 2000, is the legacy of Mayor Yury Luzhkov and a wave of popularity for Russian Orthodoxy after the fall of communism. Today’s incarnation is topped with a dome of fake gold. Its original stone details are reproduced in bronze and plastic, and the exterior is clad in a veneer of marble. Yet its mere presence, in its restored form, is a heartening symbol of a more romantic period of Russian history. (Will Black)

Joseph Stalin ordered the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition of 1939 as a celebration of Soviet economic achievements and the success of the planned economy. The venue, then called the Exhibition of Economic Achievements (VDNKh), was a showground of monumental pavilions built in the high Socialist Realist style. The showground is still in use, although it has been extended significantly since the late 1930s.

The focal point of the development’s first phase was the Central Pavilion. The original interior included a colossal illuminated map of the Soviet Union and heroic scenes of a hydroelectric power station and Lenin’s hometown. Other surviving elements of the first phase of development include an octagonal square surrounded by nine smaller pavilions, each dedicated to a different profession, theme, or sphere of economic activity. In the center of the square is a fountain featuring gilded statues of young women in the national dress of the 16 Soviet republics.

As well as reflecting Stalin’s rejection of the International Style—which was outlawed in 1931—the architecture of the showground is a legacy of Stalin’s 1934 ruling that cultural expression should be “national in form and socialist in content.” Architects were encouraged to draw upon ethnic motifs; for example, in reference to architectural forms of Central Asia, the facade of the so-called Culture Pavilion features a starlike pagoda and tiled arabesques.

The 1939 event was a great success. After World War II, in 1954, the Agricultural Exhibition was revived. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the ground became the All-Russia Exhibition Center. (Adam Mornement)