Soviet architects in the first decades since the formation of the USSR took a course towards "collectivization" and "communalization" of the population of apartment buildings. Sometimes this kind of optimization took the most bizarre forms.
Cells of society
The "bee" principle of resettlement of residents in the apartment complex was taken as a basis at the end of the twenties of the twentieth century. Some of the most famous initiators of this idea of that time were the Soviet constructivist architects Ivan Leonidov, Moisey Ginzburg and Ivan Nikolaev, who had the idea to build communal houses. The innovative idea was actively popularized in the press.
So, Ivan Leonidov wrote that autonomous living cells in such a house are the architectural future, this is the best option for the coexistence of communards, both married and single. In the late twenties and early thirties, construction of several such houses began in the capital, one of which was the so-called "House of Narkomfin" on Novinsky Boulevard. According to the draft layout, most of the apartments did not provide for individual kitchens, hallways, bathrooms and living rooms were common. In the "cells" there were special niches for built-in furniture, not shop furniture, but also designed personally for this kind of small-sized premises (atypical furniture could simply not fit there). Such design of housing was calculated for undemanding limiters who come to Moscow from the provinces. However, by the mid-thirties, the construction of communal houses was stopped - this idea was considered an "overkill" in Soviet architecture. The experimental MKDs themselves stand to this day, but in a redesigned, more convenient form for living.
House of the NKVD with transparent walls
According to Anastasia Firsova, a senior researcher at the Shchusev Museum of Architecture, this high-rise building of Stalinist architecture on Smolenskaya Square by the architect, Ivan Zholtovsky, has been built for over 10 years, since 1939. It is also called the "House of the NKVD" due to the fact that at one time a significant number of apartments here were occupied by the Chekists. In the modern sense, the strangeness of the layout of the living quarters in the building of Stalinist architecture was that the kitchens, dining rooms and halls had no walls - they were replaced by sliding glass partitions, which, if desired, made these rooms uniform and common for the residents of neighboring apartments.
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Suddenly: a toilet in the kitchen
Elina Mamontova, the general director of one of the real estate agencies in St. Petersburg, talking about her many years of experience in real estate work in the market for buying and selling housing in the St. Petersburg housing stock built during the USSR, gives completely unexpected examples of apartment planning in such apartment buildings. For example, for realtors the usual picture is when there is no place for a bathroom in the apartments: in the USSR it was believed that a Soviet citizen could wash in a bath too. Subsequently, the tenants themselves piled baths or showers where the conditions were more or less allowed - in the kitchen, in the corridor. Once a real estate agent was deeply impressed by the following picture: in the middle of the kitchen, right next to the stove, there was a "toilet-type" toilet. It turned out that at one time the apartments on the floors were planned like this,that the shaped sewer pipe went straight through the center of the kitchen in the living area below.
"Atomic" inconveniences
Muscovite Kirill Banatin, who lives in the so-called "House of Atomic Engineers" (a high-rise building was built on Bolshaya Tulskaya Street of the capital), told The Village portal about the layout of apartments in this bulky structure, which had been erected by the project of architect Vladimir Babad since 1981 for more than 10 years. constantly made changes. The living space of a high-rise building, provided for apartments, was redrawn as a result of redevelopments to increase the number of residential premises, which in the end turned out to be twice as large as originally planned.
Beams with an unclear purpose, ventilation ducts and various communications in the apartments of the "House of Atomic Engineers" can be found anywhere. In addition, Banatin's two-level apartment does not have an entrance hall, and the interstorey staircase is so narrow that moving furniture from room to room is a whole problem.
Nikolay Syromyatnikov