Housing Soviet Masses

Philipp Meuser

BETWEEN ENGINEERS 'REQUIREMENTS AND ARTISTS' CREATIVITY

Prefabricated housing was a global and cross-cultural phenomenon that defined the architecture of the twentieth century. No other architectural endeavour has had a greater influence on people’s daily lives and their sense of freedom within their own four walls. It is still too early to assess whether this struggle for affordable homes – and for social equality – was a failure or success. When the reconstruction of Europe’s war-torn cities began in the 1950s, planning and construction quickly became part of a political agenda that promised hope, happiness, and progress. Wide government support, both in the East and the West, enabled mass housing to flourish, providing many families with an affordable home in a short period of time. The ideological conflict during the Cold War inspired a flurry of capitalist and socialist strategies for solving the housing problem.

The success story of standardised mass housing in the Soviet Union begins in the mid-1950s. Until his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had promoted an extravagant, neo-classical form of architecture, characterised by diverse and costly decorative elements. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, introduced a radical change in planning and construction. Millions of prisoners, released from labour camps by decree of Khrushchev, were flocking to the cities and searching for a home, which placed even greater pressure on the already strained housing market. Large new four- to five-storey housing blocks with very similar building forms soon emerged across the Soviet Union. This form of standardised mass housing, bearing the name Khrushchyovka, changed the face of Soviet cities. These new buildings introduced an urban – albeit monotonous – quality to many settlements in Siberia, the Eurasian Steppe, and the Far East for the first time. 

Prefabricated housing accounted for up to 75% of all homes in the Soviet Union by the time of its dissolution in 1991(1). The rest of the homes primarily comprised conventional brick buildings, though these had been largely built to standard designs. These numbers characterised the housing stock of almost all municipalities in the Soviet republics. In Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), the share of prefabricated housing rose to 75% by the early 1990s, with a total floor area of between 3.1 and 3.5 million square metres. These numbers also typified other socialist states such as the GDR, where prefabricated buildings accounted for 75% of all housing. The construction of new homes dropped by almost 50% in terms of floor area between 1991 and 1995.

All housing construction was completely centralised in the Soviet Union. The state’s project institutes developed the standardised designs; its housing combines constructed the buildings. The housing series was designed to be universal and were adapted with modifications for different climates, for seismic risk areas, and for permafrost regions. As such, the panelised building could be exported internationally, to countries across the socialist world, from Cuba to Chile, from North Korea to Vietnam. State project institutes in Central and Eastern Europe also developed their own housing series based on the Soviet system. Series I-464 was an especially popular export product to allied socialist states.  

Soviet architects drew on ideas that had already been developed at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s. Hundreds of architects and engineers had emigrated from Germany to the Soviet Union around 1930, partly to escape the financial crisis in their home country and partly out of a wish to shape a new social model. Ernst May, Frankfurt’s city planner from 1925 to 1930, was a key figure in modernist housing. He and his task force, the so-called May Brigade, experimented with prefabricated construction methods for two years and would have a lasting influence on industrial mass housing in the USSR.  However, Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and the outbreak of the Second World War put a halt to the further development of prefabrication methods. The crucial turning point for Soviet mass housing came twenty years later when the state purchased a licence for the Camus System. This French panel technology became – in combination with Soviet engineer’s Vitaly Lagutenko’s K-7 project  – the basis for prefabricated construction across the Soviet Union, promising the mass production of homes at a scale found in the automotive industry. At the same time, the pursuit of technological progress mutated into an obsession with economic rationalisation, and standardised housing series increasingly lost their distinguishing features. In many places and during the years, housing construction devolved into simply a means of meeting political targets.

The principles of industrialised construction had reached their maturity by the 1960s and underwent few changes over the following decades. But the diversity of the early housing series gradually dwindled due to the pressures of economic optimisation, the decline in material quality, and – particularly in East Germany – the emigration of specialist workers. The resulting monotony of prefabricated housing estates is still seen as a failure of an entire social model to this day. 

...However, the prefabricated homes offered around 170 million people in the former socialist countries a place to live and improved their living standards. Today, Soviet-era microdistricts look like modern slums due to poor building maintenance and shabby outdoor areas, if outdoor areas exist at all. But we cannot blame prefabricated housing for these failures. Far more detrimental were the urban plans with inhumane scales and the principle of strict functional separation that led to dormitory towns and sleepy residential settlements without any urban quality.

HIGHER QUALITY, LOWER COSTS!

We need to understand the strict cost calculations and planning standards that constrained Soviet architects in order to explain the monotonous appearance of Soviet mass housing. A paradigm shift took place in Soviet architecture in 1954, when Khrushchev publicly denounced the excesses of Stalinist architecture and blamed the architects under his predecessor for causing needlessly high building costs. His blanket criticism led to a new architectural culture centred on cost control, which in turn stifled architectural creativity. Against this backdrop, it is a delight to see the creative ways in which Soviet architects approached the tasks that did leave a certain degree of design freedom. In residential buildings, three sections particularly stand out:  the facades / sun-protection elements; the balconies / loggias; and the stairwells / entrances. Architects adorned the large panels, prefabricated concrete parts, and sun-shading elements for these building sections with traditional ornamentation – as long as their designs were approved by the local party committees.

The joy in architectural ornamentation was particularly pronounced in the southern Soviet republics – for example in the multi-ethnic Caucasus or in Central Asia, with its rich Islamic heritage. Among these regions, the Uzbek SSR especially stands out as a place where national traditions formed a symbiosis with Soviet construction standards. Moscow’s policy was to leave a certain degree of creative freedom to the architectural collectives and housing combines in the faraway union republics. And Tashkent can be seen as a successful outcome of this policy. The success of Tashkent also had the perhaps unintended effect of highlighting an analogy between the principles of prefabricated construction and the principles of Islamic art. It affirmed the idea, championed by Khrushchev, that location is interchangeable, that the same construction method can be applied to all conceivable building types. Or to put it more provocatively: the Soviet ideology of standardisation and Islamic art, both of which rest on the recurrence of basic forms, manifest themselves in similar architectural forms, though rooted in different cultural world views.

Planning and construction were strictly divided in the Soviet Union, and architects did not exercise creative oversight of building projects other than in rare exceptions – when they were designing important public buildings, for example. As such, the names of the architects who designed standardised housing series are not known to us today. Similarly, the small number of artworks on buildings mostly remain anonymous. To this day, there have been few studies of facade ornamentation as an independent art form in its own right (2).

ARCHITECTURAL LABORATORY ON THE SILK ROAD

On July 9, 1963, Soviet architects gathered at the Central House of Architects in Moscow for a two-day conference on the design and theory of a socialist architectural style. Georgy A. Gradov, the chairman of the Commission for Theory and Criticism, outlined his view on the subject at length. He argued that throughout history, architectural styles had developed haphazardly. That in the capitalist world – under bourgeois ideology and under the conditions of the free market – the search for style was being replaced by fleeting trends.

''In contrast to the capitalist world, we bring a degree of order to the process of developing Soviet architecture, building our actions upon our knowledge of the objective laws that govern the development of society. We have the opportunity to steer the development of the socialist architectural style." (3)

Gradov’s definition, devoid of any meaning, alluded to a statement Nikita Khrushchev had made on the future of architecture during the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 

''It is a point of honour for our architects to create a socialist architectural style that embodies the best of humanity’s architectural thought – a style that must rest on the progressive creations of Soviet architecture. It is essential that buildings offer maximal comfort, that they are durable, economical, and beautiful.'' (4)

Khrushchev had invoked the Vitruvian triad of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas to describe the fundamentals of architecture par excellence, rounding it off with the need for economic efficiency.

Gradov had trained and worked as an architect under Stalin, and was therefore inclined to a traditional, academic way of thinking, but he also attempted to free himself from this past. The conference report, published in the magazine Architektura SSSR, cites extensively from Gradov’s speech: ''The decisive battle against architectural excess and ornamentation has led to a triumphant new style – has led to a creative aspiration characterised by honest architectural solutions and forms. We have overcome the grave consequences of the cult of personality." (5)

The conference report goes on to discuss the theoretical building blocks of style. According to a conference participant, continuous technical and scientific advances in construction methods actively shape and influence Soviet architecture.

Three kinds of technical and scientific advances influence style under contemporary conditions. First, the development of standardised designs. Second, the new construction methods and materials. And third, the industrialised prefabrication of housing. Modern planning methods and style are closely intertwined.

This approach made Soviet architectural theory unique in the international context of planning and construction. Gradov used Series I-468 to illustrate in more concrete terms how the Soviet-style is formed.

We have been implementing and continuously fine-tuning the principles of standardisation and unification, which have led to a set of stable and universal stylistic features. Let us examine Series I-468, which is currently being used to build prefabricated homes and facilities in the Urals and Siberia. A standardised modular system defines all main parameters of this series, which means a single planning process can be used for multiple designs. It is possible to construct buildings with different floor plans, lengths, and numbers of storeys, along with most of the related facilities, using a fixed catalogue of prefabricated parts. The principles of series-based planning have allowed us to build different buildings with shared structural features. At the same time, they offer the possibility of developing residential districts with greater variety and expressiveness.

Gradov thus declared the production process based on standardised parts as the main parameter of the Soviet architectural style. He later also argued that style is inextricably tied to the materials and construction methods being used and that any attempt to liberate style from materials and construction methods can only lead to ‘stylistic imitations’ – to a stylised, purely formal approach to architecture. According to Gradov, the main path towards developing a Soviet architectural style was self-evidently tied to the extensive use of prefabricated reinforced-concrete parts: 

A completely new and unique feature ... of the socialist architectural style ... is its connection to prefabricated construction methods, to the production of buildings on the assembly line. This style is also defined by our continuous attempt to increase the size of the parts, to maximise the degree of prefabrication, and to reduce the scope of the required assembly tasks.

The conference of architects in 1963 had an enormous influence on how the style of Soviet housing developed, not least because the conclusions of the conference reflected the views that Khrushchev had pronounced during the traditional November plenum of 1962. In response to the emerging monotony of mass housing, the party leader had stated that ‘individual architectural and artistic nuances must be designed within the boundaries of ... a rationalised process.’ (6) In other words, solutions to architectural monotony must be found within the confines of industrialised production. And the techniques for producing large panels limited the scope of individuality to the treatment of surfaces. Against this backdrop, the Moscow conference on style concluded that the characteristic features of the new Soviet-style are simplicity, functionality, ease of production, use of economic materials, and forms with clear compositions.

In non-democratic societies, debates on style are led by the political – not the intellectual – elites. As such, it is unsurprising that the debate on style in the Soviet Union focused on the political and socialist requirements of prefabricated housing. This makes the Jarsky brothers’ work that much more remarkable. Although they were working with a planning and construction process dominated by economic considerations, they dedicated 2% of all building costs to artworks, proving that the creative drive, sense of civic duty, and social engagement of individuals can introduce a glint of variety and expression in Soviet housing. 

Endnotes

1. Cf. V. A. Kossakovsky, and V. A. Chistova, Architectural Compositions of Residential Buildings (Moscow, 1990).

2. Books on art for architecture in the Soviet Union have begun to be published in recent years. However, these works only offer a cursory treatment of façade ornamentation for housing. Cf. Yevgen Nikiforov et al., Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics (Berlin, 2016); Nini Palavandishvili et al., Art for Architecture: Georgia (Berlin, 2018).

3. “Problemy stilya v sovetskoy arkhitekture” (‘Problems of Style in Soviet Architecture’), in Architektura SSSR, issue 11, 1963, 40 – 52.

4. Cf. Project Russia, issue 25 (2003), 12 ff

5. “Problemy stilya v sovetskoy arkhitekture.” The following quotes in this paragraph are also cited from this source.

6. Nikita Khrushchev, Auf dem Wege zum Kommunismus. Reden und Schriften zur Entwicklung der Sowjetunion 1962 / 1963 (On the Path to Communism: Speeches and Writings on the Development of the Soviet Union 1962 / 1963) (Berlin, 1964)

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