The Contracts House is a trade building in the Podil

Podil

The Podil or Podilskyi Raion is a historic neighbourhood and an administrative raion in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. It is one of the oldest neighborhoods of Kiev, the birthplace of the city's trade, commerce and industry...

 neighborhood of Kiev

Kiev

Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

 (Kyiv), the capital of Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

. The Contracts House received its name because the city's contract

Contract

A contract is an agreement entered into by two parties or more with the intention of creating a legal obligation, which may have elements in writing. Contracts can be made orally. The remedy for breach of contract can be "damages" or compensation of money. In equity, the remedy can be specific...

s were signed there. It is located on the Kontraktova Square

Kontraktova Square

Kontraktova Square or Kontraktovaya Square is a square in the historic Podil neighborhood of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. The square is an important economic, cultural, and transport center of the Podil, containing numerous architectural and historical monuments.-History:Kontraktova Square is...

, once one of the Podil's main trading centers. The building is considered as one of the important Classical architecture

Classical architecture

Classical architecture is a mode of architecture employing vocabulary derived in part from the Greek and Roman architecture of classical antiquity, enriched by classicizing architectural practice in Europe since the Renaissance...

 constructions of the city.

History

After a large fire destroyed part of the Podil in 1811, the first Contracts House in the neighborhood burnt down. A new replacement building was constructed in 1815-1817 in the Classical style according to a plan made by English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 architect V. Geste, supervised by architect Aleksander Melensky.

The Contracts House was envisioned as part of an ensemble, which would include the post office, the magistrate

Magistrate

A magistrate is an officer of the state; in modern usage the term usually refers to a judge or prosecutor. This was not always the case; in ancient Rome, a magistratus was one of the highest government officers and possessed both judicial and executive powers. Today, in common law systems, a...

's quarters, and the building itself. However, only the Contracts House was constructed. The front and western façade

Facade

A facade or façade is generally one exterior side of a building, usually, but not always, the front. The word comes from the French language, literally meaning "frontage" or "face"....

s of the building features Doric order

Doric order

The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.-History:...

 columns, and the eastern—Ionic order

Ionic order

The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of classical architecture, the other two canonic orders being the Doric and the Corinthian...

 columns located on a portico

Portico

A portico is a porch leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls...

. The front façade is topped off with a triangular pediment.

The building has a total of two floors, with the second floor used as a concert hall, containing a row of colonnade

Colonnade

In classical architecture, a colonnade denotes a long sequence of columns joined by their entablature, often free-standing, or part of a building....

s. All rooms in the building were done without any special decoration, with the exception of rooms on the upper floor, which were decorated on the order of Melensky. Since the time of its construction, the interior plan of the building has changed.

Although built as a contracts house, the building was not entirely used for this purpose; it was sometimes used as a concert hall. Famous personalities visited or used the Contracts House: writers Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

, and Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....

, poets Taras Shevchenko

Taras Shevchenko

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko -Life:Born into a serf family of Hryhoriy Ivanovych Shevchenko and Kateryna Yakymivna Shevchenko in the village of Moryntsi, of Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire Shevchenko was orphaned at the age of eleven...

, Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Mickiewicz

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz ) was a Polish poet, publisher and political writer of the Romantic period. One of the primary representatives of the Polish Romanticism era, a national poet of Poland, he is seen as one of Poland's Three Bards and the greatest poet in all of Polish literature...

, and Denis Davydov

Denis Davydov

Denis Vasilyevich Davydov was a Russian soldier-poet of the Napoleonic Wars who invented a specific genre – hussar poetry noted for its hedonism and bravado – and spectacularly designed his own life to illustrate such poetry.-Biography:...

.