Narkomfin Building
Encyclopedia
The Narkomfin Building is a block of flats in Moscow
, designed by Moisei Ginzburg
with Ignaty Milinis in 1928, and finished in 1932. Only two of four planned buildings were completed. The building is squeezed between old and new territories of United States
Embassy at 25, Novinsky Boulevard. A fine example of Constructivist architecture
and avant-garde
interior planning, it is presently in a dilapidated state; most units were vacated by residents years ago. Proposed reconstruction, in the best case, will retain only exterior walls.
in the course of the 1920s on architectural form and communal living. The building is made from reinforced concrete and is set in a park. It originally consisted of a long block of apartments raised on piloti
s (with a penthouse and roof garden), connected by an enclosed bridge to a smaller, glazed block of collective facilities.
As advertised by the architects, the apartments were to form an intervention into the everyday life (or byt) of the inhabitants. By offering Communal facilities such as kitchens, creches and laundry as part of the block, the tenants were encouraged into a more socialist and, by taking women out of their traditional roles, feminist way of life. The structure was thus to act as a 'social condenser' by including within it a library and gymnasium.
On the other hand, architects of 1920s had to face the social reality of an overcrowded socialist city: any single-family apartment unit with more than one room would eventually be converted to a multi-family kommunalka
. Apartments could retain the single-family status if, and only if, they were physically small and could not be partitioned to accommodate more than one family. Any single-level apartment could be partitioned; thus, the avant-garde
community (notably, Ginzburg and Konstantin Melnikov
) designed such model units, relying on vertical separation of bedroom (top level) and combined kitchen and living room (lower level). Ilya Golosov
implemented these cells for his Collective House in Ivanovo
; Pavel Gofman for communal housing in Saratov
(photographs). Ginzburg refined their cell design based on real-life experience.
Apartments were graded by how far along they were to being 'fully collectivised', ranging from rooms with their own kitchens to apartments purely for sleep and study. Most of the units belong to "Cell K" type (with double-height living room) and "Cell F" connecting to an outdoor gallery. The sponsor of the building, Commissar of Finance Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin, enjoyed a penthouse (originally planned as a communal recreation area). Milyutin is also known as an experimental city planner who had developed plans for a linear city
.
Le Corbusier
, who studied the building during his visits to the Soviet Union, was vocal about the debt he owed to the pioneering ideas of the Narkomfin building, and he used a variant of its duplex flat plans in his Unité d'Habitation
. Other architects to have reused its ideas include Moshe Safdie
, in his Expo 67
flats Habitat 67 and Denys Lasdun
, in his luxury flats in St James', London. The idea of the 'social condenser
' was also acknowledged by Berthold Lubetkin
an influence on his work.
. The building looks over the US embassy, which has discouraged the inhabitants from using the roof garden. The vicissitudes of the building were charted in Victor Buchli's book An Archaeology of Socialism (Berg, 2000) which takes the flats and their inhabitants as a starting point for an analysis of Soviet 'material culture'.
The building has been falling apart for the last three decades, and is now in a grossly dilapidated state, although it is still inhabited in part. There have been various proposals to save the building, which has been under threat of demolition and is an area of particularly lucrative real estate, either by turning it into luxury flats or a hotel. The Narkomfin building is at the top of UNESCO
's 'Endangered Buildings' list, and there is an international campaign to save it. It has been on the World Monuments Fund
's Watch list of endangered heritage sites three times.
Legally, each apartment unit in the building was privatized (beginning in 1992) by the residents. Later, a real estate speculator has bought out a significant part of these apartments; the rest is still owned and inhabited by the residents (as of now, the consolidated apartment package is owned by MIAN agency). This creates a legal stalemate when the residents are unable to form a condominium and operate the building independently of municipal authorities - thus, the City Hall has nearly absolute control over the future fate of the Narkomfin.
Usually, the city-backed developers have no problems with evicting former residents from the old buildings, especially in case where many residents voluntarily vacated their old apartments. However, public protests against redevelopment of the Narkomfin seemed to stall the reconstruction process indefinitely.
MIAN intends to rebuild Narkomfin into an apartment hotel, and commissioned Alexey Ginzburg, grandson of Moisei Ginzburg, to design the new structure. They expect renovation costs to be under 20,000,000 US Dollars, while the real estate prices in this area approaches 20,000 USD for square meter. Russian code on listed memorial buildings prohibits any major re-planning of internal walls and partitions.
March, 2007 gallery
Photos of the house at a Russian forum:
.
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, designed by Moisei Ginzburg
Moisei Ginzburg
Moisei Yakovlevich Ginzburg was a Soviet constructivist architect, best known for his 1929 Narkomfin Building in Moscow.-Education:Ginzburg was born in Minsk in a Jewish real estate developer's family. He graduated from Milano Academy and Riga polytechnic institute . During Russian Civil War he...
with Ignaty Milinis in 1928, and finished in 1932. Only two of four planned buildings were completed. The building is squeezed between old and new territories of United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Embassy at 25, Novinsky Boulevard. A fine example of Constructivist architecture
Constructivist architecture
Constructivist architecture was a form of modern architecture that flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. It combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedly Communist social purpose. Although it was divided into several competing factions, the movement produced...
and avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
interior planning, it is presently in a dilapidated state; most units were vacated by residents years ago. Proposed reconstruction, in the best case, will retain only exterior walls.
Architecture for Collective Living
This apartment block, designed for workers at the Commissariat of Finance (shortened to Narkomfin) was an opportunity for Ginzburg to try out many of the theories advanced by the Constructivist OSA groupOSA Group
The OSA Group was an architectural association in the Soviet Union, which was active from 1925 to 1930 and considered the first group of constructivist architects...
in the course of the 1920s on architectural form and communal living. The building is made from reinforced concrete and is set in a park. It originally consisted of a long block of apartments raised on piloti
Piloti
Pilotis, or piers, are supports such as columns, pillars, or stilts that lift a building above ground or water. They are traditionally found in stilt and pole dwellings such as fishermen's huts in Asia and Scandinavia using wood and in elevated houses such as Old Queenslanders in Australia's...
s (with a penthouse and roof garden), connected by an enclosed bridge to a smaller, glazed block of collective facilities.
As advertised by the architects, the apartments were to form an intervention into the everyday life (or byt) of the inhabitants. By offering Communal facilities such as kitchens, creches and laundry as part of the block, the tenants were encouraged into a more socialist and, by taking women out of their traditional roles, feminist way of life. The structure was thus to act as a 'social condenser' by including within it a library and gymnasium.
On the other hand, architects of 1920s had to face the social reality of an overcrowded socialist city: any single-family apartment unit with more than one room would eventually be converted to a multi-family kommunalka
Kommunalka
A communal apartment or kommunalka appeared in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as a product of the “new collective vision of the future” and as a response to the housing crisis in urban areas. A communal apartment typically consisted of an apartment shared between two to...
. Apartments could retain the single-family status if, and only if, they were physically small and could not be partitioned to accommodate more than one family. Any single-level apartment could be partitioned; thus, the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
community (notably, Ginzburg and Konstantin Melnikov
Konstantin Melnikov
Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov was a Russian architect and painter. His architectural work, compressed into a single decade , placed Melnikov on the front end of 1920s avant-garde architecture...
) designed such model units, relying on vertical separation of bedroom (top level) and combined kitchen and living room (lower level). Ilya Golosov
Ilya Golosov
Ilya Alexandrovich Golosov was a Russian Soviet architect. A leader of Constructivism in 1925-1931, Ilya Golosov later developed his own style of early stalinist architecture known as postconstructivism...
implemented these cells for his Collective House in Ivanovo
Ivanovo
Ivanovo is a city and the administrative center of Ivanovo Oblast, Russia. Population: Ivanovo has traditionally been called the textile capital of Russia. Since most textile workers are women, it has also been known as the "City of Brides"...
; Pavel Gofman for communal housing in Saratov
Saratov
-Modern Saratov:The Saratov region is highly industrialized, due in part to the rich in natural and industrial resources of the area. The region is also one of the more important and largest cultural and scientific centres in Russia...
(photographs). Ginzburg refined their cell design based on real-life experience.
Vertical apartment plan
Narkomfin currently has 54 units, none of them has a dedicated kitchen - at least, legally. Many residents partitioned their apartments to set aside a tiny kitchen. There are five inhabited floors, but only two corridors on second and fourth level (an apartment split between third and second level connects to the second floor corridor, etc.). This is a violation of present-day fire safety codes, exaggerated by the narrow, steep stairs inside apartments and wooden partitions.Apartments were graded by how far along they were to being 'fully collectivised', ranging from rooms with their own kitchens to apartments purely for sleep and study. Most of the units belong to "Cell K" type (with double-height living room) and "Cell F" connecting to an outdoor gallery. The sponsor of the building, Commissar of Finance Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin, enjoyed a penthouse (originally planned as a communal recreation area). Milyutin is also known as an experimental city planner who had developed plans for a linear city
Linear city
The linear city was an urban plan for an elongated urban formation. The city would consist of a series of functionally specialized parallel sectors. Generally, the city would run parallel to a river and be built so that the dominant wind would blow from the residential areas to the industrial strip...
.
Influence
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...
, who studied the building during his visits to the Soviet Union, was vocal about the debt he owed to the pioneering ideas of the Narkomfin building, and he used a variant of its duplex flat plans in his Unité d'Habitation
Unité d'Habitation
The Unité d'Habitation is the name of a modernist residential housing design principle developed by Le Corbusier, with the collaboration of painter-architect Nadir Afonso...
. Other architects to have reused its ideas include Moshe Safdie
Moshe Safdie
Moshe Safdie, CC, FAIA is an architect, urban designer, educator, theorist, and author. Born in the city of Haifa, then Palestine and now Israel, he moved with his family to Montreal, Canada, when he was 15 years old.-Career:...
, in his Expo 67
Expo 67
The 1967 International and Universal Exposition or Expo 67, as it was commonly known, was the general exhibition, Category One World's Fair held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, from April 27 to October 29, 1967. It is considered to be the most successful World's Fair of the 20th century, with the...
flats Habitat 67 and Denys Lasdun
Denys Lasdun
Sir Denys Lasdun CH was an eminent English architect. Probably his best known work is the Royal National Theatre, on London's South Bank of the Thames, which is a Grade II* listed building and one of the most notable examples of Brutalist design in the United Kingdom.Lasdun studied at the...
, in his luxury flats in St James', London. The idea of the 'social condenser
Social condenser
From Soviet constructivist theory, the social condenser is a spatial idea practiced in architecture. At the opening speech for the first OSA Group conference in 1928 Moisei Ginzburg claimed that "the principal objective of constructivism...is the definition of the Social Condenser of the age." The...
' was also acknowledged by Berthold Lubetkin
Berthold Lubetkin
Berthold Romanovich Lubetkin was a Russian émigré architect who pioneered modernist design in Britain in the 1930s. His work includes the Highpoint housing complex, London Zoo penguin pool, Finsbury Health Centre and Spa Green Estate.-Early years:Berthold Lubetkin was born in Tiflis into a Jewish...
an influence on his work.
The Narkomfin Building as Reality
The Utopianism and reformism of everyday life that was behind the building's idea fell out of favour almost as soon as it was finished. After the start of the Five Year Plan and Stalin's consolidation of power, its collectivist and feminist ideas were rejected as 'Leftist' or Trotskyist. In the 1930s, the ground floor, which was originally left free and suspended with pilotis, was filled with flats to help alleviate Moscow's severe housing shortage, while a planned adjoining block was built in the eclectic Stalinist styleStalinist architecture
Stalinist architecture , also referred to as Stalinist Gothic, or Socialist Classicism, is a term given to architecture of the Soviet Union between 1933, when Boris Iofan's draft for Palace of the Soviets was officially approved, and 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev condemned "excesses" of the past...
. The building looks over the US embassy, which has discouraged the inhabitants from using the roof garden. The vicissitudes of the building were charted in Victor Buchli's book An Archaeology of Socialism (Berg, 2000) which takes the flats and their inhabitants as a starting point for an analysis of Soviet 'material culture'.
Under Threat
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
's 'Endangered Buildings' list, and there is an international campaign to save it. It has been on the World Monuments Fund
World Monuments Fund
World Monuments Fund is a private, international, non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of historic architecture and cultural heritage sites around the world through fieldwork, advocacy, grantmaking, education, and training....
's Watch list of endangered heritage sites three times.
Legally, each apartment unit in the building was privatized (beginning in 1992) by the residents. Later, a real estate speculator has bought out a significant part of these apartments; the rest is still owned and inhabited by the residents (as of now, the consolidated apartment package is owned by MIAN agency). This creates a legal stalemate when the residents are unable to form a condominium and operate the building independently of municipal authorities - thus, the City Hall has nearly absolute control over the future fate of the Narkomfin.
Usually, the city-backed developers have no problems with evicting former residents from the old buildings, especially in case where many residents voluntarily vacated their old apartments. However, public protests against redevelopment of the Narkomfin seemed to stall the reconstruction process indefinitely.
MIAN intends to rebuild Narkomfin into an apartment hotel, and commissioned Alexey Ginzburg, grandson of Moisei Ginzburg, to design the new structure. They expect renovation costs to be under 20,000,000 US Dollars, while the real estate prices in this area approaches 20,000 USD for square meter. Russian code on listed memorial buildings prohibits any major re-planning of internal walls and partitions.
March, 2007 gallery
External links
- Moscow Architecture Preservation Society Profile
- Campaign for the Preservation of the Narkomfin Building
- Normalblog on the Narkomfin Building
- The Art Newspaper on the Narkomfin
- Article at Lost Clusters blog
Photos of the house at a Russian forum:
.