Post-War (1944–1950)
Post-war architecture, sometimes perceived as a uniform style, was fragmented into at least four vectors of development:
- Luxurious residential and office construction of complete regions such as the Moskovsky Prospekt in Leningrad and the Leninsky Prospekt in Moscow.
- Major infrastructure projects (Metro in Leningrad and Moscow, Volga-Don Canal).
- Rebuilding war damage of Kursk, Minsk, Kiev, Smolensk, Stalingrad, Voronezh, and hundreds of smaller towns.
- The effort for new, low-cost technologies to resolve the housing crises, evident since 1948 and the official state policy since 1951.
- Building of new cities, especially in Siberia: Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Dzerzhinsk and elsewhere.
Residential construction in post-war cities was segregated according to the ranks of tenants. No effort was made to conceal luxuries; sometimes they were evident, sometimes deliberately exaggerated (in contrast with Iofan's plain House on Embankment). Country residencies of Stalin's officials was on the top level; so was the 1945 House of Lions by Ivan Zholtovsky (House of Lions was designed by Nikolai Gaigarov and M.M. Dzisko of Zholtovsky Workshop. Zholtovsky supervised and promoted the project), a luxurious downtown residence for Red Army Marshals. 1947 Marshals Apartments by Lev Rudnev, on the same block, has a less extravagant exterior package. There was a type of building for every rank of Stalin's hierarchy.
High-class buildings can be identified easily by tell-tale details like spacing between windows, penthouses and bay windows. Sometimes, the relative rank and occupation of tenants is represented by ornaments, sometimes by memorial plaques. Note that these are all Moscow features. In smaller cities, the social elite usually comprised just one or two classes; St. Petersburg always had a supply of pre-revolutionary luxury space.
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Penthouse, pre-war postconstructivist building by Vladimir Vladimirov.
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Entrance with side views for security guards. Marshals Apartments by Rudnev, 1947
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Details indicate social strata – House of Actors, Gorky Street
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Bay windows, another luxury sign, a late 1952 Rosenfeld block.
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the Beijing Exhibition Center that built in 1954
Read more about this topic: Stalinist Architecture
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