Novinsky boulevard 25

Moscow 1928 - 1932

Moisei Ginzburg & Ignaty Milinis

The Narkomfin Building is a block of flats in Moscow, designed by Moisei Ginzburg 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 seedy state.
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 the ories advanced by
the Constructivist OSA group 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 pilotis (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.

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
Nikolai Alexander 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.
Influence
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 Unit 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 Narkomfin Building as Reality
The Utopianism and reformism of everday 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 style. 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
Rear view of The Narkomfin building, 1930s
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.
Legally, each apartment unit in the building was privatized 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 inhabitants. 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.
Moscow City Hall, under mayor Yuri Luzhkov, has a record of demolishing historically
significant structures. 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. At
the same time, Ginzburg's original apartment units and corridors are clearly
against present-day construction and fire safety codes. They will never be
rebuilt, even under the best scenario.

Perhaps the most elegant and important of all Russian Modern Movement buildings, this is
now in tragic disrepair. It was conceived as 'a building of transitional type' (dom
perekhodnogo tipa), not fully collectivized, i.e. eliminating the family structure
as was envisaged in the communal house (dom kommuna) but prompting social
change through minimizing kitchens etc and providing extensive communal facilities in
the separate pavilion linked by a bridge. Here the Constructivists first demonstrated the
new minimal apartments they designed for the state construction body, Stroikom,
including the famous Type-F split-level units and internal corridor-street which inspired Le
Corbusier's later Units d'habitation. The project was also a demonstration of economical
construction.
Due to lack of maintenance and conservation control, as well as nearby
developments the Narkomfin building is in a critical state and will be
demolished if action is not taken in the very near future.

A quintessential work of Constructivist architecture, which once used to float on columns

but whose space between was filled in to provide additional housing, which also
contained a solarium, roof garden, communal kitchen and library among other facilities,
and oft-cited as inspiration for Le Courbusiers Unit dHabitation, is these days in
complete and utter disrepair.
The structure, home to some 50 apartments, including some spacious duplex quarters, is
now at less than half capacity with most of the other apartments in disrepair,
and is potentially to be demolished by the city of Moscow, its current property
holder, unless another course of action is taken (suggestions have included affordable
artist studios to expensive middle-class housing).

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http://narkomfin.ru/Eng.aspx
http://narkomfin.ru/Eng/Narkomfin/History/Chronicle.aspx