Nikolay Erofeev
Moscow State University; NCCA, Russia
The housing problem was, of course, the first to be tackled by Khrushchev’s architectural reform since it was established at the 20th Congress in 1956 that it should be resolved within the next 20 years. By the early ‘60s they had developed a new type of industrial housing — the so called “Khrushchevka” — which initiated a project of global unification. The “Khrushchevka” spread throughout the Soviet Union — it was considered to be “ultramodern” and even appeared at some international exhibitions. Its economic minimalism enabled the construction of millions of square meters of floor space. It thus became possible to build military and industrial cities in remote areas.
The downside of the “Khrushchevka” was its lack of individuality which rapidly started to cause resentment towards it among the Soviet population. The search for alternative forms of housing and ideas for new settlement started and a number of concepts of property for the communist future were proposed — at the level of a single house, district and city. Several groups of architects proposed a new approach to spatial and social organization of housing for the future communist society — for example a group “NER” that developed a non-hierarchical net-like housing units, which were to replace the city.
“Homes of the future” projects, revealing new interaction of social and cultural functions were actively discussed at the Moscow Research Institute of Theory and History of Architecture. The futuristic architectural projects were based on technicist visions and rational principles based on the “science base” as the sum of social and urban studies were carried. With the development of cybernetics, there was a hope that it will be possible to calculate the precise scientific model of rational use of space. Futuristic quest culminated in the late 1960s in a row of completed projects, including the construction of huge industrial cities, projects which were impossible without centralized management and planned economy. The aim of the article is to define the political and formal factors in socialist residential architecture, as well as the analysis of the main concept of the Soviet residential construction, which represents the formation of a new society through the architectural space.