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Narkomfin — Moscow
I’m desperate to see the renovation of Narkomfin in Moscow. I went to have a nosy around a few years ago when it was still in a state of disrepair but you could still admire its functionalist majesty.
Designed by Moisei Ginzburg in 1929 for high ranking Soviet employees of the Commissariat of Finance (“Narkomfin”), the project gave Ginzburg the chance to try out theories advanced by the Constructivist OSA group 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.
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. The utopianism 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 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 housing shortage, while a planned adjoining…
