15 June 2016

The Guardian: Demolition of Moscow 'workers' villages' raises fears for avant garde heritage

The group of buildings on Pogodinskaya Ulitsa made up one of 26 “workers’ villages” built in the capital during the 1920s in the constructivist style, a Russian architecture movement that combined geometrical shapes, new technologies, and communist ideology.

In 2012, they were included on Moscow’s register of cultural buildings. But last year a government commission gave developers the green light to demolish the buildings and evict the residents of Pogodinskaya. “It is criminal, these are architectural gems,” said Parushina. [...]

The workers’ villages and Melnikov designs are not the only vulnerable constructivist buildings in Moscow. Much of the Russian capital’s early Soviet heritage is disappearing fast.

In another part of Moscow, authorities recently began demolishing another constructivist landmark, the 1929 Taganskaya telephone station. They did so despite public protests, a petition to the Moscow mayor that garnered more than 30,000 signatures and the opposition of leading Russian architects. Even activists were surprised to see how many people took to the streets to defend the building, which was not one of the city’s best-known constructivist monuments.

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