Moscow's Modernist Marvel

Anyone heading down Moscow’s Myasnitskaya Street toward the Garden Ring would have a hard time overlooking No. 39, an unusual building of glass and reddish-brown stone with one side fronting Myasnitskaya and the other Sakharov Prospect. For most passersby, it probably gives off a modern business center vibe. Only Moscow history buffs will know that this is the Tsentrosoyuz building – a unique example of European modernism and the only building in Moscow designed by the great architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier.

In the early years following the revolution, dozens of creative people from Western Europe and the United States were drawn to the capital of the young socialist state. They wanted to see life in history’s first land of workers and peasants, and to experience how communist ideas were pervading the atmosphere there. At various times, the Soviet Union hosted H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, and Romain Rolland.

At the turn of the 1920s, Moscow was also visited three times by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. That committed promoter of the “Modern City” was already a front-runner in the European architectural avant-garde, having made a name for himself building private villas in and around Paris. But whereas the celebrated writers mostly came to the Soviet Union to look and learn, Le Corbusier was also pursuing some specifically practical goals.

In 1928, the architectural firm that he headed with his cousin and close collaborator, Pierre Jeanneret-Gris, was commissioned to design a building to house the Tsentrosoyuz offices. The firm’s first sizable project, a design for the Palace of Nations in Geneva, had failed not long before, which must have been why Le Corbusier was looking hopefully toward Soviet Russia as a place where his ideas would be widely adopted.

In Moscow, he became acquainted with Constructivist bellwethers Konstantin Melnikov, the Vesnin brothers, Moisei Ginzburg, and Ivan Leonidov. After a close study of their designs, he embraced some of their ideas, which he would later apply, at least partially, to the Tsentrosoyuz building.

The Soviet government was entirely serious about building a home base for Tsentrosoyuz (the Central Union of Consumer Societies, which oversaw all of the country’s consumer cooperatives) and set up two consecutive design competitions to achieve that. The first was an open contest that involved the brightest and best Soviet architects; Boris Velikovsky’s design won. The second – a closed competition for Western firms only – attracted Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, and several others, including the British firm, Burnet and Tait, and the Berliner Max Taut.

With the field narrowed, a third competition followed that pitted Le Corbusier directly against Ivan Leonidov. Le Corbusier’s submission won again. Wagging tongues would later claim that this happened only thanks to his friendship with the architects on the jury, but that can hardly be true, as the design submitted by the avant-garde’s poster boy was certainly the most revolutionary of them all.

The winning design held firmly to all of Le Corbusier’s “Cinq points de l’architecture moderne” (“Five Points of Modern Architecture,” 1927), namely:

1. Supporting walls replaced by reinforced concrete columns that create usable space underneath the structure;
2. A flat roof (its drainage system hidden inside the bearing columns) to accommodate gardens and other outdoor spaces for relaxation and sunbathing;
3. An open floor plan;
4. Ribbon (continuous horizontal) windows;
5. A façade design unconstrained by the need for supporting walls.

Certain of those conceptual elements (the windows, the columns, and the flat roof with its usable space) were later used in Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis’s 1930 design for the Narkomfin building, a residence for Finance Commissariat bureaucrats on Novinsky Boulevard. Also, Le Corbusier is known to have visited one of Ginzburg’s completed residential projects in 1930 and borrowed some of its attributes for the first Unité d’habitation (Housing Unit) that he would later build in Marseilles, which featured two-level apartments connected by long, shared corridors.

The Tsentrosoyuz building, which was to accommodate 2,000 office workers, would be built of reinforced concrete and have three equally important facades, one facing Myastnitskaya Street, another giving onto the future Novokirovsky Prospect (now Sakharov Prospect), which at the time existed only on paper, and a third that was westward-facing. The urban development plan in effect at the time had placed a new boulevard there, but it was never built. So it was decided to strip the original conception for a beautifully roofed lobby on that side down to a modest entryway that is visible from the street to this day. One of the original designs did survive, however – as a mock-up that is on display in the foyer.

Since Myasnitskaya Street was both busy and noisy (by 1920s standards), the senior personnel and administrative office spaces were to be located in the section closest to the new boulevard, where additional sound-proofing would be provided by a garden planted with trees. The sales departments, the worker organizations, and the exhibition spaces with their expansive floorplans and high ceilings were to occupy the section facing Myasnitskaya. And the central unit, the one with the Novokirovsky frontage, was to contain a soundproofed auditorium that could seat 600 for stage shows, movie screenings, and meetings. The design of that room incorporated spaces above and below the stage, for easy set changes. One of the building’s main technical features was supposed to be its “neutralizing walls,” consisting of dual panes of glass with an insulating void between. But budgetary considerations eventually led to that idea being abandoned.

The project’s greatest innovation, though, was the use of a stacked reinforced-concrete shell that removed any layout constraints for the space on each floor, which was absolutely unprecedented even in avant-garde Soviet architecture. It allowed for a roomy central foyer that would link the recreational complex that housed the auditorium seamlessly with the administrative and sales blocks.

After entering through any of the three lobbies, Tsentrosoyuz employees would find themselves in a spacious, glass-domed area that contained a café, library, and reading room. Warm-air grates were to be installed in the floor, to help dry clothing and footwear when the weather turned snowy. The cloakrooms would be below ground level, and would be accessible not only from the street but also from a parking area that could accommodate thirty to fifty vehicles.

Especially important to the Tsentrosoyuz plan was the untrammeled circulation of people within the building, which was essentially effected by replacing stairs with “pedestrian walkways.” These were broad ramps with a gentle 14-degree incline that was easy on the legs. Those ramps were yet another revolutionary solution and part of the building’s unique claim to fame. Younger employees would often use them to scoot down from floor to floor on document carts, although such shenanigans were not exactly applauded. There were also traditional staircases in the corners of the central hall, but they were insignificant in the architectural scheme of things. The free passage thus given not only to sunlight and air but also to people would be part of Le Corbusier’s repertoire going forward.

The ramps, though, were not the only way for employees to reach another floor. There was also another invention that was revolutionary in the Soviet Union at the time – a paternoster elevator. This consisted of a chain of open compartments, each able to accommodate two people, that moved in a continuous loop, carrying far more people up and down in one motion than a traditional elevator ever could. Paternosters were extensively used in Western Europe between the 1900s and 1950s, but, since they had no doors to close and people stepped off whenever they chose, mishaps were frequent. One such accident occurred at the Tsentrosoyuz building in the late 1990s, after which the elevator was decommissioned and, during later renovations, the shaft was walled in with sheet rock. Today the paternoster can only be seen on the main floor, where it is on permanent display, and the likelihood of it ever coming back into operation is remote at best.

If the urban planners of today could be transported back to the Moscow of the early 1930s, they would have no qualms in applying a current buzzword – “social distance” – to the Tsentrosoyuz building, in acknowledgment of the contemporary appeal of ideas that are now almost a century old. Another function integrated into the design of Le Corbusier’s building was provided by public areas such as an exercise room. Located above the auditorium, it too had a usable roof; the plan was to install a basketball court there encircled by a running track. And there was a canteen on the same level as the exercise room, whose placement on the very top story meant that kitchen smells would not permeate the entire building. The roofs of the other two blocks would have gardens and outdoor cafés. The recreational facilities were originally intended not just for employees but for anyone who wished to take advantage of them. But these ideas never came to fruition. There was one working rooftop café before the war, but the rest of the plans remained unrealized.

While marveling at Le Corbusier’s talent, we must not forget the contribution made by his partner, who has often been overshadowed by the more eminent of the two cousins. Pierre Jeanneret created all the decorative wooden elements, from the tops of the ramps’ solid balustrades to the elegant wall motifs on the second floor. Those features have now been restored to their original condition.

Construction began in 1929, after the Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, which occupied the designated site, was demolished. The razed church did, however, leave some souvenirs behind. On two occasions – once in the early 1930s, when the Moscow metro’s first line was being laid, and again in 1975, when the Tsentrosoyuz building was undergoing its initial renovation – workers stumbled on a crypt they had not known was there.

Le Corbusier came to Moscow as often as he could, but during his absences, Soviet architect Nikolai Kolli was in charge. Kolli was a frequent visitor to Le Corbusier’s company in Paris and kept up a constant correspondence with him.

In 1931, inspired by having won the Tsentrosoyuz bid, Le Corbusier applied to be part of the design competition for the Palace of Soviets and also proposed his Ville radieuse (Radiant City)¸ a new developmental concept for Moscow that would involve demolishing all existing buildings in the city’s historic center. His Modernist Palace of Soviets design used technical solutions already familiar from the Tsentrosoyuz project – the reinforced concrete shell, the groundbreaking organization of core areas, and the particular attention paid to the acoustics and air conditioning.

But the 1930s brought with them a new official attitude to architecture. It now had an additional function – an ideological function – to discharge. Both Constructivism and Functionalism were labeled bourgeois, while Stalinist neoclassicism moved front and center. Many of the leading Soviet avant-garde architects were forced to adapt to the new requirements, and those who remained true to their ideas – Konstantin Melnikov, for one – were pushed aside. The new urban landscape proposed for central Moscow was summarily rejected, and Boris Iofan’s bombastic design for the Palace of Soviets was selected. The famously eccentric and unpredictable Le Corbusier left the USSR very shortly after that, vowing never to work with the Soviet government again.

Le Corbusier’s departure coincided with a project review during which several of his specifications were declared financially impractical. Key among those decisions was the jettisoning of his side-latched double-glazed windows. The city fathers no longer had the funds to pay for the glass manufactured in Saint-Gobain and the US-made window frames. And the Soviet-produced windows would turn out to be one of the building’s weakest points: prior to the first renovation in 1975, they let in cold air in winter and kept the whole place unbearably hot in summer.

Construction resumed in 1932 and took four years to complete. It was supervised by Nikolai Kolli and František Zammer, an architect invited in from Czechoslovakia. Unofficially, though, it fell under the aegis of Nikolai Milyutin, former People’s Commissar for Finance, which should come as no surprise. Milyutin had long been a big fan of modern architecture and had drawn up the request for proposals to design the Finance Commissariat residence, which was ultimately built by his college friend, Moisei Ginzburg. The ex-commissar had also personally designed a two-level penthouse for his family in that building that Le Corbusier had rated highly during a visit in 1930. In 1939, Milyutin was appointed artistic director for the Palace of Soviets project, which was ultimately never built.

After the latest in a string of revisions, the Tsentrosoyuz building was clad not in the unfinished concrete that its creator had in mind, but in red Armenian tufa. Le Corbusier was horrified when he heard, and at that point disowned the entire project in no uncertain terms. Reconciliation proved elusive until 1939, when the Soviets paid Le Corbusier’s sizable honorarium, which enabled him to survive the rigors of wartime, when the demand for architectural services evaporated.

Following Tsentrosoyuz, the building was occupied by the People’s Commissariat of Light Industry (renamed the Ministry of Light Industry after all the people’s commissariats were redesignated as ministries in 1946), and, from 1959, by the Central Statistical Board of the USSR, which is now the Russian Federation’s State Statistics Service (Rosstat). During the initial round of renovations in 1975, the windows were replaced (rendering the ribbon windows visible only from the inside), the spaces between the first-floor columns were built out, the transparent dome over the reading room was permanently dismantled, the open-plan offices were divided into cubicle-sized spaces, and the first-floor foyer was partitioned off, so that it no longer even remotely resembles its original self. Count has been lost of the various minor projects done here over the years, but they are known to include the walling off of the paternoster shaft, except on the first floor, and the removal of the door leading to the portico over the entrance on the Myasnitskaya Street side (before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the portico had served as a perch for high ranking officials observing passing parades on patriotic holidays).

During the renovations of 2014 and 2015, the windows were swapped out again and elements of the interior décor, including the ramps, were restored. Today they look as splendid as they did in the early years after their installation. The finishing touch came when a memorial to Le Corbusier, by sculptor Andrey Tyrtyshnikov and architect Anton Voskresensky, was unveiled outside the renovated building. It shows the great man seated in a chair facing his unrealized plan for the Radiant City. The placement of the statue is highly symbolic, in that it has as its backdrop the Tsentrosoyuz building, as if to show that historical justice has been reestablished and that Le Corbusier has finally come to terms with his masterpiece.