"Garden City": the unrealized master plan of Moscow in 1950

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In 1909, the "Old Moscow" society was founded. It developed the first General Plan of Moscow. The leaders of the society were architects Alexey Shchusev and Ivan Zholtovsky. In the First World War, there was no time for the General Plan, work on it continued in 1922, and in 1923 the first outlines of New Moscow were published.

The city was divided into six zones. Its core is the Kremlin and Kitai-Gorod ("Golden City"). Then there were five belts: "White City" (a ring of boulevards), "Earthen City" (Garden Ring), "Red City" (a ring of factories), a belt of garden cities and a "Green Belt". The building height decreases from the center to the periphery, where there are houses no higher than 3 floors.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of urbanism emerged - a scientifically based concept of urban development. The ideal at that time was seen as a "garden city" in which urban development was interspersed with parks and agricultural space. The common thing was a decrease in the number of storeys in the city from the center to the outskirts. Russian urbanism worked along the same lines. The Interpreter's blog has already written about the development of the General Plan of the garden city of Barnaul. A similar concept was created for Moscow, it was developed by the famous architect Alexei Shchusev.

In 1924, in the Krasnaya Niva magazine, Aleksey Shchusev described what, according to his General Plan, Moscow was supposed to be by 1950. We publish a snippet of this article:

Moscow layout

Let's take a look at Moscow from the height of an airplane in 1950. Right below us, the well-known Kremlin sparkles with an exquisite pattern of buildings, walls and towers. The day is festive, bright, there are crowds of people in the Kremlin. But these are not parades of troops, this is not the closed life of the center of the state. There is something different here. The Kremlin is a museum, one of the greatest museums in the world, a museum of all three plastic arts (since architecture is the Kremlin itself). The All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, like the Parisian Elysee Palace, were moved to Petrovsky Park, this elevated, healthy and topographically flat part of Moscow, partly turned into public parks, partly into garden cities. On the main thoroughfare of the Leningradskoye Highway, palaces for the business brain of the Republic have been planned and built with closed ceremonial courtyards, amphilades, a meeting room and business offices.

These buildings begin a systematic new construction of the healthiest part of Moscow, its north-western corner and embrace the meanders of the upper reaches of the Moskva River with its forests for almost 20 miles. Krylatskoe, Khoroshevo, Serebryany Bor, Pokrovskoe-Streshnevo are exemplary garden cities where Muscovites come after a business day by trams, subways, and partly by airborne buses, which have stops in the center on flat roofs of special buildings. Two- and three-story residential buildings, streets with wide sidewalks, squares and cozy parks with theaters and other public buildings - this is the character of residential new Moscow, which has spread over 25 years towards the north-western wedge.

Turning from our observation point in the opposite direction to the south-west, we see a completely different picture - industrial Moscow: Simonovo. The famous Sukino swamp moves, puffs, clanks, but does not breathe up to the Kolomna heights. Electricity and smokeless coal are everywhere. The whole Sukino swamp with its dusty and malaria bogs is pitted with buckets of industrial and forest ports. The embankments are served by railway lines and are lined with orderly rows of warehouses with automatic cranes. The port is teeming with ships and barges that came both from the upper reaches, so mainly from the Oka, with which a convenient connection is established with the help of a lock.

Water transport unloads the Moscow railway junction. On the heights of Kolomenskoye there are healthy working villages with cozy small apartments for families and rooms for singles. The villages are supplied with libraries, baths, laundries, and other ancillary institutions. The industrial area is connected to the center by the metro and airborne buses, while around the circumference Moscow is connected to all the new suburbs by a new boulevard of 50 sazh. width (rings G; about 105 meters wide - BT), passing through Simonovo, Moskvorechye, Vorobyovo, Fili, Serebryany Bor, Petrovsko-Razumovskoye, Ostankino, Alekseevskoye, Sokolniki, Izmailovo and b. Annenhof Grove. This new belt, along which high-speed tram cars, cars and motorcycles rush, is one of the best walks around Moscow for Muscovites. Behind the G ring is our ring road, but electrified, serving the passengers surrounding Old Moscow's garden cities.

Behind the Okruzhnaya road, a 2-verst (2, 2 km - BT) wide green barrage strip of plantings grows green, in which in some places settlements are interspersed, cozy and cheerful with electricity, sewerage and running water. All of them are part of the city, which is enclosed by the green belt itself included in the city square. Greens, which absorb dust and give oxygen, must penetrate into the body of the city of Moscow itself, it, like the lungs, must supply air to the central organism, and therefore from the green belt, greens cuts in wedges in several directions to the center.

The entire mountain slope of the Sparrow Hills is transformed with the help of monumental stairs into a sports Acropolis, with a monument to Lenin, stadiums, gymnasiums and schools of swimming and river sports. The entire low-lying part of the Khamovniki was planned partly for the military, partly for educational sports. Large military maneuver camps were moved to Naro-Fominsk, and the air base at st. Legs. The entrance from the Sparrow Hills resembles the views of Rome in the compositions of Pironesi with the strict outlines of public buildings, streets, squares and boulevards.

Thanks to the greenery reaching the center, the correct exchange of air in the city and ventilation of the districts are ensured, weakening the summer epidemic diseases that usually occur with urban overcrowding and poor sanitary facilities. Achievements in the field of sanitation and hygiene especially make themselves felt in Moscow in 1950, as opposed to the difficult years of the revolution and civil war.

We see excellent watering of the streets, an abundance of fountains and, which is especially important in cultural centers, well-equipped underground latrines with showers. Drinking water is drawn from chambers from the upper reaches of the Volga, and it is ozonized and perfectly filtered on special filters, from where it enters the water tanks at the heights of the Sparrow Hills or in the Rublevsky Towers.

Transport of Moscow

Moscow nowadays has 92 people per tithe. residents; by 1950, taking its territory together with a 2-verst green belt of 50 thousand dessiatines and counting 60 people. per tithe - it will have only 3 million people, and therefore Moscow must increase geographically to accommodate up to 5 million people. In the north-west, north-east and north of Moscow we see prominent wedges of residential garden-cities that accommodate the growing population of the city, living without restricting the old city and using all the latest amenities of sanitation, hygiene and transportation.

These new towns, cut by boulevards and parks, are healthy places to live, where the population enjoys all the amenities and yet is close to the capital. But this is not enough - the Moscow railway junction has developed so much in the new Moscow that the 2nd ring road appeared at a distance of 11 versts from the green belt. Tomilino, Pushkino, Odintsovo stations are large marshalling yards of the new Okruzhnaya road. Moscow is cut from north to south and from east to west, partly by flyovers and partly by underground electric railways. lines. Trains from the north and east and back run without a change. We see the new central station of the Oktyabrskaya road, covered with giant, 40-fathom, openwork arches. Trains pass on the 2nd floor, the entire Kalanchevskaya Square has changed its configuration, and the slope is corrected with a slight rise, a wide avenue with boulevards begins, leading to Sokolniki Park.

The metro, which cuts Moscow in 2 diagonal directions from northwest to southeast and from southwest to northeast, continues up to the line of the 2nd ring road, and therefore along its highways we see whole rows of comfortable residential communities, separated by green areas: Losinoostrovsky, Izmailovsky, Serebryany Bor and others. Thus, the greater Moscow, while maintaining the shape of concentric circles, develops its living space in wedges in a star-like manner.

The Moskva River, whose waters are reinforced by adjacent rivers with the help of sluices, no longer looks like a puddle in the center of the city; it is a full-flowing river like the one we now see above the Babegorodskaya dam.

There are elegant motor boats passing along it, carrying passengers at an astonishing speed; they are equipped with both electricity and air engines. River sports on summer evenings enlivens the river, the embankments of which are strictly girdled with openwork balustrades: bridges cross the river in 20 or more places, closing trams A, B, C and G. marble, 40 meters wide.

Infrastructure of Moscow

Instead of Okhotny Ryad, the large palace of the USSR with a colossal audience of 10 thousand people rises in the sky with silhouettes of slender towers. Although it has little space in terms of area, technology makes it possible to drive the building upward, which completes its bizarre silhouette. Elevators of varying speeds transport delegates from conference rooms to offices, libraries, museums, canteens and other ancillary rooms. There is also an outdoor pulpit at the palace, and around the building on brackets and consoles there are sculptural images of great figures for the benefit of mankind.

A wide street leads from Teatralnaya Square to Lubyanskaya, trams, passing through tunnels, do not clutter it, and the exit to Myasnitskaya is expanded to 15 sazhens. The pavements are everywhere from cubic Norwegian granite, part of the mosaic masonry. The Palace of the USSR is illuminated by searchlights all night long and, being built of white Ural marble, is especially effective against the background of the dark night sky. Opera and drama theaters are scattered throughout the districts. These are not dry lonely buildings, these are groups of theater performance buildings with subsidiary schools and decorative workshops. The actor lives near his theater, he is a priest of art.

Moscow markets with refrigerated warehouses, located along the periphery of Ring B, are full of people from early morning. The cleanliness is exemplary, the markets are supplied from the metro station and 2-diameter railways crossing Moscow. Sukharev's bargaining, an echo of Asia, only on Sundays amuses the eye with a fussy and motley crowd. The supply of products is centralized and simplified by water transport.

The shopping centers of Kitai-gorod with 3-tiered concrete terraces in Zaryadye are supplied with samples of goods coming from all factory centers in the USSR. Houses here of the American type with vertical lifts and moving platforms are connected by openwork closed bridges. Industrial Moscow is clearly and strongly identified; the foreign market has long considered it.

In contrast to Moscow, the residential area with gardens and boulevards, the center of Moscow is monumental and austere. The old times show through with a bright tracery of the historical past, deepening the significance of the great center of the Republic. Monuments to great people, writers, politicians, musicians, scientists are located along the rings of boulevards, processed with propylae and staircases - this is a visual alphabet for the younger generations.

The silhouettes of the new Moscow have changed - garden cities are spreading in low groups of houses of 2-3 floors with a theater, towering towers of airplane platforms and other public buildings. More light, more sun - this is the motto of the Nordic countries, which do not allow the killing of organisms in rooms without sun and light. Sanatoriums, hospitals, climatic stations can be seen in the most elevated and green areas of the city. There are also summer and winter stadiums. Fuel does not clutter empty places of Moscow with dull firewood warehouses.

Pipelines from peat and coal nearby, well insulated from heat loss, heat, like electric lighting, entire neighborhoods.

The best places in the districts are reserved for educational institutions equipped with gymnasiums, where young people get used to future civic social work. The entire Khamovniki sector up to the Novodevichy Convent was given to the university, clinics, and other subsidiary institutions of higher education. The Academic Center is located in the area of the Rumyantsev Museum and the upland part of Prechistensky Boulevard. Instead of shacks in the side streets, institutes, colleges and laboratories have been erected of appropriate height and volume.

In the center, on the squares, silhouette high buildings surrounded by parks are allowed, these are hives inhabited by business workers from morning to evening, emptying towards night and filling in the morning, but there are not many of them, these are only loners. The building height decreases from the center to the periphery, where there are houses no higher than 3 floors. Beauty in simplicity and grandeur for monuments and in warmth and comfort for housing - this is the motto of the architecture of the new Moscow. Sewerage facilities with the help of biological purification and automatic incinerators relieve Moscow from the horror of summer epidemic diseases, and the swamps of low-lying places have disappeared under the arrangement of elegant artificial and flowing pools with fountains. The stunted basements are not visible, the working population lives in healthy garden cities and early in the morning by special trains are transferred to factories, warehouses and factories.

This is where we end our flight in an airplane over Moscow in 1950 and strive to turn this dream into reality with the help of labor and reasonable social legislation.