The industrial housing experiment revolutionized urbanization during the Soviet era. Thousands of new dwellings could now be erected quicker and cheaper than ever before. The first prefab panel slabs built in the Moscow district of Cheryomushki were widely ‘copied and pasted’ into dozens of new micro-districts springing up around the Russian capital between the 1960s and 1980s.

Today, the ‘sleeping districts’ are homes to the vast majority of Muscovites and the monumental cityscapes they form are beyond striking.

Their clones would take different forms and colours, giving each microrayon a tiny bit of their own unique identity. Two circular Bublik houses built for the 1980 Summer Olympics remain landmarks of Ochakovo-Matveyevskoye, while blue and red facades of peshka blocks towering above the South-Western Administrative Okrug will guide your way to Konkovo or Yasenevo.

Walking around the areas of Danilovsky or Alexeyevsky, you will stumble upon a good number of captivating designs

Today, the ‘sleeping districts’ are homes to the vast majority of Muscovites and the monumental cityscapes they form are beyond striking. However, it is not only the peripheries that exhibit a modernist approach to post-war housing architecture in Moscow.

Walking around the areas of Danilovsky or Alexeyevsky, you will stumble upon a good number of captivating designs, such as the pilotis-supported ‘House on Chicken Legs’ or the mighty ‘Titanic’.

The images in this post were extracted from the book Eastern Blocks (Zupagrafika, 2019) and were comissioned by Zupagrafika to Alexander Veryovkin.
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