Kharkov and the Gosprom
JAMES DUNNETT on Kharkov’s Soviet-era Gosprom building, and threats to its long term survival.
First published Winter 2012
Gosprom one May Day in the late 1930s
Ukraine, sixth nation of Europe in population, has just added its name to the DOCOMOMO roster, launching its own national chapter with a three day conference in Kharkov devoted to its Modern Movement heritage. It is joining none too soon. Its most famous asset, the Gosprom or ‘House of State Industry’ is undergoing a controversial restoration, to which attention was drawn in the Royal Academy’s recent Building the Revolution exhibition.
Reyner Banham remarked of the Gosprom in his encyclopaedic Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1959) that, together with the Van Nelle Factory, ‘these two works from the extremes of the Elementarist-Constructivist territory were the only contemporary works of the Modern Movement to rival, or exceed the scale of the Bauhaus buildings’. Rising to twelve storeys and occupying a quadrant of 100 degrees around Kharkov’s circular Dzherzhinsky Square (now Freedom Square), it certainly exceeds
in size the Bauhaus buildings by a very substantial margin, and the Van Nelle Factory too - an astonishing affirmation of the organizational power of the centralized Soviet state in 1927. But the Van Nelle Factory six years ago was the subject of very careful restoration and conversion into a design centre, in which original glass and fenestration was conserved throughout, whilst the windows at the Gosprom have all recently been replaced with box-section aluminium, including dummy glazing bars between the panes of the double glazing units, and the original rough un-painted rendered wall surfaces are being replaced by something smooth and white.
Though the Gosprom is the iconic building of Kharkov, it is not ‘listed’ under Ukrainian law, and ICOMOS have reportedly now declined to nominate it as a World Heritage Site – because it has lost its original windows. But it is a big-boned building, never very refined inside or out and able to stand some rough treatment, so the architectural force of its cumulative composition and complex massing remains very potent. Its scale is reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It stands now in a curious state where details such as the men’s lavatories and the radiators and at least some of the lift cars and electrics and the magnificent timber revolving doors look untouched since 1927, while the new windows have a very contemporary banality. It is a building that needs to remain in active use, but its restoration does appear haphazard. A glance at Aalto’s Viipuri Library on the other side of the former Soviet Union would show how carefully Modern Movement conservation can be done – with funding there from the Russian government and architects from Finland. Though DOCOMOMO-Ukraine is probably too late to influence the works to the exterior of the Gosprom, there remains a major question of how the interior should be renovated – which will not be a task for the faint-hearted.
There remains a considerable Modern Movement legacy elsewhere in Kharkov, which was the capital of the Ukrainian SSR for fifteen years – even though the theatre for which there was a famous international competition in 1930 won by the Vesnins over Gropius, Mendelsohn, Breuer and other international contestants was never built.
Many of the more prominent examples, however, were ‘Stalinised’ in the 1940s and 50s – a layer of overscaled kitsch classical detailing was applied over the surface, some of which is now becoming detached. This is true of the former ‘House of Projects’ of 1932 - now Kharkov State University - which rises to fifteen storeys and was designed to complement the Gosprom on the adjacent quadrant by the same architect. It was more badly damaged during the war than the Gosprom itself (which survived German attempts to set fire to it on departure), and the restoration provided an opportunity to overclad it in approved style. When both were in their original form and visible together uninterrupted by the trees latterly planted in the centre of the square, the effect must have been overwhelming.
Indeed so overwhelmed was the Architectural Review, when it published the Gosprom in the May 1932 issue edited by Lubetkin, that it gave its height as twenty two storeys, nearly twice the actual, and complained of its megalomania, while admitting that ‘from a distance, it is undeniably grand and impressive’. Equally it is doubtful whether Banham was correct in assigning it to ‘the extremes of Elementarist/ Constuctivist territory’. Its symmetry and axiality would be untypical, and the lead architect Sergei Serafimov was of an older generation and from St Petersburg – not part of the Moscow group associated with Constructivism. Such architects were aware of the power of curving perspectives, equally visible inside the contemporary Railway-workers' Club in Kharkov
by AN Dimitriev. In some ways the composition is more similar to contemporary semi-academic projects such as those in London of Charles Holden at St James’s Park Underground Station or the University Senate House. But at the Gosprom a ‘Constructivist’ glory in repetition and spatial exuberance typified by the dramatic bridges linking the blocks permeates the composition and gives it a life quite absent from Holden. The latter-day television mast crowning the tallest block too has an appropriate Constructivist flavour, though many original interiors were reportedly destroyed when television moved in.
A closer UK comparison might be Ernö Goldfinger’s Alexander Fleming House at the Elephant and Castle, built 30 years later. A large office building that served for 40 years as the Ministry of Health, located on a roundabout, with parallel blocks of cumulative height arranged axially and linked by bridges, its design may in part have been inspired by the Gosprom. Now converted to housing, with its cinema demolished, it has suffered worse damage than the Gosprom despite its shorter life. A good start would be to list what remains, now under consideration for the third time.
