Architecture between empire and revolution: housing and the shaping of Soviet Leningrad

This article traces the planning history of the first major housing projects built in Soviet Leningrad: the Traktornaya Ulitsa and Serafimov site housing estates. Initiated by municipal authorities in 1924, they were built according to the designs of its own Design Buro and the architects Aleksandr Nikolsky, Aleksandr Gegello, and Grigorii Simonov in 1925–1926. Spearheading the reconstruction of a large industrial suburb, these projects offer an original example of the role of housing in urban development in the Soviet Union and in one of Europe’s largest cities. The planning history of the projects illuminates the way urban development unfolded in the early Soviet context: through practice and negotiation with multiple contexts, both the historic, imperial city and the revolution. The article shows the exemplary quality of these projects and their power and means to reinvent the historic forms and meanings of the city, and reconfigure its spatial hierarchies. It analyses the sources and means at play from revolutionary ideals and avant-garde ideas on form to western models of housing, the surrounding classical city and Byzantine and Russian vernacular architecture. It thus delineates the means through which architecture acts as an instrument of social and cultural change.