Vladimir Filonov

In Russia much of the current renovation of panel buildings involves facing work and is usually carried out on an individual basis.

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The three curators of a recent exhibition explain the possible benefits that renovating panel housing could have for Russia.

For many they are a lasting image of life in any post-Soviet town. Indeed, they could perhaps be one of communism’s most widespread legacies. Entering or leaving any city from Almaty and Bishkek to Arkhangelsk and Tallinn, visitors have to make their way through suburbs filled with frame-panel buildings. From the early, temporary khrushchevkas, three- to five-story prefabricated housing blocks first built during Nikita Khrushchev’s rule in the USSR, to the 10- to 12-story and upwards monoliths of late communism, panel buildings dominate the post-Soviet skyline.

Since the 1990s many who have financially been able to, have left these buildings for more prestigious properties — in out-of-town cottage settlements or historical buildings in city centers. But aside from issues of image and the social status of these buildings there are fundamental questions about their sustainability. “In the USSR the first series of panel housing were built with the intention of lasting 25 years, but they have already been standing for more than 50,” said Valeria Kashirina, a Russian architect, based in St. Petersburg. The question arises, she explained, of how to deal with the aging buildings: demolition or renovation.

With the current financial difficulties, original plans to raze huge swathes of these buildings and rebuild on the land is becoming ever less realistic. “The modernization of the socialist legacy is one of the most beneficial and speedy ways of solving the problem of how to provide Russians with affordable housing,” said Kashirina.

Russia is not alone in having a large legacy of panel buildings, and analyzing the solutions used elsewhere could provide Russia with a range of options for approaching this issue. At an exhibition in St. Petersburg earlier this year town-planning officials mixed with the public to learn more about the modernization and redevelopment of these types of buildings in Germany and how this experience is being used in Russia. The instigator of the project and manager of the exhibition, Kashirina is currently the art director at nps tchoban voss, an architectural bureau in the city, and has experience working in architecture in both countries.

The development of panel buildings

“The history of panel construction in the two countries has constantly crossed paths,” said Kashirina. Europe’s first experiment in frame-panel housing was constructed in 1926 in Germany. The success of Wilhelm Primkel’s construction in the Friedrichsfelde district of Berlin encouraged the development of this type of accommodation across an entire quarter — in the same district of Berlin — by the end of the 1920s. “The impulse for this construction was a typical desire of the Weimer Republic’s democrats to provide the families of workers and low-level state functionaries with comfortable and affordable housing,” said Kashirina.

The chaos of Russia’s Civil War and the new communist power’s policies in the countryside resulted in a mass influx of people into urban areas. Despite the Soviet government’s great building programs, the country’s housing shortage grew during the interwar period, and was compounded by the destruction of World War II. In 1948 on 5th Ulitsa Sokolinoi Gory in Moscow the USSR’s first frame-panel building was erected. “There is a legend that soon after the end of World War II Soviet rulers visited Berlin and, having seen the apartments [in panel building], immediately decided to transfer the German experience to the USSR,” said Kashirina.

Whatever the exact story, various experiments continued in the early 1950s, but panel building in the USSR took off only after the period of luxury Stalinist architecture came to an end. With the decree on the liquidation of excess in planning and construction of 1955 and the official drive to lower construction costs, panel buildings with their rapid construction and low costs came into their own. “The USSR adopted Germany’s experience of industrial construction and began to actively apply and develop it,” explained Kashirina. This type of construction provided large housing estates for growing factories and put new towns on the map. Soon the USSR was re-exporting its knowledge to East Germany.

Despite officials favoring them for their efficacy, panel construction is generally not popular in either country. The anonymity, uniformity and repetition of design are cited as the main reasons why people dislike the buildings. “One of the prejudices in Germany is that living in a panel building housing estate means living anonymously and nearly forgotten by those who prefer or can afford apartments in historical buildings in central districts,” explained Christina Gräwe, the curator of the German room at the exhibition.

However, not all the Soviet panel buildings are devoid of character. “We shouldn’t underestimate the attempts of the architects of the 1960s and 1970s, who with limited resources at times achieved some interesting results – sometimes even aesthetically convincing,” explained Vladimir Frolov. As an example, the architecture critic and editor-in-chief of “Project Baltica”, who was the curator of the exhibition’s Russian room, cited the ornamental paneling evident in many of the southern republics of the USSR.

Equally, the buildings do retain a few distinct advantages over some more modern developments. Many inhabitants of older panel buildings enjoy the greenery around their house, explained Gräwe. “Comparing a modest khrushchevka, drowned in greenery, and a modern Russian high-rise housing complex, towering like a cliff above a basic parking lot, it’s possible to conclude that, for all its minuses, the resettlement of the 1960s was more humane and proportionate, as well as better architecturally,” said Frolov. But he warned against both idolizing this building heritage or treating them as a monstrous mistake.

Despite the shared construction techniques and the similar social perceptions of these buildings, the experiences of the two countries have differed starkly in recent decades. The unification of Germany played a large role in stimulating work on redevelopment in the country. Aside from the promises of the then-German Chancellor, Hermut Kohl, to turn the former GDR into a blossoming landscape, the reality of shrinking towns following the fall of the Berlin Wall was a major stimulous for the rethink of the country’s urban environment and its planning.

“Very many plants and factories ceased to exist in the former GDR, and it was precisely around these former socialist enterprises that districts and entire towns of panel buildings had grown up,” explained Kashirina. As people then began moving to the west of the country, “it was necessary to make life in these districts more attractive,” she added. However, this process was not quick. “It took a long time until politicians, economists, architects and planners, and sociologists became aware of the consequences of shrinking cities,” Gräwe said.

As a result it has been the state that has provided the majority of the funding behind the projects in Germany, while in Russia what redevelopment there is in this sphere is supported by private investors. “Most often these investors [in Russia] are European firms that as part of advertising their products pay, for example, to change the windows in a building,” said Kashirina.

However, the experience of Lenzhilniiproyekt, a St. Petersburg-based institute that has experimented with modernizing residential pre-fabricated housing in the city, has shown that it is extraordinarily difficult to make the process profitable for the investor, said Frolov. “Nevertheless, adding a floor to a khrushchevka without installing a lift and thus creating cheap residential space on the top floor is possible without resettling the building’s inhabitants or putting too great a pressure on the existing infrastructure,” he said. Similar work reconstructing single-floor attics is currently undergoing trials in Chelyabinsk and Tomsk, he added.

The scale of the projects is also a point of difference. Germany has tended to take on whole areas or micro-districts at one time. In Russia this has not been the case. “The only examples I know — and I’m talking mainly about the situation in St. Petersburg — are of modernizing individual buildings,” said Kashirina, citing window replacement and heat-conserving facing as examples. “These two approaches cannot be compared in anyway.”

One of the most well-known German examples of shrinking is in the Sudstadt, or south town, region of Leinefelde. Modernization in the town, situated not far from the former East-West border, began 15 years ago. The work started on the outskirts of the district with the aim of strengthening the center and is still on going.

The project was not originally welcomed unquestioningly. “Many inhabitants were highly skeptical,” Gräwe said. People fear dilapidation, unaffordable accommodation and never-ending construction work. “The mayor of the city and the planners had a lot of convincing to do.” However, current monitoring shows people identifying themselves as being a model-city for the modernization of panel buildings, said Gräwe.

Panel buildings and new living patterns

The five-story panel buildings are often criticized for their strict internal structure and small apartments, Frolov explained. However, if a more global approach to redeveloping a district is taken many of these could be used as solutions rather than problems. “The modern man is ever more often orientated to living alone,” explained, Frolov. This idea was proposed and explored by Droog and Kesselskramer, an architecture bureau, in the manifesto of its installation at the most recent Architecture Biennale in Venice, S1ngletown. By 2026 one third of the population of developed countries will be living alone, but, the exhibitors emphasized, this world of single people is a diverse group of people — the young, the old, male, female, students and professionals. “The modernization of five-story panel buildings can totally become an answer to this tendency and part of the policy of providing Russians with affordable housing,” said Frolov.

While the current layout is highly unsuitable for larger families, it is well suited for a small social unit. Constructing an extra floor on these buildings could provide a partial solution to these problems, Frolov explained. “The young could break away and relocate above.” These buildings could also provide accommodation for other groups that live in small units. “It could be possible to try to resettle some of those living in five-story panel buildings and let them out as cheap student housing,” he added.

Other small-scale work on the buildings can also be decorative. As attitudes to architectural styles — in particular modernism — change, not only among professionals but also in the wider community, renovated and redecorated panel buildings could be reinterpreted, said Frolov. In Kaliningrad some architects are working on “khrushchevkas, ‘dressing’ them in pseudo-historical costumes and the excesses that Khrushchev himself battled with,” Frolov explained.

Beyond the residential sphere, various commercial pre-fabricated constructions are being redesigned. In St. Petersburg nps tchoban voss has worked on the conversion of three office-based projects. “These projects are united by two factors that are necessary for the success of such projects: the client’s openness to innovations and experimentation and the architect’s bold thinking,” said Kashirina, who also works for the company.

The facade at the Benois business center on Sverdlovskaya Naberezhnaya was refaced with glass and decorated with the nineteenth-century artist’s costume designs, while the internal structure of the former factory building was redesigned as open plan office space. Similarly the facade of the former chemical laboratory on Ulitsa Khimkov in the city has been replaced with glass and the building remodeled into the Okhta Razliv business center.

Complex approaches

Nevertheless, many of these ideas and indeed the current examples of redeveloping panel housing in Russia are not enough. Although social changes in the last twenty years have reshaped parts of the post-Soviet urban environment in the country, the official town plans and development have not been effective. A seminar with students from the St. Petersburg Architecture and Construction Institute prior to the exhibition concluded that the equal distribution of functions and transport hubs in Russian micro-districts does not work effectively.

The modern economic system has corrected the way the space works a little, said Frolov. “The first floors [of these buildings] have been filled with shops, booths, and then retail centers appeared around metro stations, and pedestrian traffic has concentrated around specific routes.” However, he explained, the redevelopment of the buildings such as the construction of an extra floor or internal restructuring can lead to an increase in traffic and the littering of the area.

“Modernization must take a complex approach,” Frolov said. While Germany is looking at the problem in this way, it is not yet the case in Russia. A complex approach “means the following progression: attracting the means for modernizing, carrying out sociological and town-planning analyses, compiling a report on construction materials and the state of utilities, and then on the basis of these results working out a planning project and then how individual buildings can be developed,” explained Kashirina. This in turn requires a whole host of experts to cooperate.

It is not only specialists who need to be made aware of the problem. “Panel building is not a sexy topic, but especially in Russia it concerns huge groups of people,” said Gräwe. The exhibition in St. Petersburg was intended to highlight how successful modernization can work; it need not be expensive, but “aesthetics, utilization, technical and financial problems and social questions belong together,” she added.

“The exhibition undoubtedly played a key role in attracting the interest of society to the problem of panel housing’s legacy,” Frolov said, and the interest of city officials is an optimistic sign.

Following its week in St. Petersburg the exhibition is to be shown during the 2nd Moscow Architecture Biennele in 2010 and will tour Russian and German cities, including Samara, Novosibirsk and Kaliningrad as well as Tallinn and Riga.