Experimental plastic house

By the end of the 1950s, rapid urbanization in the USSR forced the state to take on the provision of housing for new citizens, because before that, peasants built houses for themselves in the village ^[1] . But in 1950-1970, the Soviet Union could not afford to build quality housing on a massive scale, so temporary Khrushchev’s 25-year life was built. The idea of ​​a standardized, cheap house-building was taken from France, from where they also borrowed the idea of ​​an individual house-Khrushchev made of plastic.

The purpose of the experimental house in Leningrad was to check building products made of plastics, as well as to study their operational performance ^[1] . Despite the cheapness and other positive qualities of an individual house, the project did not enter the series: according to the party leadership, such housing will bring up individualism in a person. In addition, such houses were expensive to maintain.

The experimental plastic house stood in Leningrad for 3 years ^[2] and was used only as a laboratory to study changes in the properties of plastic over time ^[3] . According to the results of the experiment, a five-story residential building made of plastic was built in Moscow several years later ^[4] .

The house consisted of two floors: the first one, 2.2 meters high, was made of glass blocks and occupied an area of ​​6 m² - it played the role of protecting ventilation and engineering systems; the second floor of reinforced plastic with a wall thickness of 14 centimeters (which corresponded to the masonry of 4 bricks for thermal insulation) was residential. There were large windows made of plastic (plexiglass), a room, a kitchen, a combined bathroom, a pantry and a small terrace ^[5] . The total area of ​​the second floor was 49 m².