State Insurance House on Malaya Bronnaya

In 1926-1927, two 5-story residential buildings were erected in Moscow for employees of the new state institution - the USSR State Insurance . The initiator of the construction was People's Commissar of Finance Nikolai Milyutin , who was considered the author of the “socialist resettlement” project schemes, which envisaged the creation of communal houses . Gosstrakh employees, like many officials who moved from Leningrad to Moscow, did not have their own apartments and were accommodated in hotels, and therefore were ideal participants in a new housing experiment. One of the houses, located in Barykovsky Lane , was designed by the architect Boris Velikovsky and built at the expense of contributions to the fund for improving the living conditions of workers and employees. The other is at the intersection of Malaya Bronnaya and Spiridonevsky Lane - by Moses Ginzburg at the expense of the State Insurance. On the eve of the commissioning of buildings in 1927, Moscow Building magazine described them as "the first, without a doubt, successful experience in constructing residential buildings in a constructivist direction."

The Gosstrakh House on Malaya Bronnaya became one of the first embodied projects of Ginzburg. Both the architect himself and the initiator of the construction, Nikolai Milyutin, who subsequently ordered a project for a residential building for his people's commissar from Ginzburg, settled here ^[1] . In the late 1930s, most of the residents of the house, prominent Soviet officials, were repressed or shot, by the 1940s, the concept of communal houses was a thing of the past, and the building turned into an ordinary multi-apartment residential building ^{[2] [3]} .

The Gosstrakh residential buildings were the first residential buildings in which formal techniques of the architectural avant-garde were used, and the first residential buildings of the post-revolutionary period in which modern equipment was used. The magazine "Soviet Architecture" separately noted the spatial planning decision of the house built by Ginzburg. The upper floor of the 5-storey building was reserved for a dormitory of 12 rooms with one shared kitchen, 2 bathrooms and 2 bathrooms. The remaining floors were occupied by four 2-room, 3-room and 4-room apartments. Part of the ground floor was occupied by a department store, in the basement there was a laundry room and small pantries for each apartment. In the attic was a gallery for drying clothes. The roof had cork and holtsementnoy isolation, was equipped with cast-iron gutters passing inside the building and was intended for rest. There was a solarium and a canopy in case of rain, benches, a flower garden and a rose garden. Outside the house was plastered, partially lined with a special mixture imitating granite ^{[4] [5]} .

Corner apartments received corner windows and bay windows with corner glazing, the rest - balconies. In the planning of the project, Ginzburg borrowed many elements that are characteristic of the architecture of pre-revolutionary apartment buildings. All apartments had a different configuration, were equipped with private bathrooms, kitchens and latrines. The convenience of the apartments deserved attention. Entrance and interior doors were double doors, windows were equipped with transoms. The floors were covered with parquet; in the kitchens and bathrooms, the floor and wall panels were made of Metlakh tiles. Numerous wall cabinets were provided for in the apartments, including cold cabinets for provisions in the exterior walls of the building. In the built-in closet in the kitchen was a folding bed. In the walls, pipes for samovars and general gutters for several apartments were laid. The kitchens were gasified, the bathrooms were equipped with water heaters, in addition to the wiring on the ceiling, the rooms had plugs in the walls ^{[3] [4] [6]} .

Modern building technologies were applied in the building, but socially it remained the dwelling of the old "bourgeois" type. Summing up his housing experiments in the mid-1930s, Ginzubrg noted that the Gosstrakh’s house only adapted the established type to a new style: everything possible for living in an individual apartment was already mastered in pre-revolutionary apartment buildings ^[7] . Later, instead of a flower garden, a solarium, and a gallery, the 6th floor was added, the basement was closed, and residents of the hostel equipped separate kitchens in the rooms ^[4] .

• Constructivism in Moscow architecture