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Building of Council of Labor and Defense, Moscow

maybe there are bad people sitting there, but the building is beautiful



The building of Council of Labor and Defense is a state building located on Okhotny Ryad Street in central Moscow, Russia, 250 meters north of the Kremlin. Since 1994 it serves as the meeting place of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. It is alternatively known as State Duma building or the Okhotny Ryad building. It has a regional-level cultural heritage status.

The idea of erecting a large representative building near the House of Unions arose in the mid-1920s. In 1926, a competition was held for the design of the building for the State Bank of the USSR, however, construction on this site was also abandoned and the old Bank building on Neglinnaya Street was reconstructed according to the project of Ivan Zholtovsky. In the early 1930s, simultaneously with the competition for the Mossovet hotel, a competition was announced for the project of the Hotel Intourist on the other side of the street, but soon this project was abandoned and the Soviet authorities decided to build an office building for the Council of Labor and Defense on the site.

To clear a place for the building, despite the objections of art critics, the restored Church of Paraskeva Pyatnitsa and the Golitsyn Chambers of the 17th century were demolished, while the nearby Troyekurov Chambers survived. Without announcing a competition, the design was entrusted to the architect Arkady Yakovlevich Langman, who completed it with the participation of architects S. Sergiyevsky and N. Meziere. By that time, Langman already had experience in the construction of large structures in Moscow: the Dynamo stadium (together with Lazar Cherikover) and the House of the Dynamo society (together with Ivan Fomin).

Langman coordinated the height parameters of the building with the Mossovet hotl — nearly the same height of both buildings was supposed to conceal the large relief difference from Lubyanskaya to Manezhnaya squares and create the illusion of straightness of the front street, running to the new architectural dominant of Moscow - the Palace of the Soviets. Nikita Khrushchev, then head of the city, recalled how the architects discussed the project with the future "owner" of the building Vyacheslav Molotov (chairman of the Labor and Defense Council). Ivan Zholtovsky said that the project is acceptable, but not expressive, and to prove his words, he turned the picture upside down: “Can it be built like this? It is possible, it will not lose anything aesthetically, and no one will notice".

The building of Council of Labor and Defense was built in 1932–35, however, Langman's plan was not fully implemented. According to the initial project, the uniformly designed corps were supposed to form a square and to include the House of the Unions. Criticism from the chief architect of Moscow Sergey Chernyshyov forced to abandon these plans.