Avant-garde in the architecture of Ivanovo-Voznesensk

Ivanovo-Voznesensk (since 1932 Ivanovo) from the middle of 1920s to the middle of 1930s was one of the cities of the USSR where the most interesting and ambitious architectural projects of that time were most fully realized.

This large textile center, being a usual city of the Shuya district of the Vladimir province, was given the status of the main city of the newly formed "red province" in the summer of 1918, and from 1929 to 1936 it was the capital of the Ivanovo industrial region, which included the modern Vladimir, Kostorma, Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod region.

For a short time there was made an infrastructure, corresponding to the city new administrative status. New factories, schools, kindergartens, hospitals, banks, clubs, a railway station, a hotel, a post office, a cinema, a circus, a factory-kitchen, a polytechnic institute, a mass action theater, an international children's home, an electrical substation, rabochie poselki and social towns.

Architectural experiments implemented in Ivanovo-Voznesensk include the construction from standard apartment buildings of rabochie poselki made within the framework of the city-garden; the factory buildings, administrative buildings and apartment buildings in the style of constructivism; ensemble of the Polytechnic Institute in the style of "proletarian classics" or "red Doric"; post-constructivist structures. Such famous Moscow and Leningrad architects as V. Vesnin, I. Golosov, I. Fomin, S. Gruzenberg, D. Fridman, S. Zhuk, A. Vlasov, A. Staborovsky and local architects V. Pankov, A. Panov, S. Minofiev, N. Kadnikov worked in the city.

Some projects were not implemented, some of the buildings in the late 1930s and the 1950s changed their design, but up to now dozens of architectural monuments of that era have been concentrated in the city.