Super-Skyscrapers Will Change The Moscow Scene

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22942, 10 May 1949, Page 2

Super-Skyscrapers Will Change The Moscow Scene

LONDON. Moscow, capital of Soviet Russia, will look different in a few years. A big section of the city is to be rebuilt, with skyscrapers like those of New York.

The chairman of the State Architecture Committee, Mr. G. Simonov, announced the plans to Russia and the world.

He said proudly that they had been undertaken “on the initiative of the great Stalin.” But he emphasised that the new buildings would not be mere copies of Western architecture. Moscow, which holds more than 4,000,000 people, is already a fantastic blend of many ages and cultures. Its onion-shaped domes and its green, blue and red spires dominate a conglomeration of old palaces, small wooden houses, pillared workers’ fiats, and gloomy, barrack - like Government buildings.

The Russian architects will add to all this rriulti-storey skyscrapers, with fastmoving lifts, fluorescent lighting and air-conditioning. Towering above all will be the tallest and the biggest building in the world—the Palace of the Soviets, more than a quarter of a mile high, topped by a colossal statute of Lenin, in stainless steel, (It was started in 1937, but was torn down in 1941 to give steel for the war against Germany.) Mr. Simonov said this new Soviet architecture woud “show the superiority of our Socialist culture over the bestial essence of Imperialism and disintegrating bourgeois culture.”