Gosprom

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The Gosprom building in the late 1920s.
The Gosprom building in the late 1920s.

The Gosprom Building (Ukrainian: Держпром, Derzhprom; Russian: Госпром; also known as the State Industry Building, Palace of Industry or Derzhprom) is a Constructivist building located in Freedom Square in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It was designed and built between 1925 and 1928 by Sergei Serafimov, M. Felger and S. Kravets.

The building was one of a few showcase projects designed when Kharkiv (Kharkov) was the capital of the Ukrainian SSR. Others include the Post Office by Arkady Mordvinov. The Gosprom complex was the largest Modern building in the Soviet Union until the 1960s, and was used as a symbol of modernity in films such as Dziga Vertov's Three Songs about Lenin and Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line.

The use of concrete in its construction and the system of overhead walkways and individual interlinked towers made it extremely innovative. It was rated by Reyner Banham as one of the major architectural achievements of the 1920s in his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, comparable in scale only to the Dessau Bauhaus and the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam. (Architectural Press 1972, p. 297)

[edit] External links

  • 1930s photographs by Robert Byron [1]
  • View during the war [2]

Coordinates: 50°0′23″N, 36°13′38″E

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