Gosproekstroi

Gosproekstroi was the State Project Construction Trust of the Soviet Union.

This organisation was set up following an agreement between Vesenkha and Albert Kahn Inc in 1930. Moritz Kahn, one of the three Kahn brothers, said:

"In a short time I shall proceed to Moscow with a staff of twenty-five specialist assistants. We shall then help the Soviet Government to organize a designing bureau, which will comprise about forty-five hundred architectural and engineering designers, selected principally from Soviet Russia, but also from America and other foreign countries. The bureau will be directed by the head of the Building Commission of the Supreme Economic Council."

George Scrymgeour, an American from the Kahn company, was appointed head of Gosproekstroi and also sat on the National Technical Soviet. The Kahn company was responsible for supervising 3,000 designers across the Soviet Union in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kiev, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Odessa and Sverdlovsk, all controlled from Moscow. They had a budget of 417 million rubles.

State planning permitted standardisation of building construction: "all factory buildings for any one type of construction can be built on standardized principles. The result will be a great saving in time and in cost in the preparation of plans and the cost of buildings." as Moritz Kahn commented. He further added that the Soviet building code permitted a ‘saving of millions of dollars per annum because of the ultra-conservative character of that code.’