The idea of a typical construction in the USSR appeared long before the legendary Soviet Khrushchev houses began to be erected in the thousands. And the path to panel houses of this type also went through a lot of experimental ideas that did not get a ticket to life. Moreover, the fact that such buildings did not go into series seems strange, because they were much more comfortable than those that eventually built up the whole country.
A striking example of one of the rolled-up projects of panel houses is a five-story building, which is located at the address: St. Petersburg, Polyarnikov street, building 10. It is he who is the first large-panel structure built in 1955 in the northern capital. In fairness, it should be noted that this house was not the very first of its kind - first this one appeared in Moscow in 1947, and in 1951 - in Kiev.
Despite the fact that this house is a kind of forerunner of the Khrushchev houses, it still has a number of significant differences. So, for example, with a standard five floors, it has only two front doors and thirty apartments. Moreover, the size of the living space compares favorably with the standard houses adopted in the series: three-meter ceilings, ten-meter kitchens and walls up to fifty centimeters thick.
A distinctive feature was also the unsymmetrical arrangement of the apartments: there were two two-room apartments on one floor, two four-room apartments, one one-room apartment and one three-room apartment. Thus, this house can be called a kind of transitional stage from the stalinkas with their high ceilings to the Khrushchevs, because they were already built using large-panel frameless technology.
The tenth house on Polyarnikov Street was erected in an astonishingly short time - according to the Novate.ru editorial office, the construction took only 102 days. However, it remained the only one of its kind: the experimental project did not go into series on the personal order of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev.
History has not preserved the exact reason for this decision of the Soviet secretary general, but there is a legend that says that after looking at a brand new Leningrad house, he said that it was good, but it was not worth building anymore. Khrushchev was not satisfied with the relatively small number of apartments, nor the construction timeframe - he wanted housing to appear even faster. Judging by the kind of houses that eventually built up the entire Soviet Union, the architects listened to the opinion of Nikita Sergeevich.
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