At first glance, the distribution of housing had little infiuence on design because it followed rather than preceded the architect’s job. But in the case of the khrushchevka, the process was in a certain sense reversed. The basic problem had to do with the inherent contradiction between design and distribution, the outline of which we began to see in chapter 1. In theory, a separate apartment by design was supposed to be settled by an individual family. In practice, under the rules of housing distribution, an apartment was parceled out to individuals (not families) in square meters of living space, which only included the floor space of rooms but not auxiliary spaces such as kitchens and corridors. If it had too much living space, any apartment could be settled communally regardless of its architect’s intent. In chapter 1, we saw how architects who embraced single-family occupancy under Stalin designed separate apartments for elites. In this chapter, I examine how a different set of architects, who were mainly from the marginalized avant-garde of the 1920s, resolved the unintended communal distribution of apartments. In doing so, these architects skillfully leveraged the conditions of so-ciahst housing distribution to pursue their enduring dream of creating a minimal dwelling unit for the mass urban resident in an era when their constructivist aesthetics and the international style were officially banned. Their design formula became the template for the khrushchevka but left future architects in the 1950s and 1960s with an ambiguous legacy of architectural choices and limitations.
The architects’ solution to the communalization of separate apartments was the drastic reduction in living space to such a level that local
Officials would be unable to settle apartments with more than one family. This solution, I argue, was the fundamental reason separate apartments under Khrushchev were so small. The problem of communal distribution and the architects’ solution constituted the fundamentally Soviet aspects of the separate apartment’s design that distinguished it from prerevolutionary and Western models of single-family apartments. This chapter demonstrates how architects made the solution to communal distribution a founding design principle of the khrushchevka. It shows how this solution’s repercussions shaped the other factors to which scholars have pointed—such as costs, aesthetics, and ideology, which were discussed in chapter 1—to explain its small dimensions and compact layout. My explanation provides a novel way of thinking about the evolution of the khrushchevka’% design that will help us make sense of residents’ reactions and complaints, which will be examined in later chapters of this book.
World History
