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Архитектура первых советских электростанций
Many power stations had been designed long before the 1917 revolution, yet the projects were implemented only after the GOELRO plan had been approved in 1921. With a change in leadership, a new policy began to emerge aimed at the large-scale development of industry and transport based on electrification. The electrification idea had a tremendous impact on avant-garde architecture. Engineering and architecture were gradually merging. GOELRO engineers and energy experts (Alexander Vinter, Genrikh Graftio, Ivan Radchenko, Robert Klasson, Ivan Alexandrov and others) put together strong creative teams. The Vesnin brothers, Valentin Dubovskoy, Ivan Zholtovsky, Andrey Burov, Edgar Norwerth and Oscar Munz were eager to take part in industrial design projects, capturing in their work the spirit of the time. Although industrial architecture had been developing since the second half of the 19th century, the first power stations were by no means a reflection of their purpose and function. Most of them were built in the neo-Russian style, from rough red bricks, with variations on classical elements. Elektroperedacha, the first district-level peat-fired power station (1914), bore traces of the German early modernist style. Its design marked a departure from decorative historicism and the emergence of the constructivist canon in Soviet architecture. Bold experiments of Soviet avant-garde architects were apparent even in the early drafts of the GOELRO plan. By the 1930s, the new principles of constructivism had been formed and implemented in industrial architecture in full measure. Power stations had attained the characteristic features that make them stand out from the mass of industrial buildings today. This evolution can be traced by comparing the projects fea - tured in the exhibition, from Malaya Shatura, a pilot power station constructed in 1920, to the majestic Dnieper hydroelectric station built in 1932.