Rooftop ateliers: how socialist urban planners supported artists
I have always been fascinated by cities with vibrant art scenes. But how are they created? How does it happen that some neighborhoods have an artistic genius loci and some don’t? What can architects and planners do, in order to make art flourish? In my book “Belyayevo Forever” I was exploring ways how to preserve spaces rich with artistic activity. But how are such spaces made in the first place?
Quite accidentally I have discovered an approach, which seems to have been popular in the socialist countries. In many neighborhoods, planners added rooftop ateliers for artists on top of buildings. Until today, such ateliers exist in former socialist cities and preserve their original function.
I have even lived in such an atelier for a year. It was in Berlin, in a 1960s building, which you can see in the photo above on the bottom-left. The apartment had two levels. The bottom level was dedicated to the living area: the kitchen, the bathroom, and bedrooms. The whole top floor was a big art workshop.
I don’t know yet, how the system of rooftop ateliers was organized: who, and under what conditions did receive such apartments? Who designed them? Who paid for them? What kind of art was created in such spaces? Most importantly: how successful this approach was in injecting living art into neighborhoods?
What I do know is that such rooftop ateliers were omnipresent in the whole communist world. I have asked the readers of my Telegram channel to share with me the examples of such ateliers from their cities. I have received dozens of messages from people from across the whole former socialist world. Some things did become apparent.
First, the rooftop ateliers can be found anywhere from Brest to Karaganda to Khabarovsk. Second, they were always located on the top floors. Third, they were added to very different kinds of houses, from constructivism to highly decorated Stalinist buildings to simple Khrushchev-era slabs. Apparently, the construction of the rooftop ateliers went to a halt after 1991.
In this article, I will share the discoveries of the readers of my channel.
Saint Petersburg
House of the Artists, Pesochnaya Naberezhnaya 16. Built: 1961–63. Architect: A. I. Lapirov.
Residential building, Moskovskiy Prospekt. Built 1963–65. Architects: S. B. Speranskiy (project leader), E. F. Vladimirova, V. V. Isaeva
Residential building on Petrovskaya Naberezhnaya 4. Built 1964–66. Architects V. F. Belov, A. A. Leyman, A. V. Govorkovskiy
Houses in Primorskiy Rayon:
Houses on the Naberezhnaya Chernoy Rechki:
House at the Griboedov canal:
House at the Bolshoy Prospekt 64
Houses on the Kim Prospekt 30:
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (formerly known as Frunze)
Residential building “The Southern Gate”. Built: 1978. Architects: R. Mukhamadiev, V. Kuznetsov, A. Soltobaev, Y. Tagirov. eng. O. Suleymenov. The mosaic was created by A. Kamenskiy and A. Bekdzhanyan.
Some additional information can be found in the guide published by DOM Publishers, but it’s… in German:
Samara (formerly known as Kuybyshev)
Residential building on Lenin Prospekt 4. Built: 1980.
Irkutsk
Minsk
House on the Independence Prospect 78
The House of the Artists, Surganova 44:
This building is different from all the others — the ateliers are located not on the top floors, but in the whole building. More great interior shots of this particular building can be found in this article.
Kyiv
Antonovicha Street 100
More photographs can be found in this article.
Bolshaya Vasilkovskaya 10:
Prirechnaya Street 5:
Moscow
Moscow has a special neighborhood dedicated only to artists. Unfortunately, it’s Wikipedia page exists only in Russian. This is how the estate for artists was supposed to look like:
House on Vavilova/Garibaldi Streets:
And this is how the atelier looks from the inside:
The house on Bryanska Street 2:
Karaganda, Kazakhstan
Houses on the Nurken Abdirov Prospekt:
Ufa
The house on the Prospekt Mira 80:
Tula
The house on Krasnoarmeyskiy Prospekt 16:
The house in Tula is equipped with rooftop ateliers and exhibition space on the ground floor.
Khabarovsk
The house on the Muravyeva-Amurskogo Street 13:
Belgorod
Pushchino
House of the Graduates and the Trainees. Architect: V. Troshin. Plenty of photos of this modernist city can be found on this Instagram profile.
Brest, Belarus
The house on the Francisco Scorina Embankment 8:
Kaliningrad
Perm
Houses on Popova Street. There are four identical 17-story towers built next to each other. Each rooftop atelier has 120m2. A lot of interior photos can be found in this article.
House on Malikova Street 28/6 (more photos here):
The house on Chernyshevskogo St. 28:
Tambov
House on Internatsionalnaya St. 36:
Residential building on Sovetskaya St. 119:
This short collection is probably only the tip of the iceberg. If you happen to know such examples from other cities (both from the former Socialist Bloc, and from the West), please feel free to email me. If you find any mistakes in this article, feel free to comment, and I’ll fix them!
The information was gathered thanks to the community of readers of the Urban Paradoxes telegram channel. I would like to thank the following people for sending pieces of information:
- Kostia Budarin (tg channel less is bore)
- Svyatoslav Parshikov
- Galya Voytenko (Instagram @galyavoitenko)
- Raushanna Sarkeeva (fb page Городские инициативы)
- VlIvYur
- Kirill Dyatlov
- Philipp Pyshny
- Aleksandr Ratasep
- Ilya Beylin
- Greta
- Danil Amirov (Instagram @b0zify)
- Polina Nachkina
- Oleg Drozdov
- Lev Shevchenko
- Nick McFly (tg channel invert error)
- Bakursky (tg channel sexydesign)
- Vsevolod Zolotov (tg channel Стена в грунте)
- Maxim
- Arthur from Ufa
- Yevgeniy (Instagram ched2la)
- Sasha Kondrashev (tg channel pensieri notturni)
- Sergey Kovalchuk
- Gennadiy Grebennikov
- Sergey Yavorskiy (tg channel @voidandsergey)
- Aleksey Zakovskiy
- Mikhail Nikonenko
- Anastasiya Nikitina (tg channel @entablature)
- 2# N (Instagram octoberserk)
- Aleksandr Sotnikov
- Anna Kvitkina
- Sasha Pais (tg channel drawwithme)
- Polya Litvinenko (Instagram puschino.modernism)
- Oleg Konstantinov (fb group «Масловка. Городок художников»)
- Nikolay Medvedenko (tg channel Collectives)
- Ekaterina Polozhentseva
- Borislava Munirova
