House-Communes (entry)

Categories / Architecture/Architectural Monuments/Apartment Buildings
HOUSE-COMMUNES, residential constructions with developed structures of consumer services provided for the tenants (food, childcare, laundry, cleaning, etc.). The idea of Houses-Communes emerged in the 1920s in the search for new ways of creating "new customs". Their chief aim was to ease women from petty household chores and provide them with an opportunity to undertake socially useful work, give them time for studies and rest. The major features of Houses-Communes were public kitchens, dining rooms, laundries, day nurseries and kindergartens, repair shops, etc. One of the first House-Communes was the House of Former Tsarist Political Prisoners: on the first and second floors of the building overlooking Petrovskaya Embankment a club and the Museum of Penal Servitude and Exile were arranged, on the roof - a solarium. The first floor featured a canteen-restaurant, children playrooms, first-aid post, shop, the ground floor - an automatic laundry. In the terms of the 1930s the house-communes experiment failed.

References: Оль Г. А. Петроградская сторона // Архитектурный путеводитель по Ленинграду. Л., 1971. С. 192; Кириков Б. М., Витязева В. А. Петроградский район // Ленинград: Путеводитель. Л., 1987. С. 215; Исаченко В. Г. Архитектура Санкт-Петербурга: Справ.-путеводитель. СПб., 2002. С. 272.

О. А. Чеканова. Petrovskaya Embankment/Saint Petersburg, city
Оль Г. А. Петроградская сторона // Архитектурный путеводитель по Ленинграду. Л., 1971
Исаченко В. Г. Архитектура Санкт-Петербурга: Справ.-путеводитель. СПб., 2002
Кириков Б. М., Витязева В. А. Петроградский район // Ленинград: Путеводитель. Л., 1987 House of Tsarist Political Prisoners