House on the Embankment
Boris Iofan · Moscow, Russia · 1931
Boris Iofan’s House on the Embankment was conceived as an elite residential complex for senior Soviet officials directly opposite the Kremlin. Apartments, shops, cinema, club, childcare and service functions were integrated into a dense superblock, making the project a self-contained model of privileged collective living. Its restrained monumental façades represent a transition between 1920s functionalism and the more formal architecture of the Stalin period. Completed in 1931, the building later became inseparable from the political history of the Great Purge, when many residents were arrested or executed.