Gosprom

3 June 2024

Name

House of State Industry, also called Derzhprom

Built

1925-1928

City

Kharkiv, Ukraine

Architects

Serhii Serafimov, Samuil Kravets, Mark Felger; engineer Pavlo Rottert

Style

Constructivism, with an Art Deco edge

Protection

UNESCO Tentative List since 2017

The passages are part of the building. They make the mass read as linked blocks.

Gosprom is the common Russian short form for the House of State Industry. In Ukrainian it is Derzhprom. It stands on Svobody Square in Kharkiv and was built from 1925 to 1928 as an office building for state industrial bodies.¹

The building belongs to the first large wave of Soviet modernism. It was made to show a new administrative city in concrete, glass and movement. The plan is large, but it is not a single slab. It is a set of bodies, passages and bridges.

Plan

The UNESCO description gives the plan as three H-shaped groups, nine bodies in all. The bodies rise from 6 to 11 floors and are crossed by passages. Bridges hang above those passages at several levels.²

The result is a building that looks heavier and lighter at the same time. The concrete mass is large. The openings keep breaking it into views, shadows and routes.

The monument is a system of movement, not a block of concrete.

The same idea appears in the facade. Long windows, flat roofs, balconies and stair spaces are treated as architecture. Service parts are visible. Circulation is part of the expression.

Work

The competition was won by Serhii Serafimov, Samuil Kravets and Mark Felger. Pavlo Rottert is named as engineer. Local writing on the building also stresses the wider construction collective behind it: engineers, builders and site workers, many of whom remained unnamed in the public story.¹

The material was reinforced concrete. That mattered because the building needed large spans, bridges, repeated office floors and heavy traffic through the complex. The structure was part of the image.

Status

Derzhprom was submitted to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2017. The same UNESCO page calls it the world's first state-level office building in modernist forms and places it among the largest constructivist buildings.²

In 2024 the building was damaged by Russian strikes. A nearby missile strike on 2 January damaged stained glass. On 28 October an air bomb hit the monument directly; entrances 7, 8 and 9 were most affected. The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture reported damaged walls, windows, roof areas, cracks and emergency preservation work.³

The facts do not change the architectural subject. They change the tense. A building once written about as a preserved monument now has to be read as a preserved monument under repair.