People have long come from all over the world to see the run-down building on the Garden Ring. To its right is the skulking shopping center Novinsky Bulvar; behind it is part of the U.S. Embassy and one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters. But it is the ramshackle six-story building that has a magic place in architectural history.
Dozens of articles have been written about Narkomfin, the residential building designed in the late 1920s with the aim of revolutionizing the way people lived in the young Soviet republic. They talk of its priceless nature and bemoan its neglect, but to little avail. It still rots away.
Narkomfin, “a six-story blueprint for communal living as ingenious as it is humane,” according to the World Monuments Fund, has again and again been put on the fund’s list of endangered monuments.
Now, a new website, “NARKOMFIN – a web documentary,” is set to provide a rare glimpse of life inside the building. Two journalists, Natalia Melikova and Luciano Spinelli, received rare access to the building last summer, filming the interior and interviewing a number of residents. They will launch the site, which uses video, sound and stop motion animation next year.
Check out the full article by Kevin O’Flynn at The Moscow News
Preview of “NARKOMFIN – a web documentary” -> www.narkomfin.net
