Communal House of The Textile Institute - Decay and Rehabilitation

Decay and Rehabilitation

In 1941 the Textile Institute faculty was evacuated in deep rear, and its classes dissolved; the vacant campus was used by the military. After World War II the campus was taken over by the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys; students that returned in 1945 found the building heavily infested by bedbugs. Although contemporary architects regard the initial construction quality of the building as quite good for its period, by the 1960s it was falling apart. In 1968 it was renovated by Yakov Belopolsky under Nikolaev's supervision. The project took care of real-world student needs but was constrained by the existing structure and costs. For example, common toilet rooms located in the extemities of a 200-meter long building were expanded with shower rooms. However, there were still only two such rooms on each floor, and the students living in the center of the building still had to run a hundred meters there and another hundred back. The living cubicles were marginally enlarged at the expense of corridors and acquired larger windows; the ventilation system was, on the contrary, downgraded to less demanding standards.

In the next three decades the building fell into disrepair again. It lost the canopy over main entrance in 1980s and the wraparound balconies in 2006 were torn down for safety reasons. The living block was shut down in 1996; all wooden ceilings and partitions inside it were eventually torn down, exposing the steel frame inside an empty concrete shell. The campus nominally still belongs to the Institute of Steel, but the space of the former study and public services blocks is leased piecemeal to unrelated organizations. Architectural professionals and the general public were and are well aware of the poor state of the landmark, partly because it is located near the Moscow Architectural Institute dormitory and so became a regular subject of academic studies.

A new rehabilitation plan, supervised by Vladimir Kulish of Moscow Architectural Institute, was approved in 2007 with an estimated cost of 600 million roubles (25 million US dollars). According to this plan, the rooms will be enlarged to at least 11 (single student) or 17 (double) square meters, with individual showers and toilets. The study block will be renovated back to the original plans and functions. As of March 2008, the rehabilitation is being financed through a specially appropriated federal budget fund.