Восьмая сестра: Несостоявшийся небоскрёб Москвы

Planned high rise building in Moscow
The Eighth Sister is the unbuilt project for a skyscraper in Zaryadye, Moscow. It would have been the eighth sister to the group of Stalinist skyscrapers known as Seven Sisters. The architect was Dmitry Chechulin. Original 1947 plans included an eighth tower, which would have been among the tallest buildings in the world. Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, it was decided that the projected structure would overshadow the Moscow Kremlin and Chechulin's 1967 Rossiya Hotel was erected on the spot. The hotel was demolished in 2006, and the Zaryadye Park was inaugurated on 9 September 2017.

The final design of the administrative building in Zaryadye was completed and published in 1949, at which time its two authors, the architect Dmitry Chechulin and the engineer Iosif Tigranov, became winners of the Stalin Prize. A 15 hectare plot was allocated for the construction of an administrative building in Zaryadye. It was bounded by Red Square to the west, Kitaygorodsky Proyezd to the east and Moskvoretskaya Embankment to the south. The authors of the project had the difficult task of blending the 32 storey high rise building into the historic buildings of the centre of Moscow. The administrative building in Zaryadye, along with other high rise buildings, was to serve as a symbol of the greatness of socialist Moscow and the Stalinist era. The design of the building's main entrance hall envisaged the creation of a grand double height hall divided into three naves by rows of columns. Cloakrooms for 1,700 people each were arranged in the side aisles, and a lift lobby served as an extension of the middle nave. The building was also planned to have a large assembly hall, cloakrooms, refreshment rooms, and a canteen in a separate building.

Work on the Eighth Sister started later than the other Sisters and proceeded at a considerably slower pace. The reasons for this were hydrogeological conditions and the need to prepare a huge building site. By the spring of 1953, the foundation and stylobate were completed and the structure reached 15 storeys a year later. In 1954, the construction of the high rise was stopped by the government, which was a personal tragedy for Dmitry Chechulin. The architect's attempts to modify the building's design based on the existing foundation were not accepted. According to historian Kruzhkov, the reason the construction was stopped was that Chechulin did not support the campaign against architectural excesses initiated by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which radically changed the direction of the capital's urban planning policy. From the mid 1950s, the main architectural direction was to solve the housing problem, which led to the mass construction of model housing. In these conditions high rise construction became irrelevant. The erected frame of the administrative building was dismantled and its elements were used in the construction of other buildings.