House of Academicians
Building 13 in Leninsky Avenue bears a plaque with the inscription: ‘Built in 1939 according to the design and under the direction of Academician Alexei Viktorovich Shchusev’. This house is one of the oldest buildings from the Stalin era. It stands as a majestic 12-storey building at the intersection of Leninsky Avenue and Akademik Petrovsky Street. It used to be a quiet suburb of Moscow, where carts and carriages travelled along Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street to Vorobyovy Gory. Akademik Petrovsky street was known as Rizopolozhensky Lane in honour of the 17th century Church of the Presentation of the Robe of the Lord. The building of the house was connected with the move of the USSR Academy of Sciences from Leningrad to Moscow in 1934. The Presidium of the Academy was located in the Neskuchny Palace in Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street. Then, in 1935, the Akademproekt workshop for the construction of Akademgorodok was established under the direction of the architect A.V. Shchusev, who won the competition to design the city. At first it was planned to move the Academy’s Presidium to Cheremushki and build a complex of institutes and residential buildings there, but later it was decided to leave the Academy in the Neskuchny Palace and to build a twelve-storey brick residential building in the neo-Ampire style with ten entrances nearby in Bolshaya Kaluzhskaya Street. The construction of this building took a whole year, from 1938 to 1939. In 1939 the tenants began to move into the completed sections, but a massive fire broke out in the part of the building under construction, destroying the internal structures and all the finishes. The burnt part of the house was rebuilt and inhabited only in the post-war period. According to the plans of A.V. Shchusev, this house was only the southern part of a large residential complex, which was never built. The ground floor, with continuous glazing, is interrupted by a high arched entrance. In Soviet times, this floor was home to the Diet shop, which sold scarce foodstuffs. The upper floors have balconies and loggias. There were 145 apartments in the building for members of the Academy of Sciences who moved from Leningrad to Moscow with the Academy, including Honorary President V.A. Obruchev and Vice-President of the Geographical Society I.P. Gerasimov, as well as E.K. Fedorov, B.A. Vvedensky, I.G. Petrovsky, V.A. Engelhardt, B.A. Rybakov, L.S. Pontryagin, S.P. Kapitsa and other scientists whose names are reflected in the names of streets and squares in Moscow. And also the architect A.V. Shchusev, Marshal V.I. Chuikov and General A.F. Khrenov.
Address: Moscow, Leninsky Avenue, 13
