The House of the Soviets has a high quality of the architectural composition and aesthetics in the ideology of Soviet brutalism which is a constituent part of the common architectural and artistic programme of that time and is defined as Soviet modernism. Soviet brutalism is in its turn an echo of international brutalism – an architectural style of Western Europe, the USA and Japan of the 1950s and its vivid continuation - metabolism which originated in Japan in the late 1950s. The representatives of metabolism of the 1960s are such famous architects as K. Tange, K. Kikutake and K. Kurokawa. The peculiarities of the architectural language of metabolism are incompleteness, ”understatement” and openness of the structural arrangement of buildings for a “dialogue” with the changing architectural, cultural and technological context of urban environment. Thus, the House of the Soviets represents a monument to good stylistic architecture. It stimulates interest in contemporary history and provides vivid visualization of the views of that period, as nothing more interesting and significant has been created in Kaliningrad during the Soviet period. No examples of such magnitude exist in other provincial cities of Russia. By its scale, ideological power, intensity of the administrative will and the resources spent it is comparable to the construction of Konigsberg Castle by the Order.
Fig. 25. Development project for the Central square, 1980s.
Korolevskaya gora: projects and intentions for its development
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