Blue Ufalei, Red Porphyry and Green Aluminium: The Polychrome World of Socialist Metro Systems

Sokolniki metro station (Moscow)

BLUE UFALE I, RED PORPHYRY AND GRE EN ALUMINIU M: T HE POLYCHROME WORLD OF SOCIALIST METRO SYSTEMS

By Owen Hatherley

Underground stations are ostensibly an unlikely place for chromatic experimentation. The model of the Paris Metro — lavatorial tiles in order to create a bright, reflective but sober space — has proven extremely influential, combined in many places somewhat with the vast bare concrete spaces of London's Jubilee Line extension. However, several cities have Metro systems which try and offset the obviously dark, crepuscular nature of burying an infrastructural system some

distance underground. In Europe, this would include German cities like Munich and Berlin, or the (rather overrated) sharp yellows and reds of the Milan Metro, but the greatest concentration is in the Metro systems of the Soviet Union and its fraternal countries/satellites/captive nations (delete according to political preference). For Nikita Khrushchev, who in his then role as deputy at the Moscow City administration was one of the driving forces of the first of these, the Moscow Metro, “for us, there was something

Zavodska metro station (Dnipro)

supernatural” about the underground. The stations that resulted reflected this in the way that they all tried to transcend the gloom seemingly inherent in the nature of an underground railway in favour of spaces defined by complex, flickering light, polychromatic stonework, and shimmering metalwork.

definition, expected to wait, and a regular routine was enforced, united the sacral rituals of the Orthodox church, the public rituals of Communist iconography, and the mundane daily ritual of the commute. That's how you end up with the striking spaces of the Moscow Metro's first line. Beginning at Sokolniki in the north of the city, designed in 1935 by Nadezhda Bykova and Ivan Taranov, you have a station defined by thin, marble-sheathed columns, which are still visibly indebted to Constructivism in their lightness, but what is new is the colour — each pillar is coated in a bright blue Ufalei marble, quarried near Chelyabinsk in the Urals; this white-veined blue stone reflects the strips of neon lights nearly concealed in the coffered ceiling, giving the space a slightly Arctic air. Further down the same line, you have the exact opposite effect at Ivan Fomin's Red Gates station, where

It is hard to establish exactly why the Metro became the vector for such a degree of experimentation — most likely, it has something to do with the fact it presented an exceptionally controlled environment, meaning that here the Soviet command economy could come into its own — something reinforced by the fact that these were, officially, military facilities, doubling as bomb shelters (a purpose for which the Moscow Metro was used, from 1941 to 1945). These spaces where you were, by

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Red Gates metro station (Moscow)Â

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Novoslobodskaya metro station (Moscow)Â

more time in the Metro than in the Hermitage, to find that parts of the Tsars' art gallery closely resemble a Metro station — the classical sculpture galleries of the New Hermitage use similar exotic marbles to those that you can lean against and wait for your train to the suburbs; even the way the sculptures are balanced along the pillars and pylons feels oddly familiar. However, it also makes clear that this too was an imperial project, in which materials were taken from the periphery in order to furnish and enrich the centre. In some cases, the results are straightforward plunder. At Novoslobodskaya, on the late ludicrously opulent, late Stalinist Circle Line, you can find polychrome stained glass — something which is not at all part of the Russian Orthodox Church's architectural repertoire — forming illustrative, backlit niches in almost tropical greens, blues and yellows.

The glass was taken from Riga Cathedral, after Latvia was annexed to the Soviet Union. However, some of the most interesting Metro stations, chromatically, are on the edges of the Soviet imperium — particularly in the Czechoslovak capital, Prague, and in the eastern Ukrainian industrial city of Dnipro1 .

Novoslobodskaya metro station (Moscow)

heavy pylons clad in a dark, blood-red Shrosha marble, quarried in Georgia, seem to irradiate the hall. Elsewhere, pink-yellow limestone at Komsomolskaya, gold Crimean marble at Park Kultury, or the concealed lighting hidden inside Egyptian columns at Kropotkinskaya, creating a diffused, milky light, all suggest that this Stalinist project brought back the apparently traditional Russian love of bright colour pointed to by the English architectural traveller Robert Byron in the early 1930s. If so, however, it is to create a sense of mystique, power and uncanniness in the confined and utilitarian space of an underground system.

The Prague Metro, originally intended as a more modest 'Metro-Tram' on the model of Brussels, was beefed up under Soviet patronage in the aftermath of the Prague Spring into a Moscow-scale series of underground cathedrals, reached by impressively deep escalators. Several stations in the city centre, along what is now 'Line A' — Muzeum, Hradčanská, Jiřího z Poděbrad, Flora, Malostranská, Náměstí Míru, Můstek, Staroměstská, all to a common design by Jan Reiterman and Jaroslav Otruba — follow a similar model of

Reeling off the names of the materials used to face the concrete shells of the Moscow Metro stresses their geographical and nomenclatural exotica — Ufalei, BiryukYankoy, Gazgan, Nizhny Tagil, Onyx, Porphyry. It can be a shock, if you've spent 1

formerly Dnipropetrovsk

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Muzeum metro station (Prague)

Malostranská metro station (Prague)

Hradčanská metro station (Prague)

vaulted halls bedecked in various unusual kinds of fruitily coloured marble — greygreen, silver. The ceilings are covered with green and blue panels, slightly bulbous, like an animal's hide; but unlike in Soviet stations, it is at the waiting platforms

themselves that the designers have concentrated their energies. Each of these arched waiting rooms is covered in hundreds of little concave and convex anodised aluminium lenses, all in various vividly artificial shades of blue, gold, scarlet and

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Prospekt Svobody metro station (Dnipro)

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purple, into which the station names are set.

At Karlovo Náměstí, opened in 1985, the arches that divide the vaults from the platforms are dressed with inset bands of glassware by František Vizner, ribbed so that they give off a shimmering, constantly changing bright white light. These then reappear all the way through the subsidiary tunnels to the exits. It resembles most of all an idealised, imagined version of that other totally climate-controlled, artificial Soviet space — the Space Station.

most blaring, intense artificial colour into the sort of gloom you would have the right to expect when you're hundreds of feet underground.

Dnipro built what it could be argued is the “last Soviet Metro”, designed and mostly built in the second half of the 1980s but opened in 1995 (and never extended since).

The stations are reached by deep escalators with funereal uplighters, in the Moscow Metro style. The ticket halls are lined in various kinds of marble, with patterned concrete ceilings, but the underground halls themsel ves resemble anterooms for intergalactic travel more than waiting rooms f o r t h e d a i l y s l o g t o w o r k . Tw o, Kommunar iv ska and Vokz alna, are Moscow-style, with ornate lamps and deep red marble, and concealed lighting creating a grotto-like effect, respectively. The others are all of a standard type, with gigantic barrelvaulted halls where lampshades in the shape of metal blobs light ceilings lined with curved plastic panels in some very un-90s colours — metallic purples, blues and yellows. These are structures somewhere between cathedrals and psychedelic laboratories, although it is very much best to photograph them when the uniformed women who flag the trains by aren't looking, lest you be hit with their red lollipop. The trains run every fifteen minutes, and are half empty in rush hour. Around a third of the lights in the stations are permanently switched off to save electricity. Because of this, you can walk on one platform from the

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Zavodska (Dnipro)Â https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/ %D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0 %B4%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B0 _(%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D 1%86%D1%96%D1%8F_%D0%BC%D0% B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE)#/media/ File: %D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0 %B4%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%B0. jpg

SOURCE OF IMAGES:

Sokolniki (Moscow) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: %D0%A1%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0 %BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA %D0%B8_17.jpg?uselang=ru Red Gates (Moscow) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Moscow,_Krasnye_Vorota_02.jpg

Prospekt Svobody (Dnipro) https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/ %D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB: %D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D0 %BF%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82_%D1%8 1%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%BE%D 0%B4%D0%B8,_%D0%B4%D0%BD%D1% 96%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE.jpg

Novoslobodskaya (Moscow) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Novoslobodskaya#/media/ File:Novoslobodskaya_Metro_station_in_Mosc ow.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Estaci%C3%B3n_Novoslob%C3%B3dsk aya_06.JPG Muzeum (Prague) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Category:Muzeum_(metro_station)#/media/ File:Prague,_Czech_Republic,_April_2016__74.JPG Hradcanska (Prague) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Hrad%C4%8Dansk%C3%A1#/media/ File:Metro_Prague_-_Hradcanska_Station.JPG Malostranska (Prague) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Malostransk%C3%A1#/media/ File:Malostranska.jpg Metro Builders (Dnipro) https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/ %D0%9C%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0 %BE%D0%B1%D1%83%D0%B4%D1%96 %D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1 %96%D0%B2_(%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B 0%D0%BD%D1%86%D1%96%D1%8F_% D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0% BE,_%D0%94%D0%BD%D1%96%D0%BF %D1%80%D0%BE)#/media/File: %D0%9C%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0 %BE%D0%B1%D1%83%D0%B4%D1%96 %D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1 %96%D0%B2.jpg

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