Factory Forecourts: Peculiarities in Construction and Cultural and Historical Semantics during Industrialisation

Abstract

This article analyses the architectural complexes of industrial forecourts that emerged in the USSR between the late 1920s and early 1940s and their cultural and symbolic role. The author evaluates the phenomenon of the pre-factory entrance area in a global context, showing that the organisation of the contact zone between the factory and the city had been used in the Russian tradition of the eighteenth – early nineteenth centuries and, more recently, in the US and Western Europe in the early twentieth century. The author analyses 45 cases of Soviet urban planning during industrialisation and distinguishes three main types of contact zones, i. e. arterial, junction, and isolated. The rarest variety of the junction type is a welldeveloped factory forecourt, which comprises different facilities of administrative, social, and cultural infrastructure, and, in addition, possesses special symbolic and memorial significance. Only six out of 45 meet this definition, namely, in Makeevka, Saratov, Volgograd, Magnitogorsk, Yekaterinburg, and Novokuznetsk. Considering these cases, the author demonstrates that it was the landscape of these squares that stimulated the formation of cultural mythology, with the emergence of cultural artifacts, like the tank monument in the square of the Volgograd Tractor Plant or A. P. Bannikov’s mausoleum in the square of the Ural Heavy Machine-Building Plant. In four cases (Volgograd, Magnitogorsk, Yekaterinburg, Novokuznetsk), these factory forecourts were turned into places for rallies and meetings and became elements of the visual standard of representation for these locations, and acquired the status of places of historical memory. These townplanning ensembles, which manifest threefold architectural, social, and symbolic uniqueness, ought to be considered extremely valuable, therefore requiring a cautious policy of cultural heritage preservation, which is especially important in the context of partial deindustrialisation of Russian cities.