Explore Moscow!: Shukhov Tower: we start off exploring!

It rises up against the dark blue sky of the night city, mighty and slender, translucent and glowing golden. The charming intricacy of steel beams, the inviting character of the elegant constructivist design…

It might as well be the Eiffel Tower, but we’re in Moscow, and here it’s the Shukhov Tower, the seldom mentioned Moscow masterpiece. Let’s take a quick look…

… and go explore!

Well, that’s how it looks like on the city map.

This is Google Maps:

And this is Yandex.Maps which I actually recommend to use if you can read Russian. Even if not, you can sometimes also drag some bits of useful information for your walk. The grey, orange and brown (or what is supposed to be brown) dots are the nearest metro stations to the indicated site. You can see the distance to them in light grey (“м” stands for meters, “км” for kilometers).

Yandex.Maps are Russia specific, maybe even Moscow specific, and therefore you will find much more places of attraction here than in Google, where I had to put the green arrow myself.

With this sorted out, our walk finally starts.

The metro station nearest to the tower is Shabolovskaya, Orange line. It was built in 1962, much later than the tower itself, but the constructivist features are easily detected. Check out the ceiling lamps design.

And the stained glass wall panel depicting the Shukhov Tower.

We go out to Shabolovka St. It is one of the oldest streets in Moscow, and since the streets used to be named after town they led to, so Shabolovka St. was named after the Shabolovka village. We can be quite certain that the street was already there back in mid XVIII, but it never was a major street. Before the XX century it was all wooden houses with gardens and orchards, some small changes happening closer to the end of the XIX century, when merchants chose to settle here in stone 3- or 4-floor houses. The XX century meant erection of a mechanical plant, a brewery, a tramway depot, and finally a radio/TV tower in the area. Still, the street is green and quiet. Well, maybe not that green in winter, but it has a very cosy feeling about it.

Now round the corner and to the left, and we can see the whole of it. The Shukhov or the Schabolovka Tower.

The second name is much more in use, but to me the first variant is preferable. Because we owe it to him, to Vladimir Shukhov.

It’s incredible just to think how much he did for Russia, how outstandingly brilliant he was. A great engineer, he designed and supervised construction of the first Russian oil pipelines (hugely important for Russia, eh?), the first Russian oil treatment plant with oil cracking units, he invented and was the first to use hyperboloid structures in civil engineering. The tower in Moscow is just one example of these. Others include Air traffic control tower in Barcelona, Sydney Tower, Tower Infinity in Seoul, and… so many cooling towers typical of any city landscape.

He played a significant role in designing process, and though not an architect, he defined the style of many buildings in Russia and especially in Moscow through his input. Now that I’m thinking of it, these places deserve a separate post J

As Shukhov worked on the tower project in the early 1920s, the design height was 350 meters. The hyperboloid design of the tower implies that the tower is built of many hyperboloid sections consisting of many straight steel beams fixed to steel rings. As a result, the openwork grid structure is very lightweight, but resistant to high wind loads, which is a dominant load for tall buildings. If compared to the Eiffel Tower, one height unit of the Shukhov Tower required one third of the metal used for the tower in Paris. Unfortunately, due to the metal shortage during the Civil War, the smaller design was brought to life in 1922, with the tower reaching only 148.3 meters above the ground.

Unlike the Eiffel Tower, it was never meant to be a tourist attraction, and even now you can only walk around, which I did. But I can say every step is worth it, because it is so unmistakably Moscow-like! And it is so beautiful in December blizzard!