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Materials and technologies used during the construction of Narkomfin

The building boom that gripped Russia before the First World War brought with it new materials and technologies, including metal carcasses and reinforced concrete. However, bricks remained the basic material for external walls and partitions, and outside the big cities, wood remained the chief construction material. After the revolution there was a shortage of building materials such as bricks and metal beams. New technologies and materials were tested out on the pilot projects of the Avant-garde period, of which Narkomfin was one. It was the first attempt in the Soviet Union to prefabricate materials on site. Furnace-clinker concrete blocks were produced on site for the floor slabs and external walls.

One of the problems faced during the building of the complex was the short supply of bricks.  The engineer Sergei Prokhorov, who played an active role in designing the building, took as a model the construction methods tried and tested by the founder of the Bauhaus School, Walter Gropius, in the Dessau-Törten settlement (1925).   The supporting structures were made of reinforced concrete, and the ceilings and main walls of light “betonite stones” – furnace-clinker bricks made directly on the construction site.  The ceilings were then reinforced with a 5-cm layer of monolithic concrete.  Experimental materials with organic fillers, fibrolit and xylolite (wood-cement), lighter and warmer than ordinary concrete, were used for the internal partition walls and floor coverings.  

The building’s frame is made from reinforced concrete columns and supports standing on longitudinal ribbed pads concealed beneath the ground.  Open-standing columns are circular, with a diameter of 35cm; those concealed in the walls are rectangular, of varying profiles, depending on the load.  The intermediate ceilings between the storeys are supported by the main walls of furnace-clinker bricks. The external walls are not lode bearing; they are supported by a cantilever at the ends of the beams, that run along the building along the same line as the columns. This system allows the easy installation of ribbon glazing and an internal layout that isn’t dictated by the facades.  The technological solution for the flat roof with its pipe drainage system and heat insulation using “torfoleum” peatboard of compressed peat, and damp-proofing using bitumen, was developed by Ernst May, a leading German expert in flat roofs. The sliding wooden window frames, similar to the inventions of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, were treated in order that they should survive the Russian climate.

Due to a metal shortage, window profiles were made of wood, cut thing to look like metal frames. Unlike the metal windows frames used at this time in Germany, the wooden frames are simultaneously well insulated and allow the building to breathe. They have survived remarkably well and have caused little harm to the building.