If the quarters and buildings of the St. Petersburg historical center have been devoted to hundreds and thousands of books, articles and studies, then Leningrad constructivism is undeservedly deprived of attention. This style, avant-garde and completely unlike anything that had been built in the city on the Neva before, existed for a very short time - literally from 1928 to the mid-thirties, after which the "party course" and, along with it, the "party" architecture changed dramatically again. But during this short time, more than a hundred interesting buildings in the style of constructivism were built in Leningrad. And it was Stachek Square that became the first newly built area of the new city, its face and business card. And Narva Kitchen Factory is one of the key buildings of the district.
For a start, however, it is worth telling what kitchen factories are in general. The kitchen factory as an idea was designed to free Soviet women from the vulgar bourgeois life (and at the same time, to be honest, to free up the forces of citizens for socialist construction). The new government declared war on "primus", "home meals" and "bourgeois smoky kitchens": as you know, new houses in those days were built without kitchens at all (you can read more about this in the article about, for example, the infamous Tear of Socialism ). From now on, the function of "private" kitchens was to be performed by a kitchen factory - a large mechanized public catering enterprise capable of quickly feeding huge masses of people.
The kitchen factory was both an enterprise and a dining room. In addition to a purely utilitarian purpose, it also had an ideological meaning: the joint consumption of food was well within the framework of the life of a "person of a new type." And various "Nepman" establishments had to be destroyed in the bud. Remember, in "The Golden Calf":
"... - And how do you have with such ... with zucchini in the Asian genus, you know, with tympans and flutes?" - the great
strategist asked impatiently. - Outlived, - the young man answered indifferently, It was necessary to exterminate this infection, the breeding ground of epidemics. (...) But then a factory-kitchen is open. European table. Plates are washed and dried using electricity. The curve of stomach diseases has gone down sharply.
... In the large hall of the kitchen factory, among the tiled walls, under the ribbon fly agarics hanging from the ceiling, the travelers ate pearl barley soup and small brown meatballs. "
The first kitchen factory was opened in 1925 in today's Ivanovo, the second in Novgorod, the third - on Dneprostroi, then several at once - in Moscow and Leningrad.The Narva kitchen factory was one of the largest - it occupied an entire block and even included a department store.Some semi-finished products were consumed at the kitchen factory itself, and another part was distributed on factory and factory canteens, something was sold at retail.
From an architectural point of view, a kitchen factory was a very special type of structure: a huge, very light building, several floors, a semi-basement (for staff rooms and bread slicers) and a basement (for food warehouses and refrigeration units). The ground floor housed a laboratory and production facilities plus a convenience store and a snack bar. The second floor was occupied by huge canteens (operating, of course, on the principle of self-service, which, by the way, was used for the first time in the USSR in kitchen factories), the third was occupied by festive halls, and the roof (necessarily flat) served as a summer terrace in the summer. The kitchen factory was capable of preparing up to 60,000 full set meals a day. The most prominent specialists in their fields took part in the development of the menu and production technologies.
The Narva kitchen factory was built on the site of the Taganrog tavern (which, by the way, is no coincidence - in Moscow, similar enterprises were located on the site - or directly opposite - of restaurants popular before the revolution). The project was approved in 1929, and the next year the construction was completed. A rectangular building with two courtyards, a three-story part facing the square (there was a department store); dining rooms were isolated from noisy streets and overlooked the square. The combination of concrete and areas of solid glazing, large glass bay windows, the absence of a pronounced axis of symmetry, rounded volumes - all these are characteristic features of constructivist architecture.
The kitchen factory as an idea - not only Narva, but in general - did not justify itself, and by the end of the thirties they stopped building. Today the building is occupied by the Kirov department store and, ironically, by McDonald's, an institution that began once precisely as a kitchen factory, and now implements the idea of maximum cheapness and speed of food. Although, of course, not on socialist principles.
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