Soviet Palace

In Moscow, near the west wall of the Kremlin, urchins used to run and play across a large unkempt field where once stood the Cathedral of the Redeemer. Lately, however, they have been shooed away by bands of surveyors, engineers, architects. The land was being inspected and groomed for Russia's latest and greatest monument, the Palace of the Soviets, which, when completed (perhaps in 1937), will be the world's largest and tallest building.

Competitive plans for the structure were first submitted in 1931 to a jury whose most noteworthy member was Dictator Stalin. First prize was shared by a British-born New Jersey architect, Hector 0. Hamilton, and two Soviet architects, B. M. Iofan and I. V. Zholtovsky (TIME, March 1, 1932). Further decisions eliminated Architect Hamilton who dejectedly blamed his British birth, threatened a suit. Last week the accepted plans of Architects Iofan, Goldfreich and Shchuko were fi- nally released and the world had an opportunity to examine the newest Soviet colossus.

Eschewing modern or mechanistic design, Architect Iofan drew a Romanesque pyramid of six fluted, concentric cylinders which together form a pedestal for a 260-ft. statue of Nicolai Lenin, with his face turned to his own tomb on the Red Square. Steps 492 ft. wide lead from the street up to a colonnaded arcade opening into the amphitheatres with back-to-back stages. The larger, which will be decorated with a mammoth panorama of the Revolution, seats 20,000; the smaller 6,000. Escalators go up to a library which will hold 500,000 books, a maze of museums, foyers, restaurants. Besides the two main halls, there will be four conference rooms. The base of the Palace will be marble and granite; the rest, tufa, a purple-red volcanic stone found in the Caucasus. Lenin's statue will be aluminum or chrome steel. Including the statue, the building will be 1,361 ft. high (Empire State: 1,248 ft.). Boris Michailovitch Iofan is one of U. S. S. R.'s best-loved architects. Dark-eyed, black-haired, his energetic, agile figure is recognized everywhere in Moscow. Married and childless, he lives in a modern four-room apartment for which he pays 60 rubles per month (including telephone, radio, gas & light). He keeps one maid. To those who knew his work, his design for the Palace of the Soviets came as no surprise, for he learned most of his profession in Rome, admires classical architecture and Michelangelo, has already built near Rome a circular, colonnaded Jewish cemetery. In Moscow, his best work is the First House of the Soviets (apartments).

When the Palace plans reached the U. S. last week Sculptor William Zorach let out a cry of protest, charging that the Soviets had stolen an idea submitted by him for a Lenin memorial in Leningrad. Zorach, too, drew concentric cylinders but they represented a base for a shaft that telescoped into a streamlined statue of Lenin. Picking words that would sting most he declared of Iofan's work: "It goes back to the most decadent pseudo-Roman development, the sort of thing old kings and old queens loved, a sort of tremendous wedding cake . . . incorporating the worst archaic figures of the capitalistic system."

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