Buildings christened “the phantoms of Moscow” – including a library which would have been the biggest in the world, and the Palace of the Soviets, which would have been topped with a statue of Lenin taller than the Statue of Liberty – are the stars of a new exhibition at London’s Design Museum.

The exhibition, which marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution, focuses on six projects that were imagined by a bold new generation of architects and designers in the 1920s and 30s, but were never realised. Architectural drawings are supported by artwork, propaganda and publications from the period.

“The power of these buildings is in the fact that they were never built, so they live on in the imagination,” exhibition curator Eszter Steierhoffer said.

“It is a story that begins with great idealism, in people who are not just dreamers but trying to dream of a better world. But it becomes darker as the political situation changes towards totalitarianism – it is very sad, and a little scary.”

In the aftermath of the revolution, young architects and engineers – who were often also writers, artists and political activists – were ardent for change. They wanted to change the Moscow skyline, provide model housing for workers and end illiteracy. One poster reminded rail travellers: “Citizens – listen, take notice, there is a library in every train dining car.”

The exhibition includes a timetable for an ideal communal living complex with the day laid out in alarming detail. It includes eight hours at work, a surprising number of clothing changes – for lunch, again for an afternoon nap and yet again for tea – and four hours for “cultural amusements, exercises, possibly sauna and swimming”.



The epic-scale Lenin Institute would have had a combined theatre, planetarium, and gigantic library, with its 15m books moved by machinery from a central tower, linked to Moscow by an elevated railway, and to the world by wireless.

One of the most famous unrealised projects was the People’s Palace. The exhibition includes a four-metre-tall index finger to indicate the colossal scale of the proposed statue of Lenin. As millions were dying in one of the worst famines in Russian history, the palace was being planned down to the costly marble which would line the sumptuous entrance hall, and architects and engineers were being sent to the US for a discreet look at skyscrapers to try to work out how to make the building stand up.

The exhibition includes one building which was actually constructed. The mausoleum on Red Square for the embalmed body of Lenin was built twice in timber after his death in 1924, and finally in granite. Steierhoffer has included some of thousands of suggestions for its design from soldiers, miners, peasants and school children which she found in a Moscow archive.



Since the Design Museum reopened in November in the old Commonwealth Institute building on Kensington High Street, it has welcomed more than 300,000 visitors – far more than in an average year at its old site at Shad Thames.

