Massive Blocks for Soviet Mass Housing Standardization and Prefabrication in the Soviet Union

The present research was designed to survey the main features of massive- block construction (крупноблочное строительтсво), focusing on the components that made it essential in the later developments in mass housing in the 1960s, which were strictly linked to Khruschev’s policies. The evolution of the relevant techniques has been traced back through its main stages and the most meaningful buildings in a more-or-less thirty-year-long development that finally led to a turn to heavy prefabrication (i.e., to large two-dimensional panels). This factor has not been sufficiently considered, even in the face of the ideology that characterized the policies of de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union from 1954 on.