The State Duma proposed giving buildings the names of the architects who designed them

It is necessary to return to the practice of naming buildings after the architects who designed them. Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Construction and Housing and Communal Services Sergei Pakhomov told Vedomosti. “The architect today has disappeared as a person from the construction field, his role needs to be increased, so every building should have the name of the person who designed it,” he explained.

There is no idea yet what standard will need to be corrected, but work in this direction should go on, he clarified. Perhaps this will be a new law on architectural activities, Pakhomov suggests. During the plenary session “Megaprojects as a driver of economic development” of the III International Construction Championship, he also explained that he would discuss the issue of “correct and step-by-step” bringing this issue into the legal field with the Ministry of Construction.

“If it’s a beautiful house, we need to know who built it. If it’s scary, they should know too,” he said.

Minister of Construction and Housing and Communal Services Irek Faizullin said that this is not just about hanging a sign with a name, but about a person’s long-term responsibility for a specific object. Today, the author of each project is known: “In the GIS housing and communal services system, all new houses are fully certified, all the internal components are clear, including the participants [строительства]” The responsibility of not only design organizations, but also contractors is being personalized, the minister emphasized: every specialist who has the right to sign a document is in the unified federal register of issued construction permits.

Therefore, in this part, “we will probably correct something within the framework of tradition, so that the participants who created a specific object will be more famous,” Faizullin said. At the same time, the implementation of this principle will largely depend on the customers, who, at the stage of putting the facility into operation, must, for example, put up a sign about the work of a specific team or indicate it in some other way. “This can be made mandatory in terms of raising the status of builders, the proposal is interesting, we will think about it,” the minister concluded.

This tradition has faded into the background, it has almost been forgotten, complained Oleg Aksyutin, Deputy Chairman of the Board and Head of the Department for Prospective Development of Gazprom. “We need to return to this question and pose it differently: why not? Why don’t we name people who put a lot of effort into the implementation of a project?” – he turned to his colleagues.

This principle already works in the nuclear industry, said Alexey Likhachev, General Director of the Rosatom Corporation. The company has always paid attention not only to social policy, but also to history. “We have a huge number of streets and squares in cities that are named after builders,” he noted. This tradition will be continued, he assured.

Natalya Dushkina, a professor at the Moscow Architectural Institute and historian of architecture and urban planning, said that she was not familiar with such a practice. More often, houses are given the name of famous residents. For example, the architect Konstantin Melnikov designed a house for himself and his family – now it is a monument of avant-garde architecture. “If there is Melnikov’s house, it is because he is both the author and the owner of the house at the same time,” Dushkina noted.

Andrei Abramov, assistant at the history department of Moscow State University, also said that he had not heard about this tradition. Architectural expert Anna Bronovitskaya added that in the Soviet period they could only speak unofficially, for example, “Zholtovsky’s house on Mokhovaya”, “Zholtovsky’s house on Smolenskaya”, but these are isolated examples.