The Narkomfin Building: What Was Shared and What Remained Private

The Narkomfin Building provided residents with separate flats, private sanitary facilities and the option of cooking at home. The designers described the complex as a transitional-type building: the dining hall, laundry, physical exercise and some childcare were moved into communal blocks, while private and family life was preserved. The label ‘communal house’ therefore misrepresents how the building was organised.

Three groups of sources reveal how people lived in the Narkomfin Building: the design by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis, records of the spaces actually built, and accounts of the building’s later use. Comparing them allows us to distinguish the original concept from subsequent alterations. The K and F units in the Narkomfin Building confirm the privacy envisaged by the design. The history of the dining hall and communal block shows that the communal programme was only partially realised, while later overcrowding explains the more stringent communal living recalled by residents.

A transitional-type building, not a ‘communal house’

Moisei Ginzburg classified the building as an experimental transitional-type residence. Its designers proposed gradually transferring some domestic functions to communal services while retaining a private flat for each resident.

The residential complex for employees of the People’s Commissariat of Finance of the RSFSR was designed at the turn of the 1930s by architects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis and engineer Sergei Prokhorov. The first residents arrived in 1931. The building emerged from the Soviet debate about new forms of housing, as architects sought answers to the housing shortage, changes in family life and the need to free up time spent on domestic labour. Yet this debate was not confined to a single model of barracks-style communal accommodation.

In his book Dwelling, published in 1934, Ginzburg described the transition as a gradual process: new housing was intended to encourage the development of communal services. Residents retained a choice between private and communal aspects of daily life.

The Narkomfin Building was an experimental state housing complex whose layout served a programme for transforming everyday life. In radical communes, private space was reduced to little more than a place to sleep. By contrast, pre-revolutionary tenement buildings were created as commercial properties with flats to let and their own social hierarchy. The later practice of housing separate households in individual rooms of the Narkomfin Building did not alter its original type.

Two models for the collectivisation of domestic life

Fully fledged communal houses might leave each person with nothing more than a place to sleep, transferring sanitary, dining and educational functions to other blocks. The principal units in the Narkomfin Building accommodated daytime living, private hygiene and at least limited food preparation. Communal services supplemented the flat.

A revealing comparison is the Textile Institute Communal House, built by Ivan Nikolaev in 1930. According to materials from a Garage Museum course, its dormitory block contained one thousand six-square-metre sleeping cabins, each for two students. From there, residents proceeded to a separate sanitary block with showers and lockers, then to a communal block containing a dining hall, classrooms, a gym and a library. The sequence of spaces imposed a collective daily routine.

Two models for the collectivisation of domestic life at the turn of the 1930s

Criterion	Narkomfin Building	Textile Institute Communal House
Intended residents	Employees of the commissariat, single people, couples and families	Students, for whom a uniform daily routine was designed
Private space	Residential units with living and sleeping areas	A 6 m² cabin designed for two people to sleep in
Sanitary facilities	Inside K and F units; a shared bathroom between each pair of units was an exception on the upper dormitory level	Showers and clothes storage in a separate sanitary block
Food preparation	A full kitchen in K, a kitchenette in F and a communal kitchen available as a service	Meals provided in the communal block
Connection between the blocks	The connecting passage expanded the range of available facilities	The route between the dormitory, sanitary and communal blocks structured the day

The crucial difference lay in the nature of the private space. In the Narkomfin Building, it was primarily services that were communal: even the compact F unit remained a flat. Nikolaev’s six-square-metre student cabin served solely as a place to sleep within a sequence of dormitory, sanitary and communal blocks.

Communal functions: dining hall, laundry and leisure

The architects intended to communalise certain labour-intensive tasks and leisure activities: preparing main meals, doing laundry, exercising, reading, relaxing and some childcare. To accommodate these functions, a communal block was built beside the residential block, with an enclosed passage connecting the two.

The published programme included a kitchen and dining hall, a gym, a reading room and recreation rooms; space for a summer dining area was planned on the roof. A separate service block housed a mechanised laundry. The architects placed collective functions in purpose-built facilities outside the flats.

A research project by the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art shows that the completed building formed only part of a larger composition. The first phase comprised residential, communal and service blocks. The planned extension, with additional residential and service buildings, remained on paper. The completed complex therefore cannot be compared with the full design programme without taking this qualification into account.

Residents could use the communal services as they chose: they might walk through the heated passage to the dining hall, collect prepared food, send clothes to the laundry or visit the shared rooms. The door to each resident’s own unit separated these services from private life.

The threshold of the residential unit as a boundary

The principal boundary lay at the threshold of the flat. The corridors, connecting passage, staircases, roof and service rooms belonged to the collective part of the complex; the living room, bedroom, sanitary facilities and kitchen equipment inside each unit remained the private domain of an individual household.

The residential block runs almost exactly from north to south. The bedrooms, kitchens and glazed corridors faced east and received the morning light, while the living rooms faced west. Windows on both façades provided cross-ventilation, and variations in floor level separated the living and sleeping areas.

The Housing Standardisation Section of the Construction Committee of the RSFSR developed a series of flats for families of varying sizes. A 1990 survey of the Narkomfin Building identified at least eleven types. The K and F units illustrate two scenarios particularly clearly: a family flat with its own kitchen and a compact dwelling more closely linked to communal services.

The type of layout determined the degree of domestic autonomy. Both types had private living areas and sanitary facilities. They differed in floor area, the way their levels were connected, the intended household composition and the role of cooking at home.

Economy of space in the Type F unit

The efficiency of Type F was achieved by redistributing the interior volume. The architects lowered the bedroom and ancillary areas, gave the living room greater height and placed the corridor between the upper and lower units. A single passage served several levels, while windows faced both façades.

This arrangement emerged from the work of the housing standardisation section at the Construction Committee of the Russian SFSR, led by Moisei Ginzburg. Architect Alexander Pasternak was the group's principal contributor. The team developed several types of residential unit for families of different sizes; some designs were recommended for widespread use, while others were intended as experimental prototypes. The letter in each name denoted the typology under study, not a category of resident or a floor number.

In his book Housing, Ginzburg assessed a type's efficiency by the ratio of its constructed volume to its living area. For small one-room flats with 25–30 m² of everyday living space, he considered Type F the most efficient: lowering the ancillary rooms made it possible to raise the living room and achieve an efficiency ratio comparable to that of a three-room flat. The heritage assessment records a total area of approximately 35–36 m² in the Type F units as built, with a living-room height of 3.7 m and a height of 2.3 m in the bedroom, entrance hall and bathroom.

The state historical and cultural assessment report of 23 December 2025 examines a project to adapt specific premises: it gives areas of 35.1 and 35.4 m² for flats 39 and 40, and 113.9 m² for premises 50/52. These cadastral figures refer to existing properties following the restoration work of 2016–2020. Ginzburg's own efficiency ratio was based on the living area of a standard unit, so the figures can be compared only if the date, property and measurement method are specified. The same report confirms that the researchers drew on archives, on-site investigations and work carried out by the Technical University of Berlin in 2009.

Economy of volume was combined with qualities that Ginzburg considered hygienic: cross-ventilation, natural light from both sides and a well-lit corridor. Type F remained a spatially complex small flat with its own amenities. Its complete domestic arrangement depended on the reliable operation of the communal kitchen-dining room and other shared services.

The Type K family unit

The Type K unit was a self-contained family flat, with a kitchen, shared living area, bedrooms and a private bathroom. Residents did not need to go to the communal block to cook or attend to personal hygiene.

Type K flats occupied two structural bays and extended across several levels. The taller shared room was separated from the bedrooms and service area. The variation in ceiling heights made it possible to fit a complete family home into the block's economical structure while increasing the volume of the living room.

According to the state historical and cultural assessment, Type K had two bedrooms and a fitted kitchen. The baths or showers had hot water; Garage's course also specifically notes a window in the bathroom. The bathroom formed part of the flat.

A family living in a Type K unit could use the dining room, laundry and recreation areas if they wished. A fully equipped kitchen allowed them to cook at home. In this transitional model, communal services coexisted with conventional domestic life.

The rooms within the family flat also had distinct functions. Household members shared the living room, the bedrooms were separate from it, and the kitchen remained the home's working area. The boundary between communal and private space ran first along the threshold of the Type K unit and then between the space used by the whole family and the rooms intended for rest.

Type F: a compact flat supported by communal services

The Type F unit was more compact and depended more heavily on the communal service system, yet it remained a separate home for one person or a couple. It had its own living area, bedroom, bathroom and a place for preparing simple meals or reheating food.

Authoritative descriptions give a total area of approximately 35–37 m² for Type F. The slight discrepancy reflects different measurement methods and the way parts of the split-level volume are counted. The entrance level, tall living area and lower bedroom were connected by an internal staircase.

Adjacent Type F units mirrored each other: one extended upwards from the entrance and the other downwards. The shared corridor lay between the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ flats and ran along every other floor. This reduced the area devoted to passageways while preserving light from both sides and cross-ventilation in every home.

The heritage document clarifies the arrangement: the building had only two shared corridors, at second- and fourth-floor level; eight family Type K units occupied the second and third levels, while the standard Type F units were located above. The descriptions use different counting methods: state documentation lists 28 standard Type F units separately from the paired 2F units at the ends, whereas Garage's research project describes the upper part of the block as 16 pairs of Type F units above eight Type K units. The difference stems from how the end variants are classified and does not alter the planning principle.

The Type F bathroom area was compact but private. Expert reports record a shower or bath, toilet and washbasin within the unit; the configuration varied by specific subtype. Describing Type F as a room from which all domestic functions were removed therefore does not accord with the plans.

Despite its small area, Type F retained a fully functional daytime living space. The bedroom was separated by a change in level, while light entered from opposite façades. Residents entered their own flats from the shared corridor; this layout did not create rows of communal bedrooms.

F depended more heavily on centralised services than K. Its occupant was expected to obtain their main meals from the kitchen in the communal block and use the building’s other services while retaining a separate flat of their own.

Was privacy the same in every type of accommodation?

No. The upper level contained dormitory rooms designed for one or two people, with each pair of rooms sharing bathroom facilities and a shower. This documented exception should not be extrapolated to household K units or standard F units: the heritage documentation distinguishes these types by their layouts and fittings.

Paired 2F units were located at the ends of the block, while Nikolai Milyutin’s nearly 100-square-metre duplex penthouse was individually designed. The building encompassed several degrees of domestic autonomy — from dormitory accommodation with shared bathroom facilities for each pair of rooms to a large family flat. The type of accommodation must be specified in every account; the sources do not support the idea that all residents followed a single regime.

Kitchen niches and cooking at home

Kitchens in the Narkomfin Building varied according to the type of accommodation. The differences reflected the degree of reliance on the communal dining room. K had a full separate kitchen, while F had a small niche and a proposed compact ‘kitchen unit’ for simple food preparation.

Plans of F show a designated cooking area beside the living space. It could be screened off with a movable partition or curtain and was intended for making breakfast, boiling water and reheating prepared dishes. The proposed ‘kitchen unit’ occupied around 2 m²; the cabinet was designed to contain a sink, hob, extractor, refrigerator, worktop and storage for utensils. Main meals were expected to come from the kitchen in the communal block. This niche saved space while preserving a measure of autonomy for the resident.

The drawing of the kitchen unit does not in itself prove that it was installed in every flat. In a 2017 interview, conservation architect Alexey Ginzburg noted that no photographs of folding kitchens in the Narkomfin Building had been found. The state expert assessment likewise indicates that much of the specially designed furniture remained a concept and was implemented more fully in another experimental building.

Type F units provided space for individual food preparation. Plans and surveys confirm the presence of a kitchen niche, but the original fittings in each flat are unknown. There is no evidence that every resident received the same factory-made cabinet with a complete set of equipment.

Later gas appliances do not prove what was originally installed. Sources record that residents fitted cookers in the designated niches and sometimes adapted bathroom areas for cooking. In this way, families responded to shortcomings in the communal catering service and changes in their households; the original design did not envisage such alterations.

The myth of ‘flats without kitchens’ arises when three facts are conflated: the small size of the F kitchen, the emphasis on communal dining and the uncertainty over whether the folding kitchen unit was ever implemented. Yet these facts do not mean that private cooking was technically impossible throughout the building. Family K units had kitchens, while F units retained a cooking area, albeit a reduced one.

The communal block as a service system

The communal block of the Narkomfin Building extended the range of functions beyond the individual flat. It brought together services and facilities for which there was insufficient room in a compact unit and which could be organised more efficiently for the building as a whole.

A covered passage at second-floor level linked the communal and residential sections. The communal block’s large glazed spaces made shared activities visible, while the route to them began beyond the door of each private unit.

The mechanised laundry was housed in the service building. Centralised washing saved space in the flats and was intended to reduce repetitive domestic labour. The designers applied the same principle to preparing food and caring for children, aiming to free up some of the family’s time.

The unbuilt second phase immediately limited the service network. Some of the planned structures were never built, while the existing premises soon began to be repurposed, so the communal block operated as an incomplete system.

The dining hall: design and practice

The dining hall never became an established venue for shared daily meals. The kitchen mainly provided prepared food to take away, while the space intended for the communal dining hall was soon put to another use.

From the mid-1930s, the communal block was put to different uses. According to the Garage research project, the changes began as early as 1936, when a workshop and a nursery occupied the communal spaces. The institution remained there until the war years, while the block’s original programme gradually lost its coherence.

Researchers Elena Ovsyannikova and Nikolai Vasilyev attribute the incomplete socialisation of domestic life to alterations made to the building and the habits of its first residents. Narkomfin employees spent a significant part of the day at work, did not always need the communal dining room and preferred familiar forms of home life. Takeaway food was better suited to this routine than compulsory communal meals.

In practice, domestic life proved less collective than the original design envisaged. The laundry, connecting passages and some communal spaces were used, but the model of ‘a minimal kitchen in a Type F flat combined with regular meals in the communal dining room’ never functioned consistently. Residents moved food preparation back into their flats.

Community life by choice

Sources do not indicate that residents were required to follow a prescribed routine in their leisure time. The communal spaces provided opportunities to meet and take part in sports, but each family decided for itself whether to use them or remain in its flat.

The roof and terraces were used as recreational spaces. Early photographs and accounts examined in Garage Museum’s research show residents exercising and spending time together. Yet such instances cannot be taken as evidence of a continuous communal way of life: they document the use of a particular space, not every resident’s entire daily routine.

In the second half of the 1930s, many residents of the Narkomfin Building fell victim to political repression. Arrests and executions altered the composition of its residents during the same period in which the communal spaces were being given new functions. These developments make it impossible to describe the late 1930s as a straightforward continuation of the original programme.

The residents likewise do not fit the image of a faceless commune. They included Nikolai Milyutin, who commissioned the complex, the architect Moisei Ginzburg, Nikolai Semashko and his household, the painter Alexander Deineka, and the statesmen Nikolai Krylenko and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko. The shared amenities served people of differing social standing and domestic arrangements; households varied in their composition and in the services available to them.

Housework, services and domestic staff

The design redistributed some domestic work between the individual flats and centralised services. The laundry, kitchen and childcare facilities could ease the burden of daily chores only if they were regularly staffed and the family itself chose to use them.

Literature on the Narkomfin Building sometimes claims that servants accounted for almost half its residents. Ovsyannikova and Vasiliev consider this estimate unsubstantiated. The complex’s service staff were housed in the service block, while evidence of domestic servants relates to only a few units and individual families, including a cook employed by Nikolai Milyutin’s family.

Isolated accounts of domestic helpers cannot be generalised to the entire building. Some families retained traditional household practices, others used the communal laundry and kitchen, while still others combined the two approaches. Even within the same block, residents organised their domestic lives in different ways.

Repetitive and demanding tasks were intended to be entrusted to professional services outside the apartment. The reduced kitchen in an F-type unit therefore depended on a reliable communal catering service, the laundry on regular staffing, and the children's facilities on consistently organised care. The saving of living space worked only in conjunction with this system.

Later overcrowding and the communal kitchen

The most restrictive form of communal living arose later, during the period of overcrowding. Families were moved into units designed for one or two people, while large apartments were divided among several households. These changes had a greater impact on the boundary between private and communal life than the programme of the 1920s.

Alterations continued in the post-war period. The research chronology records extensions from 1947 onwards and further changes in the use of communal spaces. A communal kitchen with rows of cookers and sinks appeared on the fifth floor of the residential block. This later type of space is closer to the familiar image of a Soviet communal apartment, but belongs to the building's subsequent history.

F-type units were occupied by families for whom their original size and intended way of life proved too cramped. Large K-type units could be converted into communal apartments. As a result, spaces designed as private family areas were shared by different households, while domestic activities spilled into the corridors or communal kitchen.

This sequence of events is crucial. First came a transitional building with individual residential units and communal services; then the services operated only partially; residents subsequently adapted their apartments; and finally, overcrowding created new forms of involuntary communal living. Projecting this final phase back onto the beginning turns the architectural experiment into a caricature.

Why plans, photographs and recollections give different answers

These sources answer different questions. A plan shows the architect's intention, a photograph records the building's condition at a particular moment, a measured survey reveals its physical fabric, and a resident's recollection describes the practices of a particular family. No single type of evidence can automatically be taken as the complete history of the building.

Three concepts that must not be confused

Residential unit

A compact apartment of a particular spatial type. In the context of K- and F-type units, the word ‘unit’ does not mean a bed or a room in a communal apartment.

Dormitory room

An upper-floor room for one or two people, with a toilet and shower shared between a pair of rooms. This arrangement differed from the standard K- and F-type units.

Communal apartment

An apartment divided among several households. In the Narkomfin Building, such apartments emerged during the later period of overcrowding, so the term describes a stage in the building's use rather than the original project as a whole.

Distinguishing between these terms resolves the apparent contradiction between the plans and residents' recollections. The building could simultaneously contain separate apartments, dormitory rooms and K-type units that were later converted into communal apartments; each account becomes accurate only when linked to a particular type of accommodation and decade.

Even Ginzburg's own 1934 book is not an exact catalogue of everything that was built. The narkomfin.ru research project cautions that the plans published there reflected the approved design and differed from the final implementation. The number of unit types, partition details and equipment must therefore be checked against on-site surveys and heritage conservation documentation.

The State Historical and Cultural Expert Review drew on archival material, a 2009 study by the Technical University of Berlin, measured surveys and exploratory investigations conducted during restoration. These sources make it possible to establish the geometry of the units and the location of the cooking areas. However, they do not prove that folding kitchen cabinets were installed on a large scale: such a conclusion would require photographs or traces of identical fittings in the apartments.

Recollections are especially valuable for tracing the history of the building's use. They explain where cookers were installed, how the number of residents changed and which spaces were occupied by new institutions. At the same time, memory can merge different decades. An account of a communal kitchen in the 1950s cannot be used without corroboration to describe the initial occupancy in 1931.

The restoration completed in 2020 reinstated the logic of the layout and many architectural elements. In the building today, restored features coexist with original details and new engineering systems, so its present condition is not an untouched snapshot of 1930. The historical picture has to be pieced together from the design, measured surveys and accounts from different decades.

Conclusion: the shifting boundary between communal and private life

The Narkomfin Building preserved private domestic life within its apartments. Bedrooms, living rooms and bathrooms belonged to individual households, while the degree of kitchen autonomy depended on the type of unit. Services and leisure facilities were designed for communal use, extending the scope of domestic life beyond the apartment.

The experiment was only partially realised. K- and F-type units were built and demonstrated different ways of organising family and compact housing. The communal block was constructed, but its programme never became fully operational: the dining hall mainly provided takeaway meals, some of the premises were occupied by a nursery, and the unbuilt second phase limited the system of services.

Later, the apartments became overcrowded: families moved into F-type units, K-type units were subdivided, and a communal kitchen appeared on the fifth floor. The enforced communal living of this period often overshadows the original programme. The design established a shifting boundary between private housing and communal services.

From the outside, the complex’s approach to everyday life is expressed through its separate residential and communal blocks, the passage connecting them, ribbon windows and the main block raised on supports. The Narkomfin Building can be compared with other layers of the district on the Presnya tour, whose route runs from Kudrinskaya Square to 1905 Goda Street. The programme is designed for viewing the building from the street and does not include access to the flats or interiors of the complex.

Sources

1. Narkomfin Building. Moscow Heritage, No. 18, 2012
2. The History of the Narkomfin Building — a research project by the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
3. ‘Communes for the Elite’ — a course by the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
4. ‘In Your Own Cell’ — a course by the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
5. State Historical and Cultural Expert Review Report on Flats 39, 40 and 50/52 of the Narkomfin Building, 23 December 2025
6. Alexei Ginzburg on the Restoration and Kitchen Features of the Narkomfin Building
7. Elena Ovsyannikova and Nikolai Vasilyev. ‘The Architecture of the Narkomfin Building: Yesterday and Today’
8. ‘The Narkomfin Building and Its Standardised Masterpiece’ — event archive, 31 May 2013