Gosproektstroi


Gosproektstroi was the State Design and Construction Bureau in Moscow, USSR.
This organization was set up following an agreement signed on 9 January 1930 by the President of Amtorg Trading Corporation, Saul G. Bron, on behalf of the Superior Soviet of the People's Economy of the USSR, with the leading American industrial architect from Detroit, Albert Kahn, for his firm to become consulting architects for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union.
Moritz Kahn, one of the three Kahn brothers, said:
George Scrymgeour, an American from the Kahn company, was appointed head of Gosproektstroi and also sat on the National Technical Soviet. The Kahn company was responsible for supervising 3,000 designers across the Soviet Union in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kiev, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Odessa and Sverdlovsk, all controlled from Moscow. They had a budget of 417 million rubles.
State planning permitted standardization of building construction: "all factory buildings for any one type of construction can be built on standardized principles. The result will be a great saving in time and in cost in the preparation of plans and the cost of buildings," as Moritz Kahn commented. He further added that the Soviet building code permitted a "saving of millions of dollars per annum because of the ultra-conservative character of that code."