Vitaly Lagutenko

Vitaly Pavlovich Lagutenko (Виталий Павлович Лагутенко, 1904, Mogilev – 1969, Moscow) was a Soviet architect and engineer. His studies of low-cost prefabricated concrete construction, supported by Nikita Khrushchev, led to a complete switch of Soviet building practice from masonry to prefab concrete. Lagutenko designed the standardized 5-story apartment houses, known as khrushchyovka, and associated technologies of fast, mass-scale construction. These low-cost blocks, built by millions of units, helped relieve post-war housing shortage.

Lagutenko came to Moscow in 1921 at the age of 17 and found a job at the construction site of Kazansky Rail Terminal where he met Alexey Shchusev. In 1931, Lagutenko graduated from Moscow Institute of Transportation Engineers and joined Shchusev’s architectural workshop. During World War II, Lagutenko worked on city camouflage and repairs of war losses.

In 1947, in the heyday of extravagant, high-cost, low-density Stalinist architecture, the City of Moscow appointed Lagutenko to lead the experimental Industrial Construction Bureau, with an objective to study and design the low-cost technology suitable for fast mass construction; in 1949, he is promoted to lead Workhop No.1. He was not alone; parallel projects were tackled by traditional architects (Ivan Zholtovsky) and technologists (Rosenfeld and Pomazanov’s blocks on Peschanaya Street). Logutenko differentiated from them by focusing on low-cost prefab concrete and completely disposing with Stalinist grandeur.

His first project (1947–1950, architectural design by Mikhail Posokhin), an 8-story block south from Rosenfeld’s, used a frame structure made with prefab concrete beams and mixed concrete-masonry filling of external walls. Apartments are small, but not as small as his later designs; externally, the houses at least pretend to be Stalinist, using cornice and bas relief details, also of prefab concrete.

...
Wikipedia