The project for the construction of residential buildings, popularly referred to as Khrushchev, was launched in 1957. The construction was aimed at providing housing for every family and reducing mass housing in communal apartments.
Khrushchev's vision of the housing issue: a person should live, albeit in a small, but his own home. Based on this, the living space has been reduced to 6-9 m2 for the bedroom and 6 m2for the kitchen. The height of the ceilings was no more than 2.5 m. At the same time, the height of a five-story building in meters is approximately 15 meters.
What were the first apartments like?
In the beginning, houses were built of brick, and the height of a five-story building in meters was approximately 14 m. A few years after the start of construction, the architects switched to panel construction of five-story buildings, which significantly saved time and labor costs. Not without innovations in the layout of apartments - in the sockets the bathroom was shared.
Construction features and nuances
The features of panel Khrushchev include:
- height of a five-storey building in meters depends on the construction series;
- lack of an attic, a garbage chute,elevator;
- bearing structures in such a house are external.
Building a house from panels is more like a game of constructor: large panels and blocks are stacked on top of each other and mounted. This construction method maximizes productivity on the construction site. Consequently, a site for organizing construction is required less, and long and labor-intensive processes are completely excluded. These are the main advantages of panel construction.
And only decades later did people realize that Khrushchev is far from ideal housing: an ill-conceived thermal insulation system, low noise absorption, little usable space.
Serial construction of panels
Already from the beginning of the 60s, panel houses began to be built in series, forming entire residential areas with their own internal infrastructure. In total, construction under the project included about 23 series of brick and panel houses of various layouts. At the same time, the height of the five-story building in meters was different. It depended on the features of the building.
Basement level with an approximate height of half a meter to ground level, 5 floors with a height of 2.55 meters plus half a meter to the attic, the total height of a five-story Khrushchev house was about 14 meters if we are talking about a panel house, and 15 meters for houses with a full roof and an attic.
