The Shukhov Radio Tower (russian: Шуховская башня), also known as the Shabolovka Tower (), is a

broadcasting tower Broadcasting Tower is a university building in Broadcasting Place in Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, England. Adjacent to other university buildings, it forms part of Leeds Beckett University; it houses the Faculty of Arts, Environment and Technology, wh ...

deriving from the

Russian avant-garde The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of avant-garde modern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its e ...

in Moscow designed by Vladimir Shukhov. The free-standing steel diagrid structure was built between 1920 and 1922, during the Russian Civil War.

History

Design

Vladimir Shukhov invented the world's first hyperboloid structure in the year 1890. Later he wrote a book, ''Rafters'', in which he proved that the triangular shapes are 20-25% heavier than the arched ones with a ray grating. After that, Shukhov filed a number of patents for a diagrid. He aimed not only to achieve greater strength and rigidity of the structure, but also ease and simplicity through the use of as little building material as possible. The first diagrid tower was built for the

All-Russia Exhibition The All-Russia Industrial and Art Exhibitions were a series of 16 exhibitions in the 19th century Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of ...

in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896, and later was bought by

Yury Nechaev-Maltsov Yury Stepanovich Nechaev-Maltsov (1834–1913) was a leading glassware manufacturer, Landlord, patron of the arts, and the major private donor to the Pushkin Museum. He owned a number of shops in Moscow and St. Petersburg where the glassware ...

, a well-known manufacturer in the city. Shukhov was responsible for constructions of a new types of lighthouses, masts,

water towers A water tower is an elevated structure supporting a water tank constructed at a height sufficient to pressurize a distribution system for potable water, and to provide emergency storage for fire protection. Water towers often operate in conju ...

and transmission towers. The broadcasting tower at Shabolovka is a diagrid structure in the form of a rotated

hyperboloid In geometry, a hyperboloid of revolution, sometimes called a circular hyperboloid, is the surface generated by rotating a hyperbola around one of its principal axes. A hyperboloid is the surface obtained from a hyperboloid of revolution by defo ...

. The Khodynka radio station, built in 1914, could no longer handle the increasing amount of radiograms. On July 30, 1919, Vladimir Lenin signed a decree of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense, which demanded "to install in an extremely urgent manner a radio station equipped with the most advanced and powerful devices and machines", to ensure the security of the country and allow constant communication with other republics. Tower designing was started immediately across many bureaus. Later that year Shukhov's Construction Office won a competition. The planned height of the new nine-sectioned hyperbolic tower was ( taller than the Eiffel Tower, which was taken into consideration when creating the plan) with an estimated mass of 2,200 tons (the Eiffel Tower weighs 7,300 tons). However, in the context of the Civil War and the lack of resources, the project had to be revised: the height was reduced to , the weight to 240 tons.

Installation

Tower construction was carried out without any cranes and scaffolding, but only with winches. 240 tons of metal that was required for construction, was allocated by Lenin’s personal decree from the stocks of the Military Department. For lifting five wooden winches were used, which were moved to the upper sections. The tower is composed of six sections, one above the other. Each section is an independent hyperboloid based on a larger one. The sixth section was installed and finally secured on February 14, 1922.

Structure

The Shukhov tower is a hyperboloid structure ( hyperbolic steel gridshell) consisting of a series of hyperboloid sections stacked on one another to approximate an overall conical shape. The tower has a diagrid structure, and its steel shell experiences minimum wind load (a significant design factor for high-rising buildings). The tower sections are single-cavity

s of rotation made of straight beams, the ends of which rest against circular foundations.

Location

The tower is located a few kilometres south of the

Moscow Kremlin The Kremlin ( rus, Московский Кремль, r=Moskovskiy Kreml', p=ˈmɐˈskofskʲɪj krʲemlʲ, t=Moscow Kremlin) is a fortified complex in the center of Moscow founded by the Rurik dynasty. It is the best known of the kremlins (R ...

, but is not accessible to tourists. The

street address An address is a collection of information, presented in a mostly fixed format, used to give the location of a building, apartment, or other structure or a plot of land, generally using political boundaries and street names as references, along ...

of the tower is "Shabolovka Street, 37".

Possible demolition

As of early 2014, the tower faced demolition by the Russian State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting, after having been allowed to deteriorate for years despite popular calls for its restoration. Following a concerted campaign calling for the preservation of the tower, on July 3 the

Ministry of Culture of Russia The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation () is a ministry of the Government of Russia responsible for state policy in cultural spheres such as art, cinematography, archives, copyright, cultural heritage, and censorship. Olga Lyubimova h ...

announced that the tower will not be demolished, and in September 2014 that Moscow City Council had placed a preservation order on the tower in order to safeguard it. In January 2017 the RTRS placed a request for tender for a plan to renovate and preserve the monument.

Models

There is a model of Shukhov's Shabolovka Tower at the Information Age gallery at the Science Museum in London. The model is at 1:30 scale and was installed in October 2014.

In popular culture

* In 1922 one of the members of ASNOVA Vladimir Krinsky made a "Radio speaker of the Revolution" mural with a picture of a tower. * A science fiction novel by the Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

The Garin Death Ray ''The Garin Death Ray'', also known as ''The Death Box'' and ''The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin'' (russian: Гиперболоид инженера Гарина), is a science fiction novel by the noted Russian author Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolst ...

was inspired by the public reaction towards construction of the tower. * Shukhov Tower was a logo of a "L'art de l'ingénieur" exhibition in

Centre Georges-Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( en, National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of ...

. * In the novel ''A Gentleman in Moscow'' by Amor Towles, set in 1922, the character Mikhail Fyodorovich Mindich declares the Shukhov tower a thing of beauty, "a two hundred foot structure of spiraling steel from which we can broadcast the latest news and intelligence - and, yes, the sentimental strains of your Tchaikovsky ..." (Windmill Books, p.85)

Gallery

Image:Shukhov Hyperboloid Tower Project of 350 metres of 1919 year.jpg, Shukhov Tower Project of 350 metres, 1919. File:1979 stamp Radio Moscow.png, 1979 File:Shukhov tower shabolovka moscow 02.jpg, 2006 File:Shukhov Tower photo by Sergei Arsenyev 2006.JPG, 2006 File:2015-may-9-Moscow.jpg, 2015 File:Shukhov-April2016-Ivtorov.jpg, 2016

References

Literature

* P.Gössel, G.Leuthäuser, E.Schickler
"Architecture in the 20th century"
Taschen Verlag; 1990; .
Elizabeth C. English“Arkhitektura i mnimosti”: The origins of Soviet avant-garde rationalist architecture in the Russian mystical-philosophical and mathematical intellectual tradition”
a dissertation in architecture, 264 p., University of Pennsylvania, 2000.

ttps://web.archive.org/web/20071122135221/http://www.uibk.ac.at/baugeschichte/mitarbeiter/graefe.html Rainer Graefeund andere, 192 S., Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1990, . * Jesberg, Paulgerd Die Geschichte der Bauingenieurkunst, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart (Germany), , 1996; pp. 198–9. * Ricken, Herbert Der Bauingenieur, Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin (Germany), , 1994; pp. 230. * Picon, Antoine (dir.), "L'art de l'ingenieur : constructeur, entrepreneur, inventeur", Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1997, * Fausto Giovannardi "Vladimir Shukhov e la leggerezza dell'acciaio" a
giovannardierontini.it

External links

*
The Shukhov's Radio Tower
* ttps://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=912047&t=k&om=1 Shukhov Towers in Google Maps*
3D model of the Shukhov TowerViews of the hyperboloid towerInvention of Hyperboloid Structures
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Constructivist architecture Lattice shell structures by Vladimir Shukhov Towers completed in 1922 Tourist attractions in Moscow Russian avant-garde High-tech architecture Hyperboloid structures Towers in Moscow Cultural heritage monuments of regional significance in Moscow