Alexey Dushkin

Alexey Nikolayevich Dushkin (Russian: Алексей Николаевич Душкин; 24 December 1904 – 8 October 1977) was a Soviet architect, best known for his 1930s designs of the Kropotkinskaya and Mayakovskaya stations of the Moscow Metro.

His draft did not win the main prize, but earned an invitation to Moscow to join the Palace design team, and later Ivan Fomin's Workshop No.3.

Dushkin and Yakov Lichtenberg, two junior architects, were awarded the honorable task of designing the Palace of Soviets metro station (now Kropotkinskaya).

Dushkin worked within this framework and very tight construction schedule (half a year from earth pit to completion).

Under ground, light is the most vital structural element that livens up materials and underscores shapes... My creed is Kropotkinskaya.

His original draft called for bas relief sculptures of life-size standing figures on the corners and lace-like Gothic ornaments on the main vault.

Instead, Matvey Manizer, a sculptor with a political backing, preferred classical, larger-than-life bronze sculptures, crouched between fake arches and the plinth.

Columns are faced with stainless steel and pink rhodonite, floors and walls are finished in four different shades of granite and marble.

On January 1, 1943, in the middle of Battle of Stalingrad, Moscow Metro opened a new station, extending the Gorkovsko-Zamoskvoretskaya (now Zamoskvoretskaya) Line from Ploshchad Sverdlova (now Teatralnaya) to Zavod imeni Stalina (now Avtozavodskaya).

It clearly manifests the constructive essence and, as with Russian temples, the clearness of the working shape" As Dushkin's wife revived, the design of the station required considerable creative efforts from the author: "I remember well how the project of station «ZIS» [Zavod imeni Stalina] was developed.

While going down by the escalator, the columns appear one by one and then as if combine in common sounding - as the finale of the cadence brought to key"[5] This station on the Ring Line, 40 meters deep, was Moscow's first employment of stained glass, a technology previously associated with Roman Catholic church and thus deemed unacceptable in Soviet architecture.

According to Dushkin's wife, the architect proposed stained glass and actually travelled to Riga to inspect Latvian workshops before the war [6](i.e. between August, 1940 and June, 1941).

Dushkin and his workshop designed railway stations to replace the war losses; unlike Mayakovskaya, these are true examples of heavyweight Stalinist architecture.

In November 1955, Dushkin's railroad terminals became a lightning rod of Nikita Khrushchev's famous decree "On liquidation of excesses in construction...", which spelled the end of Stalinist architecture.

Kropotkinskaya metro station
Ploshchad Revolyutsii metro station
Mayakovskaya metro station
Avtozavodskaya metro station