Yekaterinburg

Brief Information

Yekaterinburg did not grow up around a kremlin or a market square, but around a metallurgical plant on the Iset. The day the factory hammers were launched in 1723 is considered the city’s birth date, so its center can conveniently be read as an industrial scheme that gradually became a large city. The river, dam, and straight streets here are not a backdrop, but the original components of its layout.

Its position on a low-lying part of the Middle Urals made the city a natural passage between European Russia and Siberia. As a result, the factory settlement quickly became a transport and administrative hub. Later, Sverdlovsk sharply expanded its industrial role, and in the 1920s and 1930s turned into one of the main centers of Constructivism: more than 140 such buildings have survived in the city.

What to Notice First

It is worth comparing the Iset, the City Pond Dam, and the direction of Lenin Avenue. In the early plan, the dam and the river formed mutually perpendicular axes; the settlement’s main road crossed the dam, while the other streets ran perpendicular to it. In this way, industrial logic became the urban grid.

In the Historical Square, it is important to remember that it occupies the site of the ironworks from which Yekaterinburg began. The water tower of the 1880s adds another layer: this half-wooden structure served the railway workshops, showing the transition from a factory town to a transport hub. Constructivist buildings — the Chekists’ Town, Dynamo, the UZTM water tower, Medgorodok — continue this line on a Soviet scale: once again, the city was building not individual facades, but new types of life and work.