How Soviet modernism built an architecture for research, computation and scholarship.

A tight cluster of postwar research institutes, all within walking distance of each other, each answering the same brief — house a specific field of study — with a distinct architectural idea, from Yakov Belopolsky’s studio and, at the route’s end, Leonid Pavlov’s “House with an Ear.”

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  1. Institute of OceanologyYakov Belopolsky

    Part of the cluster of research institutes built along Nakhimovsky Prospekt in the postwar decades, designed to house the study of the ocean with the same architectural seriousness the Soviet Union gave to space and atomic research.

  2. Central Scientific Medical LibraryYakov Belopolsky, Efim Vulykh, and Lev Misozhnikov

    A library built to hold and circulate the country's medical research literature, part of the science quarter that grew up along Nakhimovsky Prospekt in the 1960s and 1970s.

  3. INIONYakov Belopolsky, Efim Vulykh, and Lev Misozhnikov

    The Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences, built as a library and research center for the social sciences on Nakhimovsky Prospekt, from the same studio responsible for several of its neighboring institutes.

  4. CEMI (House with an Ear)Leonid Pavlov

    The Central Economic Mathematical Institute, built to house the computing machinery and staff behind Soviet economic modeling.