Guthrum

03 Feb 2018
02:02:15pm

Well, an exaggeration, perhaps. But Stanley Gibbons, Colnect and Wikipedia Commons all identify it differently. Can you do better?

The stamp comes from the 1937 set generally known as "Architecture of the New Moscow" (Gibbons helpfully reminds us that it was issued on the occasion of the 1st Soviet Architectural Congress.)

The five buildings depicted, with the exception of Boris Iofan's well-documented and ultimately doomed Palace of the Soviets, took me some time to track down on the internet. They are all fantastical, skyscraperish constructions, often never finished, or long since demolished, and only one (the former Red Army Theatre) apparently still standing.

Gibbons states that this one is "G.P.O.".

Colnect has "Building - TASS".

Wikipedia has "Telegraph Agency House".

(Stampworld catalogue has nothing.)

Has anyone any better information, perhaps from other catalogues?

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Guthrum

04 Feb 2018
05:43:27am

re: 90% of People Couldn't Identify This Building!!

Thanks for posting that, Charles. It would seem that Colnect and Wikipedia share the Lyapin attribution, which leaves Gibbons slightly out on a limb.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the building depicted on the stamp was either never completed, or since reconstructed, or demolished, as the current TASS building bears no resemblance to it. Sadly the TASS website (while showing its current HQ as 'historic TASS headquarters in Moscow') has no information on the 1937 version (if it ever existed other than as an artist's impression) at all. It remains the only depiction in that set about which I can find no information.

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Guthrum

04 Feb 2018
10:05:17am

re: 90% of People Couldn't Identify This Building!!

And there, in your first link, is the supposed "Telegraph Office"!



This is clearly the one featured on the 5k. and 15k. stamp in the 1937 set, shown on my original post, only now, according to the "Russia Beyond" website, it is the "Dom Knigi", or "Home of the Book".

It is good to have an alternative (and rather better) illustration of this building, and even the name of the architect, Ilya Golosov. His Wikipedia page lists this as an "unrealized draft" of the "OGIZ publishing building, 1932". OGIZ was the Soviet state book and magazine publisher. This is some way away from the philatelic attributions I have already mentioned!

The current Moscow Dom Knigi is nothing like this one, an expansive, low-rise building, and evidently a bookshop rather than a publishing HQ.

Thanks, doomboy, for helping to solve this one - I envisage yet another fruitless missive to Stanley Gibbons' Russian catalogue compilers! (As well as a redesign of my album page...)

(Did we ever establish how Scott describes the building? Maybe they got it right!)

 
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Guthrum

04 Feb 2018
11:03:45am

re: 90% of People Couldn't Identify This Building!!

For the benefit of collectors who use Scott, the appellation "Tchaikovsky Concert Hall" actually refers to the building subsequently established in 1940, using some of the interiors but not the exterior of the Meyerhold Theatre - a project planned by the great director himself and drawn up by the architects Shchusev, Barkhin and Vakhtangov. Work ceased on this project when Vsevelov Meyerhold was arrested and murdered in 1940, a late victim of Stalin's purges.

 
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