Shukhov Tower — industrial heritage site
savethetower · CC BY-SA 4.0

Shukhov Tower

  • 2 min read
  • 55.717° N 37.611° E

Interesting facts

  • Shukhov's original 350-metre design would have stood 15 metres taller than the Eiffel Tower while weighing about 2,200 tonnes, less than a third as much.
  • The tower was ordered by a decree signed by Lenin on 30 July 1919, and its 240 tonnes of steel came from military stocks by his personal order.
  • Just five wooden winches did all the lifting, and they were moved up section by section as the tower rose.
  • Shukhov devised the hyperboloid structure in 1890, aiming for the greatest strength from the least material.
  • The prototype tower from the 1896 Nizhny Novgorod exhibition was bought by the industrialist Yury Nechaev-Maltsov.
  • Public excitement over the tower helped inspire Aleksey Tolstoy's science fiction novel The Garin Death Ray.
  • The Centre Pompidou in Paris used the tower as the emblem of its exhibition L'art de l'ingénieur in 1997.
  • The tower appears in Amor Towles's novel A Gentleman in Moscow, where a character praises it as a thing of beauty.
  • The tower has never undergone a full overhaul, and routine repainting stopped in the late 1980s, leaving its joints exposed to corrosion.

Why it is worth it

Seen from below, the Shukhov Tower is a net of straight steel bars that somehow adds up to a curved, tapering silhouette — six stacked hyperboloid sections, each one a lattice of rods twisting in opposite directions, rising 160 metres above the south of Moscow. Built in the last years of the Russian Civil War, when steel was desperately short, it is one of the landmark structures of early twentieth-century engineering.

Its designer, Vladimir Shukhov, had unveiled the world's first hyperboloid lattice tower at the All-Russia Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896 and went on to build some two hundred such towers, including water towers and the Adziogol Lighthouse near Kherson, before he was asked to build a radio mast for the new Soviet state, which needed a station to relieve the overloaded Khodynka transmitter. His first scheme called for a tower of 350 metres; shortages of steel forced him to cut it to 160 metres, and the finished structure used only about 240 tonnes of metal. Construction ran from 1920 to 1922 without cranes or external scaffolding: each section was assembled on the ground inside the one below and then hoisted into position with wooden winches, so the tower grew upwards like a telescope. The sixth and last section was fixed in place in February 1922.

The tower stands on Shabolovka Street, several kilometres south of the Kremlin, and for eighty years it served as a broadcasting mast. Broadcasting from the tower ended in 2002. Years of corrosion led to proposals to dismantle it in the 2010s, but a public campaign to save it followed, and in 2014 the Russian Ministry of Culture ruled out demolition and the city placed a preservation order on the structure.

Getting there

The tower stands at Shabolovka Street 37 in Moscow, about 2.3 km from the Zamoskvorechye district and a few kilometres south of the city centre. The nearest major airport by straight-line distance is Sheremetyevo International Airport (SVO), about 31.5 km away; Moscow's other airports, Vnukovo and Domodedovo, also serve the city.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Moscow Oblast 13The Most Beautiful Places in Russia 73The Most Remarkable Industrial Heritage Sites 8

From the encyclopaedia

The Shukhov Radio Tower, also known as the Shabolovka Tower, is a broadcasting tower deriving from the Russian avant-garde in Moscow designed by Vladimir Shukhov. The 160-metre-high (520 ft) free-standing steel diagrid structure was built between 1920 and 1922, during the Russian Civil War.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

55.71722, 37.61139per Wikidata