Seven Sisters
— — the spires the city raised after the war.
Not only on a wall.
“The seven towers Moscow raised in a single decade after the war. Begun in 1947 to mark the city's 800th anniversary, finished by 1957. Moscow State University at Vorobyovy Gory, the Hotel Ukraina on the river, the Foreign Ministry on Smolenskaya, the apartments at Kotelnicheskaya. Seven spires rising above the post-war city, each topped originally with a tiered red star. — from the studio
Seven Sisters, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Seven Sisters, called vysotki in Russian, are seven Stalinist skyscrapers across central Moscow, designed in a unified Socialist Classicism and built between 1947 and 1957 to mark the city's 800th anniversary. The tallest is the main building of Moscow State University on the Sparrow Hills, 240 metres including its spire, the tallest building in Europe at completion. The others sit on river bends and major squares: the Hotel Ukraina, the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment apartments, the Kudrinskaya Square building, the Hotel Leningradskaya, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Smolenskaya Square, and the Red Gates administrative building.
Each tower is a steel and reinforced-concrete frame faced in limestone, ceramic block, and ornamental terracotta, with spires sheathed in stainless steel and topped originally with a five-pointed star. The architects, including Lev Rudnev, Arkady Mordvinov, and Mikhail Posokhin, drew on American Art Deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and on Russian baroque tower forms. An eighth tower, the never-built Zaryadye Administrative Building, would have completed the ring. Its foundations were used decades later for the Hotel Rossiya, demolished in 2006, and the site is now Zaryadye Park.
Construction began on 7 September 1947, the city's 800th anniversary, with the simultaneous laying of foundations across all eight planned sites. The Hotel Leningradskaya opened first, in 1954. Moscow State University and the Hotel Ukraina followed in 1953 and 1957. Stalin died in March 1953, mid-program. The cathedral-scale ornament was scaled back on the buildings finished after his death. The towers shaped a decade of Soviet civic architecture exported to Warsaw, Bucharest, and Riga, where smaller Sister-style buildings still stand.