Bolshoy Ustyinsky Bridge

The Bolshoy Ustyinsky Bridge spans the Moskva River at the point where the Yauza flows into it; the left-bank end of the crossing leads onto Yauzsky Boulevard, the right-bank end onto Sadovnichesky Proezd. The name comes from the old mouth (“ustye”) of the Yauza, which was located here before the riverbed was realigned. The bridge carries the crossing along the axis of the Boulevard Ring and is one of the crossings that define the appearance of the centre between the Kremlin and Taganka. Thanks to the design of its supports, it stands out among neighbouring bridges for the laconic, almost weightless silhouette of its arch, free of massive bank abutments.

The first crossing on this site appeared in 1881: the engineer V. N. Shpeyer designed a three-span arched bridge with spans of 39.5, 44.5 and 39.5 metres. The metal structure rested on stone piers with ice-breakers, and the deck initially carried horse-tram tracks, later replaced by electric tram lines. The present bridge was built in 1936–1938 slightly upstream, to a design by the architects G. P. Golts and D. M. Sobolev, with calculations carried out by the engineer V. M. Vakhurkin. The construction was linked to the opening of the Moscow Canal and plans to extend the Boulevard Ring into Zamoskvorechye under Moscow’s 1935 General Reconstruction Plan; at the same time the course of the Yauza was altered, so that it now flows into the river below the new bridge.

A distinctive feature of the design is the absence of visible bank abutments: the load is carried by two underground foundations, each measuring 58 by 40 metres. The main span is formed by six riveted steel arches with a cross-section of 2.1 by 1 metre and a total weight of over two thousand tonnes, spanning 134 metres with a rise of less than nine metres. The roadway continues as an unbroken ribbon above the embankments. Golts made no attempt to disguise the structure with decoration — the arch is presented openly, and the austere outline of the supports balances the geometry of the metal.

At the design stage, the installation of a beacon tower on one of the abutments was considered, but the idea was abandoned even before construction was completed. At the same time as the Bolshoy Ustyinsky Bridge, the Maly Ustyinsky Bridge across the Yauza was also built, and later, nearby, the Yauzsky Bridge — together forming a cluster of crossings at the confluence of the two rivers. Thanks to the reserve capacity built into it during construction, the bridge remains one of the least congested by traffic among the bridges of the city centre.

In 1997–1999 the bridge was reconstructed to a design by Giprotransmost, with the Italian firm Todini acting as contractor and financing provided by a World Bank loan. The superstructure was replaced with an orthotropic deck, while the load-bearing arches and the underground foundations from the 1930s were preserved unchanged. Today the bridge serves both as a transport crossing and as a viewing point: it offers views of the Kremlin, the high-rise on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment, and Zaryadye Park.

The Bolshoy Ustyinsky Bridge is a rare Moscow example of a crossing where a 1930s engineering solution is presented as an independent architectural image, with no attempt to hide the structure behind a decorative façade. It remains a monument to the pre-war reconstruction of the capital’s embankments and shows how the urban-planning challenges of expanding the Boulevard Ring were solved during the Soviet period.