House of the Press

The House of the Press on Bauman Street is one of the most recognizable monuments of Constructivism in Kazan, built in the decade before the war as a unified publishing complex for the republic. The building holds the status of a regional cultural heritage site, and today its restored halls house the Nogai Hotel.

In the early 1930s, the leadership of the Tatar ASSR decided to bring the editorial offices of the republic’s leading publications together with a large printing plant under a single roof. The complex was built in 1933–1935 to a competition-winning design by the architect Semyon Pen, a graduate of the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineers, who had already designed the Krasny Proletary printing club in Moscow as well as the House of the Press in Baku; the Kazan building surpassed both in scale and occupied the site of the former Flour Market. In the spring of 1935 the departments of Tatgosizdat moved in, and a new republican printing plant, named after Kamil Yakubov, began operating alongside it.

The complex, intricate in plan, unites blocks of varying height along three streets at once — Bauman, Kavi Najmi, and Profsoyuznaya — with an enclosed courtyard hidden between them; the built-up area measures roughly 140 by 80 meters. The main façade is composed of three parts: two four-story wings flank a recessed central volume with a connecting gallery and loggias above a through passage. The ground floors of the side wings are opened up by a colonnade of round columns spaced just over five meters apart in front of the shop windows of the retail halls, while the load-bearing reinforced-concrete frame is concealed behind brick walls finished in dark-grey stucco with ribbon windows.

For decades the building housed the republic’s book publishing house, Kazan’s largest bookshop, and the board of the Tatarstan Writers’ Union, headed at various times by Kavi Najmi and Musa Jalil; Soviet writers visiting the city gave readings at the Tukay Club on the fifth floor. In 1974 part of the operations moved to a new building on Dekabristov Street, and in 1981 the building was placed on the register of protected monuments. During restoration work in 2012, the bones of an Ice Age mammoth calf, a horse, and a woolly rhinoceros were found in the basement and handed over to the university’s geological museum.

A large-scale reconstruction began in 2012 and cost around 1.2 billion rubles; ahead of the 2013 Summer Universiade, the façade along Bauman Street was the first to be restored, and a five-story ‘Barabus’ parking garage was built on the site of the former printing workshops. In the summer of 2015 the complex reopened as the 167-room Nogai Hotel, and the hall of the former writers’ club was recreated for conferences and meetings, decorated with portraits of Tatar writers.

Today the House of the Press remains a prominent accent in the streetscape of Bauman Street, and the square in front of it, known to locals as ‘Knizhka’ (‘the Book’), still serves as a meeting place for young people. The combination of the austere prewar architectural forms with a modern hotel function makes the building one of the historic center’s points of attraction.