The Krasny Treugolnik ("Red Triangle") Factory Complex

Between the Obvodny Canal, Staro-Petergofsky Prospekt and Rosenstein and Ivan Chernykh Streets sprawls the complex of the former Krasny Treugolnik (Red Triangle) rubber factory — one of St Petersburg's largest monuments of industrial architecture. This ensemble of around a hundred and fifty production and ancillary buildings took shape gradually from the mid-19th century onward and occupies a site of about 34 hectares, a substantial part of which now stands abandoned.

The enterprise was founded in 1859 by the Hamburg merchant Ferdinand Krausskopf, who saw in the Russian climate a promising market for rubber footwear. Together with partners, he opened a galoshes factory on the Obvodny Canal under the firm 'TRARM'; the company's charter was approved on 11 March 1860, a date regarded as marking the start of the enterprise's operations. Production grew rapidly: while around 180 people worked there in 1861, by the end of the decade that number had grown several times over. By the 1890s the firm had bought up neighbouring workshops, including the 'Mackintosh' rubber works, and in 1908 it changed its name to 'Treugolnik' (Triangle).

Most of the buildings were erected in the unplastered brick style typical of late-19th-century industrial construction: austere façades with large window openings gave the workshops maximum natural light. The ensemble was designed by the architects Roman Genrikhsen, Robert Gedike and Oskar von Witte, and in the 1910s some of the new warehouses and workshops were given reinforced-concrete frames to designs by the engineers Krzhizhanovsky and Serk. At the same time a reinforced-concrete bridge was built over the Tarakanovka River, linking the factory's old and new grounds.

During the First World War the factory became one of the main suppliers of rubber for aviation and motor transport, and after the revolution and nationalisation in 1922 it received the new name Krasny Treugolnik (Red Triangle). It was here, in 1930, under the chemist Sergei Lebedev, that the country's first tyre made of synthetic rubber was produced. The Great Patriotic War inflicted serious damage on the complex: production was mothballed, workers evacuated, and the site subjected to repeated shelling and bombing that destroyed more than twenty buildings. Reconstruction work stretched from 1946 to 1952.

After the collapse of the USSR the enterprise struggled to modernise and was declared bankrupt in 2002. Today the labyrinth of some hundred and fifty buildings, which residents jokingly call St Petersburg's own 'Bermuda Triangle', is partly occupied by small businesses — workshops, studios and rehearsal spaces — while the abandoned buildings continue to deteriorate. In February 2023 fifty of the complex's buildings and eleven galleries were added to the regional register of protected monuments.

Krasny Treugolnik remains one of the city's largest and most contentious industrial ensembles: on the one hand a genuine monument of pre-revolutionary industrial architecture, on the other a site whose fate remains unresolved, where the question of restoring and repurposing the abandoned workshops has been postponed for decades.