The House of Soviets is a building located in the city of Kaliningrad in the Kaliningrad Oblast, an exclave of

Russia. The local people often refer to it as the "buried robot" because its appearance resembles the head
of a giant robot which is buried in the ground up to the shoulders. The chief architect was Yulian L.
Shvartsbreim. It was built on the original territory of Königsberg Castle.
The building is located in the central square of Kaliningrad, at the intersection of Shevchenko and Lenin
Avenue. Although is widely claimed that the House of Soviets was built directly on top of the Königsberg
castle, the actual building stands to the east, on a former castle moat.
Königsberg Castle was severely damaged during the bombing of Königsberg in World War II. The city came
under the control of the USSR after the war and the Soviet authorities opted not to preserve the castle
remains, claiming it was a centre of fascism. Whatever remained of the castle was blown up and cleared
away between 1967 and 1969.
The vision for the redevelopment was heavily influenced by works of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer,
specifically the development of the Brazilian city Brasília. There were two architectural competitions for
the redevelopment of the area, in 1964 and 1974, which included design firms from Moscow, Leningrad,
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The design chosen was by the Kiev-born architect Yulian L. Shvartsbreim who
was a laureate of the USSR state prize and well respected within Soviet Russia, and his studio TsNIIEP.
Construction started in 1970 on what was intended to be the central administration building of the
Kaliningrad Oblast. The building is situated to the east of the former castle, near the former castle moat.
Placing the heavy concrete structure on top of the ruins resulted in structural problems, not to mention
that the castle itself was built on marshy soil. The foundations proved to be inadequate to support the
original 28-story plan and only 21 stories were completed. Continuation of development was stopped in
1985 after the regional Party Committee lost interest in the project and ran out of funding. In 1992 there
was an attempt to finish the construction with Danish funding but it was abandoned. The building was left
unfinished for many years.
In 2005, for Kaliningrad's 60th and Königsberg's 750th anniversary, also marked by visit by Russian
President Vladimir Putin, the exterior was painted light blue and windows were installed. The new color
diminished the sense of brooding mass, but some criticized this update as a modern Potemkin façade. The
interior remained unfinished and unusable.
A German consultant recommended tearing down the entire structure and building anew as cheaper and
safer than attempting to repair and finish the existing shell.[citation needed] While some consider the
building to be one on the worst examples of post-war Soviet architecture, the House of Soviets was seen
by others as a good example of Brutalist architecture, particularly before its pastel paint job.