Stefan Nikolaevich Polupanov

Stefan Nikolayevich Polupanov was born in 1904 near the Kupyansk-Uzlovaya station, into a railway worker's family. As a teenager, he painted revolutionary posters for streets, clubs, and barracks; in 1920, he entered the architectural department of the Kharkiv Construction and Art Institute. He arrived in Uzbekistan in the second half of the 1920s as one of those young architects who brought constructivism here, and started out as the head of the design bureau under the Andijan District Executive Committee. The early projects were designed for a different climate: pure geometric volumes, reinforced concrete, large glass surfaces. In the design of the Shark cinema, he placed a huge advertisement for Eisenstein's film The General Line, and in the State Bank design - a corner glass cylinder. From 1929, he worked at Uzgosproekt in Samarkand. The largest work of those years was the first culture and recreation park in the Uzbek SSR, in Andijan, and in a small canteen building he tried for the first time to introduce elements of local architecture, bringing them down to poster-like geometry. In Tashkent in 1931, he built the Government House on Red Square, with two identical flat portals protruding from the general volume. At the same time, he designed a residential complex for OGPU employees. People got used to calling it a "commune house", but an entire neighborhood was conceived: a hotel-type building with one-room cells, a club, a kindergarten, and a kitchen-factory that was supposed to feed neighboring houses as well. Only the hotel-type building and the kitchen-factory were built. The building itself, according to a 1984 assessment, was a prototype of future complex houses with extensive public services, "but this experiment was clearly premature." Neither the Government House in its original form nor the neighborhood buildings have survived to the present day.

In the late 1930s, Polupanov moved away from constructivism. Starting in 1935, he systematically measured and documented monuments and folk housing in Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Termez, and published albums on the architectural monuments of Samarkand and Khiva. Based on this material, he built his "new style", and his main creation became the Uzbek SSR pavilion at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow: a closed volume with ornamented walls, an inner courtyard, and in the center a wooden rotunda-gazebo under an openwork star-shaped dome. Doctor of Architecture Yu. Yaralov wrote that among the many pavilions, this one "stood out for its individual character". In 1946, a closed competition was held for the reconstruction of the government center of Tashkent, the future Lenin Square. In the first round, not a single project passed, while in the second round, the first prize was awarded to A. Babakhanov, S. Polupanov, and V. Volchek. Their square was conceived with water: a canal ran around the government buildings, a huge hauz stood on the square, and a park was laid out around the buildings. Polupanov was a deputy of the Tashkent City Council, a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Architecture, and an Honored Worker of Arts of the Uzbek SSR. He died in 1957.