Last stop Avtobusniki

Located a few dozen kilometres from Moscow, Beryozka-6 (or "Birch-6") is a typical Soviet cottage settlement with an equally typical Soviet name. If you ever have the chance to visit the place, you'll find yourself immersed in a scene worthy of John Carpenter's or Lloyd Kaufman's dystopia. Every plot in the settlement accordingly accommodates a Hungarian-made Ikarus 280 bus converted for housing, equipped with firewood storage, kitchens, bathrooms and saunas. Greenhouses have been built from bus windows, and gardening tools made from spare parts. Some of the buses are topped with gable roofs, and some have running water, while others are covered with plastic siding and camouflaged as garden cottages. This example of "stone-age high tech" makes an explicit nod to a number of associated themes: the functionalist identification of architecture with technology, the standardisation of housing, and informal design or DIY architecture.

Under Stalin, dachas were allocated to representatives of the Communist Party's scientific and cultural elite. They were typically large plots of land in scenic locations, built together with a cottage of standard design. The next stage in the history of dachas came with Khrushchev's rule during the 1950s and '60s, when the plots were issued to employees of various enterprises and factories, and the settlements were kitted out according to profession. The Stalinist format was reduced—standard plots became as much as ten times smaller—while the houses were usually built by the owners themselves according to strictly limited designs.

In the 1980s, plots were handed out in large numbers, including considerable portions of former arable land, and their size reached an all-time minimum of 600 square metres. The dacha essentially became a country home for city folk, a second house generally used in the summer, while in the winter many of these settlements were left as empty areas scattered with gloomy, monotonous cottages.

The Beryozka-6 settlement was founded in 1989, at the twilight of the Soviet era. Originally it was known as "Avtobusniki" (which literally translates as "the bus people"), because plots were distributed among employees of the bus fleet in Moscow's Yasenevo district. As the year associated with the planned economy's final defeat, 1989 was one of the toughest in the Soviet Union's history. To help dacha owners, the managers of the bus depot decided to give each worker half a written-off Ikarus 280.

These buses were transported to their new destination and became the centrepieces of dacha life, acting as homes during the construction of the main cottages. However, once the dacha cottages had been built, the problem of what to do with the buses remained. Who would take them away? And where would they take them? Ultimately, dacha owners had to put up with the vehicles' presence on their plots.

In a sense, these Ikaruses echo the fate of the renowned Soviet five-storey residential buildings, the first examples of modular housing in Russia. In the 1950s, it was assumed that these five-storey blocks would be temporary structures, designed to offer a quick fix to the problem of housing shortages. They were only supposed to be Soviet people's homes until the onset of real Communism, i.e. for a period of 20 to 25 years.

To paraphrase Le Corbusier, they were in essence "time machines for living in". But the years passed and the heralded Communism did not arrive, yet the five-storey blocks are still standing. Nevertheless, in the case of Avtobusniki the situation is slightly different. The dacha owners achieved their original goal in that their cottages were built and the "bright future" arrived. But they are still unable to dispose of the mythological Icaruses, the cocoons from which their future hatched.

The reference to Le Corbusier here is no coincidence. In his famous 1923 manifesto Vers une architecture, Le Corbusier compares the work of architects and engineers, and falls on the side of the latter, making a number of controversial statements. Firstly, he writes: "The aeroplane is a product of high selection... The mechanical carries within it the economic factor that selects. The house is a machine for living in." He went on to state: "If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the house, and look at the question from a critical and objective point of view, we arrive at the 'House-Machine'."

Le Corbusier thus attempts to formulate the idea of technical selection as the image of Darwin's natural selection. In this system, the "species" and "subspecies" of living creatures equate to the various standards and types of buildings. If for antiquity the "Parthenon is a product of selection applied to an established standard", in our time, according to Le Corbusier, the crown of evolution is the "House-Machine". The history of the Soviet dachas parodies this evolution almost literally: from the dinosaurs of Stalinist dachas, bypassing standard postwar-era cottages, to the village of Avtobusniki.

Together with their dachas, the inhabitants have also evolved. If the first typical dacha inhabitants were professors or generals, and then employees and factory workers, nowadays the ideal occupant of Avtobusniki could be the robot Bender from Futurama, in the guise of a Soviet pensioner. Sergei Kulikov is an architecture historian and researcher