Erich Mendelsohn's Red Banner Factory and Saint Petersburg's Industrial Architecture

This article describes one of the major monuments of 1920s Russian architecture, Erich Mendelsohn's Red Banner factory, which the German architect designed for the Leningrad Textile Trust based on his successful factory designs in Weimar Germany. Shtiglits describes the influence that this iconic building had on later industrial architecture in Leningrad, then analyzes present plans to develop housing on the factory site, which will entail only the preservation of the factory power plant, as other, more imaginative schemes, including a proposal to transform the complex into an "art factory," have faltered.