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Moscows Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was demolished in December 1931. In its place now stands a new Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

The intermittent period saw a stupendous construction planned for the site: the Palace of the Soviets, a 400-metre futuristic clash of neoclassicism and the avant garde, topped with a 100-metre-tall statue of Vladimir Lenin was set to occupy the area. If realised, it would have been the worlds tallest building for its time, topping the Empire State Building with its base alone. Lenins authoritative gaze and outstretched arm would have disappeared into the clouds.

An international design competition took place to establish what the vast congressional temple, communicating communisms triumph, might look like. It saw some 160 Soviet and foreign architects and their teams among them Walter Gropius, Moisei Ginzburg and Le Corbusier engage their efforts to establish an image that could conquer the spot. Jewish-Soviet architect Boris Iofan won.

The palace was part of a 1930s master plan to reconstruct Moscow. An offensive against the old city, it would have included new monuments, large-scale housing plans and elite residences, as well as attempts to straighten roadways and establish public parks.

The Soviets utopian ideals, and their commitment to the vision of socialism and its accompanying aesthetics, were a double-edged sword: Stalins state was viciously territorial over them, often at the expense of inhabitants, and many plans never saw fruition. Utopia often stayed mired in the realm of utopia.

And the vision of the Palace of the Soviets remained just that: a vision. Despite this, it is still one of the most notorious buildings in Moscow, and along with Tatlins Tower (1919), one of the nations most famous imagined projects.

But the city envisaged several more that could have permanently changed the face of Moscow as we know it today. An exhibit opening at the Design Museum on 15 March is set to document the architectural plans of the 1920s and 30s, as well as the propaganda surrounding them.

Narkomtiazhprom (NKTP) or the Peoples Commissariat of Heavy Industry was one such projected symbol for the new city. The subject of a 1934 architectural competition (Stalin seemed to enjoy these), it was set to stand on the north east edge of Red Square, and its realisation would have led to the destruction of both the Gum Shopping Centre and Moscow State Historical Museum, completely changing the geography of the landmark area.

Ivan Fomin's plan for theNarkomtiazhprom.

Some 12 designers in total competed for the project, among them, Ivan Fomin and Konstantin Melnikov. To one architect, Ivan Leonidov, this change was fundamental to the project. His design put forward three towers sharing a plinth: one rectangular, one circular, and one simple and strong. It was to be flanked by a staircase from which the proletariat could observe events on the square. He proclaimed that Red Squares landmarks should be subordinate to the structure.

The architecture of Red Square and the Kremlin is a delicate and majestic piece of music. The introduction into this symphony of an instrument so strong in its sound and so huge in scale is permissible only on condition that the new instrument will lead the orchestra, he wrote in his explanatory notes. The project fizzled out after a third round, and Leonidov only ever managed to construct a hillside staircase as part of a sanatorium in the southern city of Kislovodsk, in the north Caucasus.

A city for the people also needed people to venerate: heroes of communism. In 1934, Soviet architect and city planner Dmitry Chechulin intended to build a symbol honouring Soviet pilots on Belorusskaya Ploshchad, where one of Moscows main metro stations now stands.

The unrealised Aeroflot building was a tribute to those who helped to rescue the crew of steam ship Chelyuskin. In 1933 the steamer set sail from Murmansk to traverse the Northern Sea Route with the intention of reaching the Pacific Ocean. En route, it became mired in ice fields in the Chukchi Sea and was crushed and sank the following February.

All but one crew member survived and escaped onto the ice, and a complex aerial mission was required to ensure the success of the rescue operation, given the absence of landing space. Its success led to the pilots glory.

The Aeroflot building was never constructed. However, the design in strikingly similar to that of the present-day Russian White House, for which Chechulin was also a co-architect as the project took off in the 1960s.

An Arch of Heroes to stand as a monument to the war dead was also put forward by Soviet starchitect Leonid Pavlov in the early 1940s. A much smaller wooden recreation of the design was displayed among other temporary arches, on one of the citys main thoroughfares on City Day in 2015.

The Communal House of the Textile Institute in 2013. Image: Panoramio/Wikimedia Commons.

Ideas for communal housing projects were fundamental to the Soviet regime; the pinnacle of socialism saw different families sharing buildings, and facilities, having only their rooms as private space. Some key structures remain in place today in various conditions although the Narkomfin experiment for workers from the Peoples Commisariat of Finance and the Communal House of the Textile Institute envisaged in the late 1920s have both seen better days.

And some never made it. One of the first projected communal housing projects was put forward by Nikolai Ladovsky, who rejected a focus on sheer technicality and function for a focus on space and form he was a rationalist rather than a constructivist. Most important in them will be the amount of intelligence, he reportedly said.

One such idea, conceived in 1920, was a conglomeration of residences spiralling upwards, not unlike Tatlins Tower. Ladovsky was drawn towards a trend in contemporary psychology called psychotechnics, creating a laboratory for students in 1926 to research visual perception and architecture and how it could contribute to organising the psychology of the masses. Such ideas fell out of favour in the late 1930s, but before then, he also managed to put forward a proposal for a new industrial town of 25,000 called Kostino.

The Design Museum exhibit will touch on the psychological elements of Soviet architecture too, documenting El Lissitzkys plans for Cloud Irons in 1925. A contemporary of Ladovsky, he developed designs for eight such structures horizontal skyscrapers but with vertical supports as he deemed moving vertically unnatural for humankind.

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