Moldovagaz and Chisinau Municipal Water HQ

The seven-floor building on Albisoara Street narrows from top to bottom, its upper floors projecting beyond the lower ones in a reversed pyramid form that Leonid Voronin also used for the Botanica District County Government Building completed a year later. Two prominent vertical elements bisect the facade at the centre, rising the full height of the structure and reading as pillars holding the mass above the ground. The glazed transparent ground floor reinforces this impression. Above it, the first floor is clad in rosy porous limestone; the remainder of the building is grey-white cement, with the surfaces of the two central vertical elements covered in cast concrete slabs with a repeating geometric pattern derived from the standard PO-2M panels used across the USSR. Voronin completed the building in 1986 for two tenants occupying equal halves: Apa-Canal Chișinău, the city's water, sewage, and central heating provider operating since 1892, and MoldovaGaz. The inverted pyramid raised on pilotis was a recurring motif in brutalist architecture internationally, with Boston City Hall among its most prominent examples. The Chișinău version is considerably more modest in scale and material ambition, a consequence of the budget and technical constraints under which architects in the USSR routinely operated. The building looks, from a distance, more like a research institute than a utility company headquarters, which says something about the aspirations encoded in its form.