National Library of the Republic of Moldova

Construction began in 1953 on a standard design by L. Rudnev, adapted for Chișinău by Agasi Ambartsumiyan and Serghey Vasiliev, who were responsible for the facades and interiors. The building was completed several years after the 1955 austerity decree, and the tension is visible: earlier design versions show a more elaborately decorated facade with sculptures in niches and a Renaissance-influenced organisation. What was built is considerably starker, a row of half-columns across a limestone facade with massive entrance doors, its workmanship poor enough that the stone began deteriorating within a decade. A shield on the frontispiece depicting a book bathed in sunrays was cast in concrete. The library was founded in Chișinău in August 1940 using the collection of the Romanian Central Library evacuated across the Prut River, and moved into this building in 1961. It sits on 31 August Street between the Government Hall and the National Concert Hall, both by S. Fridlin, against whose restrained modernism its neoclassicist facade reads as conspicuously out of place.