Novosibirsk was built fast during the 1920s and 1930s and the centre preserves an unusually coherent set of Soviet Constructivist buildings — the functional, austere architectural style that dominated early Soviet urban design before Stalin pushed it aside in favour of the monumental classical style. The cluster around Krasniy Prospekt and Lenin Square includes the Gosbank building by Andrey Kryachkov, the Business House, the Aeroflot House, and several other institutional buildings from the same period.
Kryachkov was Novosibirsk's most important architect — he designed more than a dozen of the city's main civic buildings across a 40-year career and his work charts the shift from pre-revolutionary classicism through Constructivism into Stalinist pomposity. Walking between these buildings takes an hour and provides a compressed version of Soviet architectural history. The buildings are in varying states of preservation; the Gosbank building is the best maintained and the most architecturally coherent.