The history of the Kiev metro can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, when the first attempts were made to design it. But those plans were destined to remain only on paper. The first stations of the Kiev metro opened to passengers only in 1960. A radical reconstruction of the transport infrastructure of the city was an integral part of the project to restore the city, which was badly damaged during the Great Patriotic War and German occupation. Kiev metro stations were built, mainly at the expense of the Union budget, with the involvement of specialists and engineering technologies from the Moscow school of design and construction of the metro. Kiev metro was the third in the country after Moscow and Leningradsky.
Schematic diagram of the Kiev metro
More than half a century has passed since the opening of the first metro line. Without this type of transport, it is already impossible to imagine modern Kiev. The map, the metro stations on which are distributed fairly evenly both in the center of the city and in its outskirts, makes it possible to verify the correctness of the decisions made in the post-war period according to the Kyiv metro concept. There are ten administrative districts in the city, and metro can be reached in any of them. The project initially implied its further adjustment as the city developed along both banks of the Dnieper. The Kiev metro stations, according to the original scheme, were located only on three lines. Further development of the Kiev metro is carried out both to continue these three lines, and to create new ones. Currently, the Kiev metro has five lines, one of which is being actively built, and the other is in the design stage.
Architectural and engineering features of the Kiev metro
The decisive influence on the look of the Kiev metro stations was exerted by the era in which they were designed and built. In them, one can easily find features of similarity with the architectural solutions of the Moscow and Leningrad metro stations. However, there are a number of features, one of which is the almost complete absence in Kiev of ground entrance halls of metro stations. Most often, the exit to the city from the metro is combined with an underground passage through the street.
The lines have areas of both very deep laying and those running along the surface of the earth. In the decorative decoration of station interiors, all trends and trends in the history of Soviet architecture are clearly traced. To observe all this, an attentive viewer will need a map of Kiev with metro stations. It is enough to find out in which years these or those stations were built. And it’s possible, as in a museum, to observe the post-war clumsy splendor with elements of Ukrainian national folklore, and the subsequent “struggle against architectural excesses”, and a more organic and thoughtful stylistics of recent decades. But the metro in the
capital of Ukraine continues to be built and designed. What will be the architectural appearance of the stations on the two new lines of the Kiev metro, we can see in the near future.