The history of the Kyiv Metro can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century, when the first attempts were made to design it. But those plans were destined to remain only on paper. The first Kyiv metro stations opened for passengers only in 1960. The radical reconstruction of the city's transport infrastructure was an integral part of the city's restoration project, which was badly damaged during the Great Patriotic War and the German occupation. The stations of the Kyiv Metro 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 Leningrad.
Principal scheme of Kyiv Metro
More than half a century has passed since the opening of the first metro line. It is already impossible to imagine modern Kyiv without this type of transport. The map, where the metro stations are distributed fairly evenly both in the city center and on its outskirts, makes it possible to verify the correctness of the decisions made in the post-war period on the concept of the Kyiv metro. The city has ten administrative districts, and the metro can be reached inany of them. The project initially implied its further adjustment as the city developed along both banks of the Dnieper. Stations of the Kyiv metro, according to the original scheme, were located on only three lines. Further development of the Kyiv metro is carried out both by continuing these three lines and by creating new ones. Currently, the Kyiv Metro has five lines, one of which is under active construction, and the other is under design.
Architectural and engineering features of the Kyiv Metro
The era in which they were designed and built had a decisive influence on how Kyiv metro stations look. In them, one can easily find similarities 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 Kyiv of ground lobbies of metro stations. Most often, the exit to the city from the metro is combined with an underground passage across the street.
The lines have sections of both very deep laying and those running along the surface of the earth. All currents and trends in the history of Soviet architecture can be clearly traced in the decorative finish of the interiors of the stations. To observe all this, an attentive viewer will need a map of Kyiv with metro stations. It is enough to find out in what years certain stations were built. And you can, like in a museum, observe the post-war clumsy splendor with elements of the Ukrainian nationalfolklore, and the subsequent "fight against architectural excesses", and a more organic and thoughtful style 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 Kyiv metro, we can see in the near future.
