Hotel "International"

The task of design and construction of the International hotel was entrusted to Hryhoriy  Yanovytsky, the young and ambitious architect. He was an admirer and adept of constructivism, a modern avant-garde style in architecture. According to the project, the hotel would offer rooms of different classes of rooms, marked by the letters A, B, G, F, D, E, C, I. There were comfortable halls on each floor. On the ground floor, next to the lobby, there was a café by area of ​​468 square meters. The main hall and reading rooms were located on the first floor. The project entailed a restaurant for 350-400 guests and a banquet hall for 50-60 guests. The restaurant would serve up to 2 500 meals a day and had a huge terrace overlooking Dzerzhinsky Square. The rapid pace construction of this hotel was supervised by the government.  The launch of the first building was scheduled for the anniversary of the October Revolution, on November 6, 1934. That year, 327 rooms were launched. However, the interior works were completed in 1936. This date is considered to be the date of the building's launch. The hotel had a total of 495 rooms. In 1937, architect Yanovytsky won the Grand Prix for the interior design of the International Hotel at the World Exhibition of Arts and Technology in Paris.  During the Second World War, the hotel buildings were damaged. So, after the war, Yanovytsky, who returned from the evacuation, was proposed to renovate the building. He declined the offer to work in Moscow and lived in Kharkiv for the rest of his life. From 1947 he worked as an associate professor at the Kharkiv Institute of Civil Engineering. At the time of the hotel's reconstruction, constructivism was already banned in the USSR, so he had to renovate the building using classic forms and techniques. The building was newly decorated by classical architraves, cornice brackets, figured friezes, and rusticated plinth. However, the constructivist design of the building was preserved. The hotel was renamed "Kharkiv" and once again took the leading position in the hotel industry in Kharkiv.