English 
Български 
简体中文(中国)
Postwar SOFIA
Postwar SOFIA West
Discover the unknown ‘soc’* architecture of Sofia
1. Zone B-5
Experimental housing estate, completed in 1985 and planned for 17 452 residents to live in 4 987 units. Designed as an alternative to the standard prefab housing estates. In the 1990s, Zone B-5 dilapidated to extremes, almost becoming a ghetto, but today the area enjoys a strong pop-cultural appeal.
2. Gasstroymontazh
Administrative building with distinct postwar modernist features of the International Style. The materials, scale and rhythm employed are characteristic of buildings of the late socialist period.
3. Shipka Hotel
Hotel of the Ministry of Defence. It represents one of the two most widespread types of urban hotels that were popular in the second half of the 20th century - a horizontal slab, which is the opposite of the other typology of a tall modernist box.
4. Rodina Hotel
An exemplary hotel designed А Touristproekt, a state design organisation, completed between 1964 and 1984. It is a focal point in Sofia’s skyline and was the tallest building in the city until the second decade of the 21st century.
5. Bulgarian Trade Unions Headquarters
A 22-story administrative high-rise with a horizontal 3-story base, completed in 1978. The towers were built top to bottom around a monolithic core, which was an innovative technology in Bulgaria at the time of construction. The second high-rise on the same base, which was part of the original project, was never constructed.
6. Two Apartment Blocks
A group of two apartment blocks completed in the early 1950s, designed by the same architect, Neno Yamantiev. They represent two distinctly different, but equally unorthodox, interpretations of Stalinist architecture of the period.
7. Park of the National Palace of Culture
A park and a square at the same time, which together with the building of the National Palace of Culture form a complex organism connected on multiple levels. The central axially symmetrical composition branches out in a number of picturesque areas on the periphery, including a kid-friendly playground.
8. The National Palace of Culture
Sofia’s ‘Palace of People’ demonstrates the new cultural policies of late socialism – in search of the national and towards a synthesis of all arts. It was built for the occasion of the 1300th anniversary of the founding of the Bulgarian state, celebrated in 1981.