Moisei Ginzburg (1892–1946) was a Soviet architect and a leading theorist of Constructivism. Born in Minsk into a Jewish family of architects, he studied at the Milan Academy of Fine Arts and the Riga Polytechnic Institute and moved to Moscow in 1921 to teach at VKhUTEMAS. His book Style and Epoch (1924), often compared to Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture, served as a manifesto for Constructivist architecture. He founded the OSA group of Constructivist architects. After the group was dissolved in the early 1930s he turned to planning and worked mainly in Crimea and Central Asia.
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The Gosstrakh Apartments in Moscow (1927) were the first building in the USSR to apply Le Corbusier's Five Points. The Narkomfin building (1930), designed in 1928 with Ignaty Milinis for staff of the People's Commissariat of Finance, was a "social condenser": a long block of duplex flats on pilotis with a roof garden, linked by a bridge to a block of shared facilities. Le Corbusier acknowledged it as an influence on his Unité d'Habitation. The Government House of the Kazakh ASSR (now KBTU) in Almaty (1931), designed in 1928, followed.
