Housing-Construction Combine

an enterprise that manufactures complete sets of structural components for entirely prefabricated buildings, transports them to the construction site, assembles them and performs adjustment work, and puts the finished buildings into operation.

Housing-construction combines are a new, progressive organizational form of industrial housing construction in the USSR. The production activity of a combine is based on the fact that the usually uncoordinated processes of factory manufacturing of sectional elements, their transportation to the construction site, and the assembly and decorating of buildings, which are performed by separate, independent subdivisions, are combined into a continuous flow that is under a single management. As a rule, a housing-construction combine consists of the production base (plants and shops for large-panel housing construction and reinforced-concrete products), construction and installation departments and sections, and various auxiliary services. Housing-construction combines are equal in economic and legal status to building trusts and are under the jurisdiction of respective ministries or building administrations.

There are several types of housing-construction combines. The most widespread are combines whose production base and construction and assembly subdivisions operate with internal profit-and-loss accounting and a standardized construction budget. Some combines have independent industrial and construction budgets (for example, Housing-construction Combine No. 1 of Glavmosstroi [Central Administration for Residential and Civil Construction in the City of Moscow]). The production technology of enterprises that make up a housing-construction combine is determined by the type of buildings.

The annual production capacity of a housing-construction combine (1970) is 400,000-500,000 sq m of living space, depending on the conditions of construction (scattered housing construction or concentrated construction of residential blocks and mikroraions [neighborhood units]) and on the volume of the construction and installation work. In selecting sites for housing-construction combines, the most expedient distances for convenient transportation of structural members and articles are taken into consideration. The prefabricated elements are usually delivered to the construction site by the housing-construction combine’s own means of transportation or by special motor-vehicle transportation enterprises. In both cases the organization of operations permits the assembly of buildings according to schedules directly from the means of transportation, without transshipment at on-site warehouses.

’As a rule, the housing-construction combine erects the aboveground part of the building. The operations of the so-called zero work cycle, and sometimes decorative and sanitary-engineering work, may be done by specialized organizations that have the status of subcontractors. The finished product of the housing-construction combine is the building that is put into operation, and all financial calculations and appraisal of the work performed by the combine refer to the building. Such a procedure simplifies the accounting system, since there is no necessity for intermediate payments, and also stimulates the yearly rhythm in putting buildings into operation and reduces the length and volume of unfinished construction.

The activity of many housing-construction combines attests to their high economic efficiency. Compared with conventional contractors’ organizations, which construct large-panel prefabricated housing and public buildings, the labor productivity of workers in housing-construction combines is higher, and the expenditure for labor per square meter of living space is an average of 20-23 percent lower; the construction period for the aboveground part of the building is 22-26 percent shorter, the number of workers needed for a comparable volume of construction and assembly work is 20-25 percent lower, and the administrative and economic staff is 15-17 percent smaller.

The first housing-construction combines were founded in 1959 in the Glavleningradstroi (Central Administration for Residential, Civil, and Industrial Construction of the Leningrad City Executive Committee) system (Poliustrovo and Obukhovo). In 1962 they were organized in Moscow, and later in other cities of the USSR. In the first stage of their activity, housing-construction combines built one or two types of apartment houses, which often led to a monotonous and unimaginative building style. The resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR On Measures for Improving the Quality of Civil Residential Construction (1969) recognized the expediency of shifting housing-construction combines to a new technological production basis in order to ensure the production of sets of parts for the construction of residential buildings of various lengths and numbers of stories, with various versions of architectural and planning realizations and exterior decoration.