Kira Kartasheva is an architect, professor of Moscow Institute of Architecture, specialist in social problems of mass housing design, leading specialist in social porgy of housing at TsNIIEP Zhilishcha. 

Kira Kartasheva was born in Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) in a family of architects and engineers. In 1954 she graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute and started her doctorate. In 1957 transferred her doctoranture to the architectural faculty of Czech Technical University. She defended her PhD “Architecture of buildings of large spans” in Prague in 1959 in Czech language.

In 1959 Kartasheva started working in NIIEP (Scientific-research institute for experimental design, since 1963 – TsNIIEP Zhilishcha) in Moscow – the major Soviet design institute for mass housing. Since the early 1960s, Kartasheva participated in major projects of the institute, among them, the design of social facilities in Akademgorodok, design of the city-centers of Togliatti and Naberezhnye Chelny, design of a diamond-mining town Udachnaia, located beyond the polar circle in Yakut republic, as well as the development of new residential building types.

At the institute, Kartasheva’s field of expertise was urban sociology and sociology of housing. In 1968 she became the head of sociological research in TsNIIEP Zhilishcha, “the sector of sociological research and prospective housing problems”. Soon, it grew into one of the biggest research departments of the institute. While sociology, as an independent discipline, was largely banned in the USSR, such departments in a design institute provided an important nische for this area of research. In TsNIIEP, Kartasheva carried out surveys of the population in newly constructed residential districts, collected data on the use of housing and urban facilities which served as an important source of feedback for architects. Kartasheva was one of the few researchers whose work helped establish a discipline of urban sociology in the USSR – “the first generation of urban sociologists in the USSR”, in her own words. Establishing a new research discipline involved building a collective, establishing contacts with cooperating institutes and enterprises, and agreeing on a terminology. Kartasheva cooperated with major sociologists at that time, among them Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Rozalina Ryvkina. 

In 1988, she received a professorship at the Moscow Institute of Architecture where she taught the course “Social Foundations of Architectural Design”, a course she continues to teach in MARKhI even today, more than forty years later. 15 post-graduate students defended their dissertations under the supervision of Kartashova. 

Research of Kira Kartasheva was reflected in multiple publications, among them “Prospects for the development of housing in the USSR” and “Living cell in the future”.

Here you can find the profile of Kira Kartasheva published in Arkhitektura SSSR (March 1979).