Ekaterinburg

Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Ural, is also considered the capital of constructivism with around 140 constructivist buildings of the 1920s-30s when the city was still known as Sverdlovsk. But it had taken it until 2000 to become fully aware of its architectural avant-garde prominence — and a lot of the new heritage had already been lost by then. Whenever you hear ”Ural”, the first thing that comes to mind is mining. Here, it started long before Peter the Great, but it was during his reign that Nikita Demidov came to develop local mines before starting a whole dynasty of industrialists. One of Sverdlovsk Region's landmarks is the slanting Demidov Tower in Nevyansk that is a good indication of the scale of power and ambition that Ural entrepreneurs possessed at the time.