Among the engineering problems that mankind had to solve, there are those about which one can say one thing - no, it doesn’t happen, it’s impossible! This may refer to moving buildings to new places. After all, the house must be very delicately torn off from the foundation, lifted, moved and managed not to be destroyed! How builders made houses move and what technologies accompanied this difficult, but still amazing process.

The builders of the young country had to not only change the face of the city, improve the living conditions of the population, but also transform the streets of the city, improve the transport environment of the capital. The streets that had developed in previous centuries did not meet the requirements of the new time. The increased traffic flow required the creation of new highways by expanding the old streets. The obsolete buildings that interfered with the new transport arteries were subject to demolition, however, it was decided to save some of the houses and move them deeper into the quarters. Up to this point, there were already known cases of the transfer of houses, both abroad and in the Russian Empire, however, this time a more massive moving was coming. In this regard, a special office was created to develop methods and projects for the transfer of buildings.

At first glance, the essence of the method is quite simple: having the structures preliminarily strengthened, the building must be cut off from the existing foundation, mechanisms for moving should be brought under its walls, and transferred to a new foundation. It sounds simple, however, as always during construction, there are a lot of nuances. The condition of the building's structures, its total weight, the distance and obstacles that it must overcome when moving, and even the presence or absence of residents at the time of the move - all this should be taken into account when developing the movement project. The weight of the first houses moved to the USSR ranged from several to fifteen hundred tons. The durations of such movements ranged from 25 days. Subsequently, engineers were able to move buildings weighing up to 23,000 tons in just one night.

The move speed record is only 41 minutes. We are talking about, perhaps, the most famous building "moved" in our country - the house of the Moscow City Council. The building was transported with a mass gathering of Muscovites and the press, without interrupting the work of the builders. An ideological component played a significant role in the decision to move this building in this way - so great was the desire to demonstrate to the West the capabilities of Soviet engineers. And they did manage to do it, this case was included in the Guinness Book of Records. There are several other cases of buildings being moved in our country in the post-war period, but over the past 30 years there have been no such large-scale projects. Today, such technologies for moving houses are used in the reconstruction of buildings, when there is a need to deepen the underground part up to the construction of several underground levels. In such cases, as in the beginning of the last century, the existing walls of the building are cut off from the old foundation, the jacks are brought up and then they are supported on the newly erected structures.

The need to change the location of the building on the city map in the modern world may arise for the same reasons as before - the construction or expansion of roads, the construction of new structures. Most often, a decision is now made to demolish the old fund, it makes sense to preserve only buildings of historical value, and today they are increasingly being reconstructed rather than demolished. Moving modern buildings is certainly possible, but their weight is much higher - hundreds of thousands of tons. It is difficult to imagine the situation and the technology with which it will be possible to move such a building. And most modern buildings are being built with a two- or three-level underground part, which cannot be moved.

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