The question before architecture in the Soviet Union of the 1920s was not style but programme: what buildings would replace the church, the manor and the club? The workers' club is one answer to that gap — a collective cultural building run by the unions, holding theatre, library, classroom, sport and assembly together. It had no direct precedent, so its form was not inherited either.

The Rusakov Club, completed by Konstantin Melnikov in Moscow in 1928, translates the programme straight into form. The main hall's balconies are cantilevered out beyond the façade in reinforced concrete; the masses that read like three gear teeth are three separate seating blocks inside. Movable partitions let each block be cut off from the main hall and become an independent meeting room; one building serves either a single large assembly or three small ones. The façade's striking shape is not a stylistic choice but the outward expression of that flexibility.

Melnikov designed six clubs in the 1920s, his own cylindrical house, and the Soviet pavilion for the Paris exhibition; once socialist realism became the official style in the 1930s he stopped receiving commissions and spent the last thirty years of his life effectively without practice. The Rusakov Club was long neglected, used as a theatre in the 1990s and restored in the 2010s. The surviving buildings of constructivist architecture are now being reassessed as the Soviet experiment's most original architectural contribution.