Shukhov Tower on the Oka

In 1927–1929, to Vladimir Shukhov's design and under his direction, three pairs of steel lattice towers — 128, 68 and 20 metres high — rose on the Oka between Bogorodsk and Dzerzhinsk, carrying the NiGRES 110-kilovolt line across the river. Shukhov patented the hyperboloid tower back in 1899; the world's first such tower stood at the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition of 1896. When the line's route changed, four towers were scrapped; a single tall one survived — 128 metres, one of the two surviving tall multi-section hyperboloid structures in Russia (the other is the Shabolovka tower in Moscow). Western specialists hold the Oka tower to be the more refined and worthy of World Heritage status. The tower stands beyond the settlement of Dachny, twelve kilometres from Dzerzhinsk, on the left bank of the Oka. Approaching its base is an exercise in scale: open steel solved as lace, holding the whole structure's weight with a pattern that never ages.