rings, weighing an estimated 28 thousand tons, were the largest, the heaviest and the most expensive elements of the frame. The statue of Lenin, weighing around 6,000 tons, was to be built around its own steel frame, and clad in monel sheeting with an estimated lifetime of two thousand years. External walls followed the American pattern of hollow-body brick infill and granite exterior cladding. According to the official narrative, Stalin instructed the designers to avoid unnecessary visual clutter and use a simple two-tone color scheme. The designers selected greyish blue Ukrainian labradorite for the basement and pale grey granite from the valley for the rest of the structure. Engineering systems The palace's internal transport infrastructure was designed assuming 50,000 visitors daily. The routes to the grand hall and to the office tower were physically separated; the former relied primarily on stairs and escalators, the latter on elevators. There were to be 130 passenger elevators carrying 25 people each, 27 service elevators and 20 elevators with firefighting equipment. Since no elevator could travel the whole height of the building, visitors to the top floors had to make two or three transfers, sometimes via escalators or stairs. Electrical consumption of the palace was specified at 90 MW peak, and 90 million kWh per annum. Fault-tolerant, redundant electricity supply required the construction of three new thermal power stations. Internal cleaning and waste disposal systems contained twelve central vacuum cleaning stations of 750 KW each, and thirty industrial garbage disposal units with a combined capacity of seven tons/day. Heavy air conditioning equipment would have been located below ground level, the conditioned air would be delivered to each seat in the grand hall via a network of ducts running under each row of seats. The placement of air intakes required further research on the distribution of pollutants in the air; the designers knew that the intakes should have been raised to at least , but the exact height was not yet known. Apparently dust prevention and cleaning the dust were paramount concerns. The designers even provided for vibrating brushes, installed in the floors of the lobbies, for cleaning the soles of the visitors' shoes. Urban redevelopment Moscow's planners viewed the palace as the hub of the Ilyich Alley, a new southwest-to-northeast axis aligned along present-day Komsomolsky Prospect, Volkhonka Street, Manezhnaya Square and Sakharov Prospect. The concept developed by the Vesnin brothers and Ivan Leonidov in