The most legendary tower in Saint Petersburg is located at the corner of Svetlanovsky and Tikhoretsky Avenues. It is the complex of the Central Research Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics (TsNII RTK).

This research center originated as a design bureau at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute back in 1968. It became an independent research institute in 1981.

TsNII RTK became famous as a center of the space industry of the former USSR. Already in the late 1960s, a gamma-ray altimeter "Cactus" was created there for controlling the soft-landing engines of the Soyuz spacecraft. Later, TsNII RTK designed soft-landing control systems "Kvant," soil sampling control complexes for the automatic interplanetary station "Luna-16," manipulator schemes for underwater vehicles, and many other examples of Soviet high-tech.

Construction of the building for the design bureau began in 1973, based on a project by architects Savin and Artyushin. The construction dragged on until 1987. The architectural dominant of the complex was and remains the tower-laboratory for testing space equipment. Its skyward-reaching form contrasted with the low, elongated building of the institute.

Inside, the tower is completely hollow, but even today it contains an extraterrestrial object. At the base of the structure, a manipulator from the "Buran" spacecraft, the first and last Soviet "Shuttle," is installed.

In the early 1990s, the top of the institute’s tower broadcast "Russian Video" — Russia’s first private channel, owned by V. Gusinsky. It was the first channel in Petersburg to broadcast not from the Aptekarsky Island TV tower. At the same time, an antenna superstructure appeared on the tulip-shaped tower.

It is amusing that https://www.businessinsider.com/ included this building in the ranking of the "most absurd buildings of the communist era": "In St. Petersburg, the Russian State Scientific Center for Robotics and Technical Cybernetics looks a bit like some sort of Satanist temple."