The word literally means "new building" (building as a gerund, not as a noun). The word was coined when they started building appartments in blocs, up to four floors high (that's five american).
Why four? The standards demanded an elevator if higher.
There was a world of difference between living in a house and in novogradnja. A house has a garden, yard, lawn, shed, attic, maybe a cellar. An apartment in novogradnja has only the rooms, a few square meters of balcony, and maybe as much space in the cellar (which anyone can break into). Your territory ends at your door - beyond that, there's the staircase with the lights on a short timer, so if you're on the 3rd floor, you have to hit at least two switches on your way down, or else you'd find yourself in the dark. Garbage chutes weren't standard until the seventies, so you'd have to carry it down. Central heating also wasn't an option in those earlier buildings, so you'd have to carry coal upstairs from the cellar. Your mailbox was downstairs and was often ransacked by the kids. Also, anything larger than a regular envelope would be forcibly crammed into your mailbox, because the postman wouldn't walk up - if it was an LP record, too bad.
Most important, you didn't own it - you had a legal right of residence after a while (5 years, IIRC) and then they couldn't kick you out even if you stopped paying the rent, which was symbolic anyway. Since you didn't own it, you weren't in charge of maintenance either, so whatever broke (and it did), you'd have to wait for the housing enterprise or whoever was in charge to send a majstor.
Yet everyone wanted to live in those, because it was basically free. Your rent wasn't higher than your power bill, you had no worry about the maintenance, cleaning outside your rooms. And initially the walls were all solid, so you wouldn't hear much of your neighbors (in the seventies, however, the beauties of sheetrock over a frame were discovered).
In the nineties these apartments were sold to the tenants at ridiculous prices. For an amount ranging between a month's and six month's worth of gasoline for your car you could buy off your place... and enter into something like a condo relationship with your neighbors. And you were still in novogradnja and not expected to shovel the snow from your pavement (and get fined by the city if you don't) like those guys in the houses across the street.
Note 2022, after mentioning how it was the same everywhere, see 25-I-1996., about the architecttural style. Until around early sixties that was true, they all looked the same - so in Varšava, so in Novosibirsk, so in Sofija and here, they all look like ruža. Though, truth be said, they look like he first four buildings on ruža; any that were built later are merrier; likewise in Dunavska and Mala Amerika - the first batch is gray, the rest is a party. That's when ours split ways with the bloc in this sense too. Take Lesnina, which was built in early sixties, which already has some architectural frills and is not all in one surface, the protrusion with the logo of Lesnina is done in façade brick, and odd and even floors alternate in color (ok, shade of gray, but there's contrast). Then 25. maj and whole Bagljaš are completely different. This kind of architectural extravaganza can't be found in the bloc at the time; on the Panoramio photos and on videos of crazy Russians on the road I can see many colorful buildings, but these are all new, this century, and their façades are still flat. We had it much more lively.
I've never seen this kind of an apartment building here with a hotel type of layout as what I've seen in the US, with tens of apartments on the same floor connected by a hall, and two or three staircases connecting them to other floors. It's always one entrance, one staircase, and between 3 and 6 apartments per floor per entrance. You can't enter the building via one staircase and leave via another, they are never connected. Now in the american case it's a saving* on the stairs, which are complicated and expensive to build. I've seen it in only a couple of cases, in slat-and-board three storey buildings, where such number of stairwells may suffice, but then my sample is too small. But I've never seen that here, except in the around-the-yard buildings downtown here, which were built in XIX century or early XX, but here the upper floor apartments were connected by a terrace.
(OK, checked with the folks on burundi and they found a few such buildings, with up to 50 apartments per floor, all connected with a long hall, which was more of an experiment, in sixties to early seventies, and it was abandoned, one gets a feeling of living in a hotel or on a railway station. Separate entrances are more intimate.
One entrance has actually become the unit of measure, or a location - it assumes all the apartments and people whose apartments share the entrance.
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* I googled it out back in the time when the Gugao was returning the number of hits: „a saving“ is returning about ten time fewer hits than „a savings“. Neither do I understand why.
5-VII-2012 - 23-VI-2026