The proposed work is devoted to the application of the direct method to the study of heat transfer processes in the system "solid cylinder inside a cylindrical shell". It is assumed that there is an ideal thermal contact between them, and the law of changing the ambient temperature, which rinses the surface of the structure, is an arbitrary function of time, and evenly distributed over the surface. Consequently, isotherms inside this construction are concentric circles, that is, the problem is symmetric and is solved for the first time in such a statement. To solve such a problem, the auxiliary problem of determining the distribution of a non-stationary temperature field in a two-layer hollow cylindrical structure with a "withdrawn" cylinder of sufficiently small radius is raised in parallel. In this case the symmetry condition of the original problem is replaced by the condition of the second kind on the inner surface of this construction. The implementation of the solution of the auxiliary problem is carried out by applying a reduction method using the concept of quasi-derivatives. In the future, the Fourier scheme is used with the use of the modified eigenfunctions method. To find the solution of the original problem, the idea of the boundary transition is used by passing the radius of the withdrawn cylinder to zero. It is established that in this approach all the eigenfunctions of the corresponding problem on the eigenvalues have no singularities at zero, which means that the solutions of the original problem are constrained throughout the design. In order to illustrate the proposed method, a model example of finding the temperature field distribution in a column of a circular cross-section (concrete in a steel shell) is solved under the influence of the standard temperature regime of the fire. The results of the calculations are presented in a bulk schedule of temperature changes, depending on time and spatial coordinates. The generalization of the results obtained in the case of any finite number of cylindrical shells is a purely technical problem, and not a fundamental one. Note that while changing the boundary condition of the third kind to any other boundary condition (for example, the first kind) does not affect the scheme of solving similar tasks. Since the general scheme of studying the distribution of temperature fields in multi-layered structures with an arbitrary number of layers in the presence of internal sources of heat is studied in detail, the setting and solving of such problems for the system of "solid cylinder inside a cylindrical shell" is not without difficulty.