Alexey Ginzburg has already talked a little about this project in his interview with Archi.ru - he considers the neighborhood with the theater, a famous example of Moscow brutalism, to be especially important. “I brought samples of bricks by car, put them next to the wall of the theater, and checked that they were in tune, but not too accurately,” says the architect. However, the context of Taganskaya Square is diverse and the theater is not its only element, although one of the main ones.
The complex shape of the site as a whole gravitates towards a right-angled triangle, whose hypotenuse is elongated along the red line of the Earthen Shaft. The right angle is in the depth. This is a convenient form for a store, since the length of the showcases along the main facade turns out to be quite large in relation to the total area. The triangle provides the necessary "underbelly" of the actual retail space: within five storeys of shops, a supermarket, food court and cinema, grouped around a predictably triangular atrium. Its small space, which is clearly visible in the section, was tilted by the architect like the Leaning Tower of Pisa: floor by floor, it shifts stepwise up from the center towards the Garden Ring - to a flat, slightly sloping lantern, whose glass is tilted to the south. Thus, a glazed patio, almost an essential part of a modern store, captures the maximum amount of sunlight possible. There are two levels of parking underground.
Now the site is empty, only in the corner of a grass-sown hill there is a small above-ground parking lot. But earlier it was occupied by the Tagansky trading rows, whose building historians even tried to ascribe to Osip Bove. The trapezoidal contour of the rows almost completely coincided with the now empty triangle, although there were many shops around, outside the boundaries of the rows. The shopping arcade was demolished in the 1960s; At the same time, a tunnel was laid under the square on the Garden Ring, and the square itself was turned into one of the most spacious and problematic interchanges among the "Moscow-style highways". The place remained an empty spot, especially noticeable in contrast to the large volume of the Taganka Theater, which appeared in the 1980s. The new multifunctional complex should be located right on the site of the shopping arcade and directly inherit it, not only in the sense that it revives the commercial function at this place, but also, let's say, architecturally and genetically: the distance between the walls on the main facade of the new building is literally drawn from Tagansky rows. A new building grows out of the rhythmic grain of the previous one, exceeding it in height, which, however, often happens to children who grow taller than their parents.
It must be said that even the late Soviet authorities recognized Taganskaya Square not only as a theatrical, but also as a commercial role - panel houses in the district are equipped with obligatory and very extensive "glass" along the streets. In the market nineties, the theme was developed by assorted shops and stalls closer to the exits from the metro - some of them have recently fallen victim to the well-known story of the "demolition of squadrons." Trade, never dying on Taganka, moved from ordered shops in old Moscow rows with their arches and courtyards - to Soviet regulated glass - to the rough charm of chaotically growing mushrooms of the nineties. Now it looks like it's time for the mall. To pity or not to pity small shops is everyone's personal choice (I do), but it is quite obvious that sooner or later their simple buildings in the city center must give way to something else. However, let us remind you that the work on the project has nothing to do with demolitions, it began under the previous mayor.
Shopping centers are also, however, different, they have the inevitable evil of consolidation, and the power of network logistics, and the charm of comfortable consumerism - a little bit of everything. But I would like to emphasize that Aleksey Ginzburg managed, upon agreement, to insist on the metropolitan format of the store, with shop windows and a street promenade. A store similar to European passages and large stores, all these Parisian Le Bon Marché, and akin in this sense to the Moscow GUM, which, by the way, also replaced the post-fire Beauvais shopping arcade on Red Square. The Alexey Ginzburg multifunctional complex is a hybrid of an atrium building with an arcade and a city street, remembering, moreover, of the old shopping arcade. Will there be a shopping promenade here, on the edge of the Garden Ring? Why not. There are two steps from the metro, half of the car traffic is removed below, to the level of the tunnel, and here, on the hill, it is not felt too much.
The third important part of the context after the theater and shopping arcade is the 19th century houses, which stretch along the same side of the Zemlyanoy Val almost continuously towards the Yauza. In order not to "crush" them with a massive volume, the main facade of the multifunctional complex is divided into three projections. Between them there are glass lintels of the entrances, triangular recessed inside, which is clearly visible on the plan. They almost mirror the theater building, where opposite there are two brick triangular ledges of similar size. The plan clearly shows: two buildings are pieces of the same mosaic, and the protrusions-depressions are the key for their connection. Only they are separated, cut by the Garden Ring, and the main facade of the new building is porous, lattice - like a cut. And the rear walls facing the neighboring streets are solid, here there are fewer windows, more walls. Here there are entrances for loading shops, and the relative simplicity, isolation of the facades is due to pragmatic reasons. And at the same time, the exterior of the “backyard” even more closely resonates with the rhythm and plasticity of the theater building, as if the IFC were indeed a breakaway fragment of its brick rock, the second half of the Pillars of Hercules. Of course, in tandem with the theater, the new building forms propylaea of the entrance to the square - this is its town-planning meaning: it will become the second, missing pylon of the new version of the Tagansky Gate. By the way, the old wooden gates of Zemlyanoy Gorod, built in the 17th century, were located on the current territory of the MFC, so inheritance takes place with full right, although the modern version of the propylae has changed the scale and location - after all, the Sadovoe Koltso route runs here not along the shaft, to the west.
Propylaea, of course, will work both at the entrance to the square and at the exit from it. Now, especially when you turn from Serpukhovskaya Street to the ring in the direction of the Kursk railway station, the square seems excessively wide and unformed, and the new building will become another border accent. Overlapping, I dare say, in addition to the theater, also with the Church of St. Nicholas on Bolvanovka: earlier the square was decorated with two noticeable volumes, now there will be three.
However, being a large-scale pair of the theater building, the MFC does not at all become its full reflection. Rather, he plays with a masterpiece of contextual brutalism in a similar-dissimilar manner. Particularly noticeable is the contrast of the one-piece, and at the same time, the theater building bristling with brick screens - and the ribbed-permeable light lattice of the main facade of the MFC. The facade-screen, the facade-showcase is exposed along the Garden one like a shield resting on the triangular base of the building. Its plane is even slightly elongated, stretched between the two ends - the northern and southern corners of the triangle, which take on the role of important accents directed to the audience, to the circuit of the ring. Media screens will be installed at the ends, they will take on the role of signboards and billboards. But besides the luminous additions, the very shape of the ends - complex, sharply cut, with a slight turn of their cubist "head" to the track - is able to attract attention. The nose of the northern end hangs sharply in space, contradicting the inertia of the slope with an emphasized ease. Under it - a light concrete staircase leads through the high glass illuminated in the evenings directly to the second floor. Below the stairs is the entrance and exit from the underground parking: the advantages of the slope are used both functionally and plastically.
The difference in elevation on the site is eight meters, which is not a lot and not a little, in the portfolio of Alexei Ginzburg there are buildings on steeper slopes, moreover, the architect even likes to work with relief, considering it not a burden, but an interesting task. Here too - the building does not slide down the slope, but rises under a strictly horizontal cornice. In practice, this means that two additional floors are gradually growing to the northern edge. From the side of the square, the volume is four stories high, although if we take into account the contextual step, delicately carved from above, then there are even three stories, and from the Yauza side, from the north, there are six of them, which gives a completely different scale, flying. The design of the facades is also evolving: the southern risalit is cut fractionally, floor by floor, echoing the scale of the historical city, the central one - it is directly opposite the theater - receives the largest rhythm, here the floors are combined in two or even three in height. The northernmost one, the highest, receives a second horizontal cofferdam. However, the contradictory rhythm is united by a common texture and logic of construction.
Work on the project took a long time, the authors considered many options for cladding. Several white stone, with thin lintels of Jurassic marble and a large glass insert - "head". And several brick ones, including portals with wide large frames. In this case, the final version was a really successful, hard-won and modern, not alien to fresh trends, version. The texture of the brick, variegated from gray to black through the "red theater", balances on the verge between detail and minimalism. The main decorative element is the stepped slopes, their rows neatly protrude one after the other along the half-width of the poke, also hinting at a rupture of the surface that has "broken away" from the theater. A simple technique in itself, in addition, is designed for chiaroscuro: the facade looks to the west and the oblique sun should emphasize the relief well. Brick steps will also be visible to most pedestrians, since the main flow of people goes down from the metro - there are more slopes on the left, there are no slopes on the right, and the frames of high windows that combine two or three floors are asymmetrical, and the lintels are triangular. It is planned to use Dutch clinker for cladding.
To say that the task set in this project was difficult and responsible is to say nothing. A notable place, on the contrary, is a masterpiece, the study of the architecture of which Alexei Ginzburg, by his own admission, was engaged in as a student, a beloved monument of modernism worthy of admiration. And not only him, but in general - a key place in the Moscow history of the 1970s, after all "Taganka", here Vysotsky was buried. The urban space in this place is so oversaturated with semantic "layers" that the voids involuntarily begin to speak; and at the same time building something spineless here in regeneration would be terrible. In this case, it seems, we managed to find a balance and avoid shyness, settling on an exact, in some way even ringing solution - a shield-mirror, worthy of a couple of the famous theater, interpreting their time in their own way. Our trading time, obsessed with the comfort of the townspeople, but something that has not yet forgotten about itself.
