This house is interesting as an invention. If facades are usually made in memory of constructivism, then Nikolai Lyzlov revived the very essence of the search for avant-garde architecture - a typology invented in the 1920s. Ginzburg in Moscow and Le Corbusier in France, in our "house-commune", in their own way "the Marseilles cell".
The impetus for the search was given by a very difficult area - cramped, with restrictions on height. It was necessary to preserve the square, entrances for firefighters, not to block the light to the surrounding buildings and, of course, to create a maximum of useful areas. Why Nikolai Lyzlov revived a technique long forgotten in our country, first used in the House of the People's Commissariat for Finance - the apartments are made in two-tiers.
Each apartment is spread over two floors. Living rooms are spacious and high, "double-height", 5 meters high, with a large window across the wall and a staircase. The living rooms, on the other hand, are small, 2.5 meters high, which, however, is quite enough for sleeping. All apartments, except for the smallest one-room apartments, face two sides of the house - to the street and to the courtyard, alternating, which is why a rhythmic alternation of wide and narrow window strips appears on the facades.
The two-tier structure allowed the authors of the project, Nikolai Lyzlov and Vitaly Stadnikov, to save a lot on corridors - there are only three of them on 9 real floors, and only three elevator stops. The three resulting corridors are built according to the American system, similar to a hotel - a long axis and many doors, which, however, hide not rooms, but bunk apartments, which is why the famous quote from Woland about the fifth dimension suggests itself. And yet the layout, according to Nikolai Lyzlov, is designed for non-inert people, for example, those who now inhabit the commune house on Gogolevsky Boulevard, where the area of each apartment is 37 meters. And the owners of these constructivist apartments are sometimes very rich people who can afford more than one cottage. “We went to look at this house when we were designing it,” says Nikolai Lyzlov.
On the ground floor - the only hall for the whole house, and offices obligatory for the city center; underground, as it should be, a garage. On the roof is planned a recreation area under the roof on "legs", and the only thing, according to Lyzlov, "violation of social justice is a penthouse." Although it is possible that there will be not an apartment, but a fitness club, - the architect immediately makes a reservation.
It is very noticeable that, working within the framework of the constructivist structure and planning, Lyzlov somehow especially imbued himself with the ideals of avant-garde architecture, not in the Bolshevik, of course, but in the humanistic European version. The house is a club house, inevitably elite for the center of Moscow, but inside it is devoid of a hint of the stratification of the rich - richer - even richer, habitual in the new Russian society. Inside the elite club, everyone is equal, there are more and less apartments, but all are equally good, and the choice depends not on the quality of the apartment, but on the size of the family. The most interesting, according to Lyzlov, turned out to be the smallest apartment, consisting of one room, five meters high.
This allusion to equality takes the topic beyond the simple, albeit masterful, extra square footage. It seems that here we are dealing with the revival of the spirit of the avant-garde killed in the 1930s, the content of its not only formal, but also structural searches. The Lyzlov House on Maslovka is probably the most avant-garde of everything designed for Moscow in recent years, avant-garde "from the inside", which inevitably reflects on the facades, transparent, rhythmic, rational - not depicting constructivism, but living in its concepts in the 21st century.
