The area for which the project is intended is mainly built up with industrial buildings from the 1920s and 1930s for the plant that we now know as ZIL. The appeal to the heritage of the Russian avant-garde in such a neighborhood is quite natural, but the new house does not fake the environment at all - on the contrary, it seeks to correct historical injustice, adding to the constructivist industrial zone an element of a more complex variety of architectural searches of the same era and at the same time - offering its own version of understanding forms that have firmly entered history, but have not received either a continuation or a final interpretation.
In the 1920s. Ilya Golosov, a student of the classicist Zholtovsky, architectural theorist and avant-garde, invented, among others, one unexpected shape, replacing the corner of the building with a glass cylinder gripped by a rectangular console. The surprising novelty is actually not as simple as it might seem: the corner rotunda was a favorite technique of classicism. And such a juxtaposition of forms is well known to classical architecture on a smaller scale - similarly, the round trunk of a "muffled" column is crossed by rectangular blocks depicting squares of raw stone, keeping the sculptural perfection of the column inside the "wild" massif. In Golosov's interpretation, the theme reveals its stereometric nature: the simultaneous opposition of a circle and a square, vertical and horizontal - the "knot" grows to the scale of a house and completely loses its external resemblance to the prototype.
In Bavykin's project, this connection with the original form manifests itself again, as if sprouting. The house, for obvious reasons of capacity, is much higher than most avant-garde projects - 27 floors. The increased scale forces to multiply the cantilever "bundles" - instead of one, there are four of them, at an equal distance. Four floors - one rectangular, fixes and sharpens the round glass of a giant cylinder. Because of the repetition, the consoles regain a distant resemblance to "couplings" on a very large column.
This would not be clear to everyone, but Bavykin consolidates the result by transforming the glass of the 27-storey cylinder into flutes-flutes of the Doric order. The ribbed surface looks so extraordinary that it makes you think, sooner or later prompting the idea that we are facing a descendant of a column that has grown that way by 10-15 times, or rather, its stereometric reincarnation on an enlarged scale.
Here you can recall that the early and late Golosov have projects with exaggerated, wide and short, Doric columns, the large flutes of which are similar to those used in the new Bavykin project.
And also - that five years before Golosov built a club for them. Zuev, the famous project of Adolf Loos appeared, a skyscraper in the form of a column, finally removing the main element of the classical order from the category of "small" ones. And also the fact that this very column flaunts on the logo of Bavykin's workshop, having got there together with a barking dog from his drawings of the "paper" period.
In general, the approach that is felt in the architecture of the house on Avtozavodskaya seems to belong to “paper architecture”. There is nothing fashionable, magazine-like here; no bevels, folds, curiosities. A very consistently reproduced language of the 1920s, provoking typological innovations - for example, the ten lower floors of the building are given to a parking lot, the tiers of which are devoid of external walls, which radically solves the problem of ventilation. The architect's work here unfolds on some other, deeper level, not decorative and not constructive, but rather typological and semantic. Bavykin explores the avant-garde almost as carefully and thoroughly as the classicists studied antiquity. And on the way out, it turns out that they are not so far from each other.
