The nymph Calypso was Odysseus's most enjoyable adventure. The cunning Greek lived with her for 7 years, and she bore him seven sons, among whom, according to some versions of the myth, were Rom, Latin and Avson, the first king of Italy. According to this version of the story, though less known than Virgil's Aeneid, the Romans should have descended from Odysseus. Now this nymph is known as, figuratively speaking, the patroness of tourism and long-distance travel - after Jacques Cousteau gave her name to the ship on which he was looking for Atlantis - the film about the journey, respectively, was "The Underwater Odyssey".
Architect Ilya Utkin called his project of the house for the collection of the Pirogovo resort "Villa Calypso". According to the author, he was pushed to this more by the memories of Cousteau's dives than by the Odyssey itself. However, be that as it may, for modern architecture, the "mythological" name of the house is very rare. Probably, one can even say that after the time of modernity and neoclassicism passed, architects began to treat ancient subjects and their heroes very coldly. Now, creating their buildings, authors think about different things: about function and ergonomics, about pure form and plastic, social responsibility, history and politics, or about architectural styles. But very few people turn to literature, allegories, and even more so - myths. In addition, architects rarely name their houses, but if this happens, they choose more modest and simpler names, avoiding associations and allusions in general.
In business, on the contrary, mythology is very popular, the entire Greek and Eastern pantheon has been "disassembled" into the names of companies and have already reached such small gods, which, although they were revered in ancient times, were not depicted in any way - hence the problems with logos: there is a name, no pictures. Sometimes buildings also get names, but real estate names, as a rule, are glued to architecture as labels to packaging and say little about imagery.
The case with the villa of Ilya Utkin is completely opposite and uncharacteristic for our time: the author gave the “literary” name. By the way, for the first time for myself - all the previous villas of Utkin, as well as many others, "passed" under the numbers. I dare to share the feeling that the appearance of the name is not accidental and to some extent reflects the specificity of the architectural language, which the author formulated in his projects of country houses of the last decade.
The appearance "on the horizon" of a Greek nymph reveals the architect's desire to populate the house, in addition to people, with mythological characters or even the spirits of very distant ancestors, so characteristic of the Romans. However, the interpretation of the building by means of sculpture is characteristic of almost all historical architecture: once the stone inhabitants guarded the house, once they were considered "only" an ornament, but they always remained an integral part of it, like the ghosts of English castles - the owners change, the ghosts remain. In the second third of the XX century, after the mermaid expanse organized by the Art Nouveau, the stone population practically disappeared, being replaced by the "propaganda man" - a woman with an oar and athletes. But they first separated from the facades, and then finally went into monumental propaganda, leaving flowers and ornaments to the houses.
So, the sculptural army is scattered, but stubbornly appears in the houses of Ilya Utkin. He is the only one who made "real" Atlanteans in Levshinsky. He constantly conceives figures on the porticoes and independently draws nymphs for his houses - fountains with reliefs, the very name of which suggests that this is not just water, but the soul of the spring lives in it. In fact, it is even strange that with the love for modernity that manifested itself in Moscow in the 1990s, no facade sculpture was revived. The stylization of eclectic houses, and their replicas also did not contribute to its spread - as if a prohibition gravitates over architecture, akin to the Muslim tradition not to depict living beings, but only plants. It seems that Ilya Utkin is the only one who uses facade and park sculpture a lot, treating it as a necessary part of the architectural concept, and interpreting it very personally, in his own way, and not clichéd, because to cast another “plaster head ", Of course, everyone can. But will she have a soul?
Villa Calypso seems to have a "soul" - in the ancient sense - is. She loves water very much, therefore, one third of the house, dug into the ground, has been turned into a pool covered with large cylindrical vaults, and from this it resembles a piece of ancient thermae overgrown with a "cultural layer", leaving only the tops of semicircular "thermal" windows inscribed in contours of large formwork. Thus, the pool, which in our time is more often, like a garage, a semi-technical attachment to the house, an element of comfort, and not architecture, here acquires a very "Roman" look, becoming the figurative and semantic core of the dwelling, which is built on top of it …
The pool may seem symbolically associated with a mythical cave where an ancient nymph lived on the shores of the Ocean, as well as with real groundwater, which is close everywhere in the Moscow region. As if it were a spring under the protection of some very ancient deity - here we recall the most famous Greek temple after the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, standing above the salt spring of the sea god Poseidon - a classic temple that arose on the site of an older archaic sanctuary, which grew out of its history and reflected it in my own way. Of course, we are not talking about any close resemblance or repetition, but rather about the unity of the theme: Villa Calypso does not copy anything and does not even construct directly the logic of the ancient myth, but rather hints at the existence of a subtext, into which it is possible, but not necessary, to ponder. However, the hint is supported by sculptures depicting Poseidons with tridents on the northwest terrace.
The upper part of the house consists of two floors and a spacious attic facing the ends of the house with triangular pediments of classic outlines, which are filled with a completely modern, transparent and geometric pattern of wooden beams, which change the angle of inclination from sharp in the center to gently sloping at the edges. Under the pediments there are Corinthian porticoes "in antae", in which two columns unite two floors. Similar columns also "support" the central part of the long southern wall; here the intercolumnia are filled with glass - therefore the columns “work” both outside and inside, becoming a remarkable part of the space of the ceremonial hall, a third of which, adjacent to the columns, is made one-piece, double-height - and the rest goes out towards the columns as a balcony. The plan of the villa is simple and strictly symmetrical - two parts of identical outlines adjoin the central core, strung on a longitudinal axis that runs through the whole house from one end portico to the other. This is a very classic type of layout of a parallelepiped house, divided into three main parts, hierarchically linked to each other, it goes back at least to the Renaissance Italian palaces and Palladian villas and this is the main feature, which, in addition to a gigantic area of about 2000 square meters, does not allows us to doubt that in front of us is precisely a palace, a very luxurious structure and therefore, even in nature, not devoid of a certain degree of composure, in something even stiffness, which significantly echoes literary and mythological associations, with a hint of education inherent in its title.
The function of this palace, however, is a holiday home. Perhaps its closest analogy in meaning is a Roman country villa near the capital. It is not very well known what these villas looked like, the architects have been wondering about this for five hundred years already - and the author seems to offer his own version of the interpretation of such a building - ceremonial, but pleasant and moderately “wild”.
He lets nature in here as much as possible within the framework of the classicist paradigm. Firstly, the outer contour of the villa-palace is arranged in such a way as to obtain as many balconies and terraces as possible - they are formed due to the "proprietary" author's porticoes, and appear on long facades between projections, where the walls recede, in the lower part in order to to let light into the underground space of the pool, and at the top - turning into balconies. There are record numbers of such open spaces adjacent to the house - one can even say that between the line of the “main” walls and the space of the courtyard, a kind of “air”, or, more correctly, a spatial “pillow”, is created, the area of interaction between the house and nature. In addition, most of the walls receding from the edge are turned into windows and are transparent, which reinforces the theme, letting in the landscape - and this is a very beautiful landscape - inside.
The natural theme, in addition, is supported by the active use of the rustic surface, beloved by the author, adopted from Roman times imitation of rough masonry, befitting first of all country houses in which "vita rustica" takes place, life in nature - the whole houses are covered with long strips of rusticated buildings to a height of 1 floor, moreover, closer to the center they are flat, and along the edges - at the ends and on the terraced portico, the surface becomes rough, indicating its remoteness from the conditional middle "core".
However, the resulting house cannot be fully considered neither a reconstruction of a Roman villa, nor even another paraphrase of Russian or English Palladianism - although the features of all this can be found if desired. At the same time, it is easy to find here some of the neoclassical experience of the early 20th century used by the author - for example, columns recessed in a two-story stained-glass window, or even famous experiments of modernism, such as F. Wright's "house over a waterfall". However, the main feature of the house-palace, probably, lies in the fact that all these experiments of varying degrees of prescription, with a spread of two and a half millennia, are quite organically integrated into the vocabulary of a very individual author's language, developed by Ilya Utkin over the past five or six years. It has its own easily recognizable features and at the same time has some common goal, which is probably not limited to formal characteristics. Looking at Villa Calypso, one can assume that the meaning of this language, at least in part, lies in the author's search for the architectural imagery of a country villa from the times of the Roman Empire, which for modern art historians is a kind of "plastic unknown." Moreover, this task - referring to the sources, has already been solved many times in the history of classicisms, but each time in its own way, and now a fairly long history of such experiments has accumulated, from the Renaissance to neoclassicism, with a consistent deepening into history and the aging of sources.
But the urgency of the task does not pass, but on the contrary, it has the peculiarity of returning, each time generating new experience, and often - as in this case - a very personal interpretation of the classics. It seems to me that here the path of the eternal search for the golden age is as follows - the architect isolates from all the Renaissances and classicisms known to him, and not only from them, features and lines that could correspond to the desired image, and collects them into something of his own, very personal, individually meaningful. In the case of Calypso, the search, probably, in some ways even went beyond the most archaic prototype, getting close to the mythological ancestors of the ancient Romans along the Odyssey line.
