The reason was the instruction of the mayor of Moscow to the Moscow Heritage Committee and the Moscow Architecture Committee. The mayor, having discovered a small cultural project, proposed to increase its area so that the museum got more exhibition space. Indeed, the previously designed areas were barely enough to show the main collection.
The site intended for the museum is located in a very valuable historical environment, or rather, on the border between the dense and integral, mostly Empire-style buildings and the void, consisting of the Yauzsky gate square, a public garden and road junctions. At first, having studied the world experience, the authors came to the conclusion that today a large parallelepiped is considered to be the ideal solution for an exhibition space - high and not forcibly enclosed by anything, which allows you to change the internal space, making it different for each exposition, and also makes it possible to show a very large exhibit - for example, a church organ. But this idea was immediately rejected at the agreement, based on the characteristics of the place. They took the idea of an ancient "forum" or "agora" surrounded by small houses in a small square as the main idea. A sort of cultural village. Then it began to grow, and the houses began to merge with each other, and formed a small conglomerate of various volumes, stone and metal, almost constructivist and almost empire, as if frozen in the process of mutual accretion. And suddenly - the total area needs to be increased by more than 2 thousand meters, from 8 560 to 10 900.
Having increased by one floor, the building has completely lost the windows of "traditional" Empire proportions and acquired a new type of openings - very small vertical gaps between the facing slabs, which alternate with the same narrow niches. This technique allows you to turn a stone surface, which in our time is nothing more than a thin shell of decorative decoration, into a kind of masonry from stone squares, emphasizing the supposed massiveness of this masonry. According to Dmitry Alexandrov, the starting point for this decision was the well-known technique of contextual design - an appeal to the history of the area. As you know, the wall of the White City, built by Fyodor Kon at the end of the 16th century and dismantled due to dilapidation by the end of the 18th century, passed through here. Actually, the name of the square comes from the fortress Yauzsky gate located here. The wall passed along the line of the boulevard and the new building of the museum, thus, turns out to be behind it, inside the White City, and not in its place - however, the figurative hint is clear - the house returns to this place a volume that resembles a fortress wall in scale and texture. Thus, the project, due to the sanctioned increase in size, in the matter of fitting into the context moved from direct methods to indirect ones: it is no longer “attached” to its immediate neighbors, but to a relatively distant history, plus it continues the lines imagined in the air that continue the highest marks neighboring masterpieces, especially the portico of the Board of Trustees.
The technique that refers us to the fortress wall allows us to hide the scale of the grown building. It is not very clear now how many floors there are - we are dealing either with large spots of solid glass, or with a relatively small rhythm of masonry. A strange thing happens in the perception of the house - it seems that the absence of obvious articulations should work on the topic of massiveness, increase the size - but in fact it does not, in itself it does not increase or decrease, but allows the eye to choose the desired reference point for itself.
And yet the image of the fortress is only a hint. The walls will be faced with smooth and pale-yellow Jurassic stone, which in Moscow is called either limestone or marble, and is now very popular. The metal roof has become the second half of the facade solution. Now it goes around the building around its entire perimeter, retaining the original hip slope, but all large glazing planes have disappeared - they have been replaced by tall vertical windows covered with perforated gratings made of the same titanium-zinc alloy as the entire surface.
And the magnificent views of the square and the bell tower have been preserved in the glazed rounding at the corner and in the staircase adjoining it. The combination of closed, vertical-cut thin loopholes of walls and open airiness of glazing at the corner creates an interesting effect in the new version of the music museum - as if a strict and closed, stone-metal massif at the corner either broke, or parted, parted and exposed a fragile transparency of glass forms rounding and growing upward. This unexpectedly poignant impression seems to be the main one here and somehow resonates with the fact that the upper glass roof covering the courtyard will be sliding. As if the whole house, as an architectural type of organ, obeys the work of a giant mechanism hidden inside.
