The walk gathered more than 200 people, familiar to themselves, who occupied the main approaches to the building on the Red Gate for several hours. The walk consisted of several stages: stories about the town-planning situation, architecture and the unique design of the building alternated with a walk through the lobby and conference hall of the Ministry of Transport and a visit to the “Stalinist” apartment - one of the few that fully retained its original interior. The granddaughter of the architect Natalia Dushkina spoke about architecture, and Igor Kaspe, engineer, associate professor and laureate of the Council of Ministers prize, spoke about the structures.
Recently, Stalinist architecture is increasingly beginning to be perceived as a monument of history and architecture. On the one hand, with the end of the Soviet era, we have a certain mythologization of the 1930-1950s, and on the other, these monuments are simply becoming less and less numerous. The famous Stalinist "skyscrapers" built as a sign of victory in the Great Patriotic War play a special role among the buildings of those years, primarily in the town-planning structure of the city. As the permanent organizer of the walks Sergey Nikitin noted, no one else performs the town planning function that they perform in the city. They create a system of major urban landmarks and accentuate the most important points of the urban landscape.
The skyscraper at the Krasnye Vorota stands on one of the most elevated places in the Garden Ring and crowns a complex urban development junction, from which the street runs towards the square of three stations. The skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya, together with the Leningradskaya hotel and the tower of the Kazansky railway station, constitutes a “couple of opposition” to the building of Moscow State University, which is located on the opposite side of Moscow. Despite the fact that the building at the Red Gate is the lowest - only 24 floors, due to its location it may well compete with the highest - 36-storey University.
Natalia Dushkina shared with the young "truants" that if you come to the observation deck in front of the university in good weather, then on one line you can see first the golden dome of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, then the burning dome of the Ivanovsky pillar, and behind it, in the future, the spire with the star of Krasnovorotsky skyscraper.
The design of high-rise buildings began in 1947, and each was assigned its own department. The skyscraper at the Red Gate was designed by the Ministry of Railways and Communications, which held a small competition for this. Two main projects were submitted for the competition: the chief architect of the Ministry of Railways Alexei Nikolaevich Dushkin, who was engaged in the design of metro stations at that time, and the project of the architect Voloshin. The fundamental difference was that, in Dushkin's project, the main facade of the building was turned towards the Garden Ring, and in another project - towards Kalanchevskaya Street. In the course of both architectural and human intrigues, as Natalia Dushkina said, the first option was chosen.
However, from the approved project to the completed construction, the building has changed quite a lot. Dushkin's initial project resembled a knocked-down cube in the style of Chicago office skyscrapers - it was sharply different from all the skyscraper projects presented. In the future, this option did not work, and together with the architect Boris Sergeevich Mezentsev, a more elongated high-rise volume began to be developed. According to Natalya Dushkina, it so happened that "there were two bears in the den, which found it extremely difficult to work together." However, the distribution of forces was quite clear: Mezentsev, "a great master of details", was mainly engaged in the plastic of the facade, and Dushkin, together with the engineer, developed the entire planning and constructive basis of the high-rise - in fact, the main work on the construction of the high-rise.
The fact is that the skyscraper at the Red Gate is the most complex in terms of construction technology. At the same time, a metro station was being built - the deepest in the Moscow metro - and the left wing of a high-rise building had to be placed above its huge hole. For this, for the first time in world practice, a foundation pit was developed with an area of more than a thousand square meters. meters without internal fasteners, which was held by the frozen ground. Then the so-called "glass" was erected in it - the hexagonal foundation of the left wing of the building, into which the metro lobby was built, and on the "edge" of the pit, the foundation and frame of the high-rise part of the house were erected. This was where the biggest problem lay - the fact is that during freezing the soil expands and the foundation would inevitably rise, and after it returned to normal temperature, it would, along with the entire building, sink. Therefore, in order to avoid distortion, Abramov decided to build the high-rise part not strictly vertically, but at an angle - otherwise the building would have collapsed sixteen centimeters to the east. However, the innovative engineering solution ran into force majeure - the delivery of the structures was delayed for several months due to which there was a simple soil and now the "glass", gradually leveling vertically, tilts in the opposite (so far permissible according to the norms) side.
The technical complexity of the building's structure determined the nature of its interiors: the skyscraper at the Red Gate is the most modest of all seven brothers. There are no luxurious halls like in the front door of the university or the stained glass windows of Korin, like in the skyscraper on Vosstaniya Square. The most front part here is a small lobby, finished in stainless steel. As Alexei Dushkin himself wrote, he "had to, as at the Mayakovskaya station, emphasize the bearing capacity of the steel structure, completely freeing it from all ballast masses." In other words, the decorative steel elements that we saw on the columns and walls cover the structures themselves, but at the same time demonstrate its metallic essence.
Since the building is divided into two functions - the tower houses the headquarters of JSC Transstroy (the former Ministry of Railways), and the side wings - residential apartments, the side blocks are much more modest. The organizer of MosCultProg Sergey Nikitin agreed with the residents of one of the apartments on the ninth floor, which the participant of the action will have a look at rare authentic interiors. It turned out to be a small apartment, with high (3.5 meters) ceilings and small rooms, including for the housekeeper. In addition to the walls, the style of the interior of the apartment was created by cabinets of the beginning of the last century, volumes of old books and many figurines. It should be noted that now apartments in high-rise buildings are being actively rebuilt and undergo "European-quality renovation", but not just cultural value, but also material value in the future will be much higher in the original dwellings than in the converted "modern" ones. The facade of the building is much better preserved, however, it is also being replaced, for example, by windows and doors. The brown window frames of residential apartments are being replaced with white plastic, and the huge display windows associated with the metro become fine-grained, which of course spoils the appearance of the facade. Here we recall the behest of the architect Dushkin, for which he fought all his life, that "to build is still half the battle, the other half is to preserve what has been built."
