The bright and slender tower, which can now be seen by anyone who drives past VDNKh and Ostankino by car or monorail, arose due to the successful location of the site. It is located among panel and Stalinist houses, far enough from the highway of Prospekt Mira, so initially they were going to build a 20-storey house of medium size here - no higher than the neighbors. However, after one of the necessary elements of coordination - visual landscape analysis, it turned out that if you look "from Moscow", from the side of Rizhskaya, Alekseevskaya and the center, then the house stands right on the line of the avenue and successfully closes its perspective. The fact is that in front of VDNKh, the avenue turns to the east, and a new house, which is located far from the highway, at some point turns out to be "right in the direction" of cars driving towards the Moscow Ring Road. Thus, the project turned from “just” another one elite house into an urban dominant - and the building was allowed to be built high. What must be recognized as a rare case for Moscow is that as a result of the agreement, something does not legally decrease, but, on the contrary, grows.
The case is really exceptional, because the dominant did not just grow up - it happens in Moscow, but did it according to all the laws of the most refined variety of the architectural theory of the Russian avant-garde - the ASNOVA school, of which the architect Alexei Bavykin is a connoisseur and admirer. The author has often embodied themes close to the plastic searches of this movement in his works - to recall at least a relatively old (1994-1997) Infobank building on Vernadsky Avenue or a relatively new project of a house on Nizhnyaya Krasnoselskaya. Their two most noticeable features are the facades curved along a light arc, which make the silhouette varied, partly unpredictable: the Infobank hulls, for example, are thin on the one hand, and wide and resemble sails on the other. A similar effect occurs in the VDNKh tower, but in a slightly different way - first of all, on a larger scale.
The second favorite theme of Alexei Bavykin is a plastic game, the essence of which is to imitate the interpenetration of various types of matter. In the VDNKh tower, bright red and white grows like rectangular islands through glass, red passes through white and vice versa, and finally, the topmost layer is the lattice metal of large and small balconies. The latter look like the "balconies of a lonely smoker" from Trubnaya Street that have multiplied along their entire height. In fact, these balconies are for air conditioning, but, according to the architect, if you are not afraid of heights, you can go out and smoke while observing the city.
All these visual sprouting is not a decorative fad at all. The theme is based on the plan and shape of the building, in which a specific architectural plot can also be discerned. The volume of the 34-storey building looks like part of an unknown whole torn to pieces - the curved bright white western wall looks like a shell, the glass-red eastern wall looks like a filling. Either it was a dinosaur egg, or a spaceship, or a giant great-house that decided to reproduce vegetatively and for this purpose landed a piece of itself on the banks of the Yauza … House-fragment, asymmetric and rushing upwards. Probably, so as not to fly away, its volume is cut through by a plate of staircases, which "pinned" it, charged with dynamics, but very large, to the place.
All these associative ingenuities have one consequence - the house is interesting to consider. It is not boring, constantly changing and in different angles it becomes light, then dark, then wide, then vertically assembled - this is in the prospect of the prospect, or even almost slender and taking off - this is from the Yauza side. Despite its considerable growth, the house fits comfortably into a motley quarter on the border of Khrushchev's five- and Brezhnev's twelve-story buildings, and one might even say that nothing suppresses anything. There is in this giant of elite construction some kind of mixture of grace, fun and goodwill, which makes it an appropriate phenomenon next to the Leonov Park on the banks of the Yauza.
In the history of this house, the moment of realization seems especially, emphatically important. The fact is that the movement of Russian rationalism, led by Nikolai Ladovsky - in contrast to the more famous constructivism - has very few things built. It was embodied in theory, teaching, plasticity of studio work, "impregnated" Western modernism, but in Russia in the 1920s, it practically did not come out into "real practice."
The VDNKh house of Alexei Bavykin seemingly seeks to correct this injustice, revitalizing the principles of ASNOV and applying them to a modern building. It was not without reason that at first it was shown at exhibitions as a deliberately stylized picture in the characteristic Rodchenkovsky angle - and then this picture was replaced by a very similar photograph. The photograph is the embodiment of the drawing, it serves as confirmation that the house was built the way it was intended - that the architect managed to pull the coveted thread to embodiment, weave his version of the historized avant-garde scientist into the variegated chorus of modern Moscow construction.
