The place for the future house was chosen absolutely exceptional, but for the architects it was simply symbolic, since the House of the Architect is very close by. For all other people, the area is simply pleasant, it is one of those fragments of the capital's center, which managed to almost completely preserve the historical buildings and, therefore, the almost untouched urban environment of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. The classic ambassadorial quarter, quiet, high-status, rich in architecture of all sorts - from famous masterpieces such as the Ryabushinsky mansion of Fyodor Shekhtel or the Tarasov house of Ivan Zholtovsky, to "ordinary" apartment buildings a century or more ago. All this with minimal Soviet inclusions and even less modern ones. Reserve. By the way, the eastern border of the site just borders on one of the Moscow "protected areas".
It is not surprising that in such an environment a residential building will be elite - the "Ostozhen" format. All three buildings will accommodate only 27 apartments, 1-2 per floor. Its volumetric composition is typical for this kind of elite houses built in the center - the building consists of three volumes of different heights, united by high glass bridges of passages - from the side of Spiridonovka there is a 9-storey building, then, approaching Granatnoye, the height first decreases to 6 and then up to 4 floors, responding to the proximity of an Empire estate, an architectural monument. The buildings are set in an "corner", fencing a square courtyard, from which, through the trees of a small neighboring park, the House of Architects will be clearly visible.
For such elite houses being built in the center of Moscow, much can be “decided in advance” - their height is rigidly set by landscape-visual analysis, and expensive facade cladding and planning - by the high cost of future apartments. The latter creates a paradox - the typology and location presuppose a rigid format and a lot of rules, demand respectability and make these few houses somewhat subtly similar to each other. And it, this elite typology, requires from each building a "zest" - a recognizable feature, a characteristic feature, and best of all - combined with a laconic name. “… You, Semyon Semyonovich, bought an apartment in the Copper House? - and we - in Roman … And Ivan Ivanovich in Byzantine … ".
House in Granatnoye - "Byzantine". The logic behind the emergence of this name is historical and literary, almost tourist and obvious. The way it is embodied is an ornament that covers the house wherever possible - outside and inside, including elevator cabins. The ornament is planned to be applied to the stone facing slabs; on glass parapets "French", from floor to ceiling, windows; on cast-iron gratings where these windows have been turned into balconies-loggias; on oak doors of entrances to the staircase; on the canopies above these doors, the ceilings of the lobbies and the walls of the elevators already mentioned. A small glass rectangle of the gazebo is conceived in the courtyard - the glass is also completely covered with ornaments. This listing makes you dizzy, and it seems that the house is not Byzantine at all, but oriental, because only in the East there are "carved boxes" the size of a house.
But this is not entirely true. The ubiquitous ornament, which has successfully taken root on four (this is at least!) Types of matter, is actually organized in the spirit of a lightened and enlarged Art Deco. Vertical windows merge into stripes two stories high, the carvings are inscribed in a field of rectangular panels, forming a kind of blades that give the facades a rhythm characteristic of the architecture of modernism, looking back at the classics. The ground floor is covered with quite classic rustic wood, and the central parts of the facades, observing the axial symmetry, are marked with rows of loggias. All this brings us to the "Stalinist" architecture, and more after- rather than pre-war. Indeed, the famous architect Andrei Burov (1900-1957), whom many of the graduates of the Moscow Architectural Institute consider their teacher, experimented with such ornamental filling of the facades. He also designed the portico of the House of Architects in Granatnoye, to which the courtyard of the “Byzantine House” will face - there is a thread of continuity.
It is worth remembering, however, that experiments with "carpet" (or almost carpet) decor of facades began in the 1910s. - a style interested in ornament in all its manifestations. There is even a house at the Pokrovsky Gate on Chistoprudny Boulevard, covered with enlarged and flattened copies of the lions and fallow deer of Vladimir and Suzdal - a close relative of the Byzantine House, built a little over a hundred years ago. In addition, it is well known that after Burov, in the architecture of modernism, both Soviet and European, interest in ornament lived and developed, although it did not become mainstream. Now in foreign architecture, openwork lace is very popular, it seems even more than in the seventies - sometimes they are used in the form of decorative inserts, sometimes they completely occupy the surfaces of giant buildings, like at the Jeddah Rem Koolhaas airport, for example.
Generally speaking, if we exclude “brutalism”, which respects mass and texture, as well as “minimalism”, which strives for simplicity, then ornament must be recognized as an important part of the architecture of the 20th (and 21st) century. As you know, modernism seeks, among other things, to dematerialize works, making them light, floating, transparent. The main means on this path are modern technologies: transparency of glass and strength of reinforced concrete. However, the old way of de-reification of the surface - ornamental-lace, is also used, and we note, more and more often. By the way, it was Byzantium who knew best of all about the power of this technique - the destruction of matter by a pattern applied to it, which transmitted this knowledge to the architecture of the Muslim East.
And finally, the theme of the facade-painting and facade ornament in particular has been developed for several years by the author of the house in Granatnoye, Sergei Tchoban. In St. Petersburg, he has already built the Alexander Benois House, a multifunctional center, the main façade of which consists of Benois theatrical sketches applied to glass and arranged in a checkerboard pattern. The St. Petersburg business center "Langensiepen" imitates the Renaissance ornamentation also with the help of glass printing - photographs applied to glass. A more strict, geometric version of the ornament will be used - this time in stone, in the Forum-plaza business center, designed by SPeeCH, about which we recently wrote. The Byzantine House is most of all similar to Langensiepen - a grid of facades with narrow vertical windows, as well as the fact that the ornaments refer us to a certain city - Rome, from where the decor fragments were taken (photographed). The "Byzantine house" is being built into this row - this is the next step, taken this time for Moscow, which quite obviously inherits the previous one, although it uses a more traditional material - stone. One gets the impression that, having moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, Sergei Tchoban's ideas "petrify": either they materialize, or they become - a little - more traditional. Petersburg, it turns out, is graphic and ephemeral for an architect, Moscow is "stone". What can you do, the old "Byzantine" capital. Petersburg, on the contrary, is a new "western", Roman, theatrical one.
All of Sergei Tchoban's "painting facades" have several characteristic features. They appear in buildings, shall we say, of medium size by the standards of modern architecture. They are very classic, again by the standards of modern architecture - but there is not a single column in them - decorations, of which there are a lot, all belong to the fine arts "superimposed" on architecture: painting / graphics or sculpture. One gets the impression that the columns were deliberately expelled because they belong to the elements of a specific architectural language. The architecture of the columns is gone, the art of decoration remains. These decorations are borrowed from everywhere, but with one indispensable condition and this condition is accuracy. Benois's sketches are copies, Roman reliefs are photographs. For the selection of Byzantine ornaments, a specialist historian was invited, who selected historically accurate drawings and motivation. So, on the 9-storey building, the Byzantine motives (XII-XIV centuries) will be used, on the 6-storey building - Vladimir-Suzdal, on the smaller 4-storey - Balkan and early Moscow.
And one more feature of Tchoban's facades, in some way a consequence of the previous one - is their semantic richness. These are message facades, and it began with the Benois house, which the architect regarded as a tribute to his beloved artist, whose house (moreover) was located nearby. Therefore, it is especially interesting what kind of Byzantium is shown to us by the "Byzantine House".
Russian architecture has never seen such a Byzantium. To begin with, it is inconceivable to imagine Byzantine motifs in Soviet architecture, for the same Burov. They were ideologically alien, and above all due to the fact that before the revolution they were ideologically oversaturated. Conservatively oversaturated. For the Russian XIX century Byzantium is the Orthodox faith and autocratic power, or rather the source of both. Everywhere, where in the XIX century Byzantium - there is a gigantic gloomy (and from this unlike) temple-stylization or an imperial two-headed eagle. And the release of the Serb brothers, and even the cross over Hagia Sophia. And it cannot be said that these topics are now completely forgotten - on the contrary, recently a film was shown on TV just about this.
But there is nothing of the kind in the Byzantine House. Not a single two-headed eagle. Somehow the architect managed to ignore all the heavy burden with Petersburg grace and German composure, taking from the theme only what was needed - decor with a lightweight thematic charge. Which is just enough to speculate - what kind of Byzantium turned out to be! It seems to be she, but you look - and she is not at all. Or vice versa?
