After many years of discussion around the world-class constructivist masterpiece that is disappearing before our eyes, a compromise has finally been found: the MIAN group of companies will carry out a project to restore the house, preserving the status of an inhabited one - the building will turn into a boutique hotel with 40 apartments, but it will fully recreate the original solution up to accessories, painting walls, dishes and other little things. Fortunately, as the doctor of art history Vladimir Sedov noted at a press conference, we almost 100% know what the house looked like, so there will be no fantasies during the restoration. They decided to attract the public to such a significant event by arranging an exhibition in the Museum of Architecture.
It took a long and difficult time to reach the current decision on restoration. For the city authorities, the house was like a thorn in the eye - foreigners go to it in shoals, architects arrange excursions, and pieces fall off in front of the sightseers, it's a shame to show it. Paradoxically, for the city, the monument, apparently, did not represent any value for a long time - remember at least that it simply was not on the general plan of 1935. Fortunately, the change in the stylistic course from the avant-garde to Stalinist classicism did not end in tragedy for the house, at one time they forgot about the Ginzburg house - it was not even rebuilt, it came down to us "as it was", but it was not repaired either, so it is very authentic (preserved fragments of plaster from 80 years ago), but also very dilapidated.
With the beginning of the rehabilitation of the avant-garde in the post-Soviet period, people started talking about the house, but its conservation did not happen. Passive contemplation of the picture of the further destruction of the monument was partly due to the fact that until recently it could not be divided in any way - a variety of organizations with mutually exclusive projects tried on the building. An absurd situation, given that foreigners have been beating drums for several years already, putting the Narkomfin House in the first place on the list of 100 main buildings in the world threatened with destruction at the request of the Moscow Heritage Institute.
Fortunately, "MIAN" appeared on the horizon at a time when the house could still be restored - if we stretch out for a few more years, we could completely lose the monument, says the grandson of Moisey Ginzburg, Alexey, who, symbolically, is engaged in a project to restore the house.
The current transfer of the building to private ownership is not a tragedy, said MUAR director David Sargsyan, since “only having different forms of financing and property, we can save historical architectural objects today”. Italians, Sargsyan noted, still live in Palladio's villas and in numerous palazzo, but it never even occurs to anyone to rebuild something in order to improve their living conditions. The main thing is that after the restoration the feeling of touching a real thing, a genuine structure, is preserved, Vladimir Sedov emphasized, and this, in principle, is possible, as the Germans showed, by restoring their Bauhaus down to the original material of window sills and door handles.
The leitmotif of the exhibition at MUAR was the wittily noted parallel between the ideal of socialist settlement, to which Ginzburg was striving, and the way of life of modern man. At first glance, it is absurd that the mechanism of social sales, which was hardly introduced in the 1920s.by building communal houses with a socialized household block, today people of high income are voluntarily elected. It was a brilliant guess, ahead of even Le Corbusier. Trying to avoid the extremes of violent conversion to a new lifestyle, Moses Ginzburg introduced these principles into his home rather carefully, leaving the tenants with the right to choose. Then, by the way, there were also tougher experiments, which include the communes of Nikolaev and Kuzmin, about which Ginzburg wrote in the book "Housing". In those utopian projects, a person painted by the minute simply lost the right of any choice, getting up at the call of the radio room and falling asleep with the help of soporific substances in his "cell", which only remained the space of his private life. All the rest of the activity took place in the team, whether you want it or not, and the kitchen, bathroom and other household joys were not provided for on an individual basis.
Today, even what Ginzburg did seems to some people to be wild in the sense of communal life, although his version was very moderate - it was not for nothing that the project was called a "transitional type house." In any case, it was the specificity of life inherent in the planning that was one of the main issues in the event of a possible restoration, because finishing the bathrooms or kitchens means losing the authenticity of the monument, and without them, who will live here then? However, it is still not worth equating a house with a large communal apartment, as paradoxical as it may seem, on the contrary, all the "capitalist sentiments" were laid in it: two-level apartments, the people's commissar's penthouse and a winter garden on the roof. The type of a chamber hotel, which, as Aleksey Ginzburg noted, preserves the residential function of the building, was the best suited to this scheme. its authentic purpose.
Both buildings and the transition between them, as well as the park area in the project, are preserved. In the main 8-storey building, where Ginzburg designed apartments of different types for different families, there will now be hotel rooms, a reception, a hall, a cloakroom, a shop, and a lobby bar. The area of the 4-storey communal building will accommodate a meeting room, a business center, a conference hall, a foyer, a restaurant, and all of this is of a chamber scale, since the exclusive "avant-garde attraction" is designed for a very small number of guests.
The restoration survey of the house is still ongoing, for Russian restorers working with the avant-garde is a novelty, so the Germans will help. MIAN is going to spend $ 60 million on this project. As the chairman of the board of directors of MIAN, Alexander Senatorov, said at a press conference, the very fact that the monuments of the avant-garde can be restored, and even generate income, should pay attention to this empty niche, to the crumbling monuments - and nothing like Soviet houses- communes, as Vladimir Sedov noted, we will not find anywhere else in the world. The restoration is promised to be completed by 2011, so that in a few years, foreign avant-garde fans who used to come here to look at the emergency building with layers of fallen off plaster will be able to live here and, as they say, experience all the delights of socialist life.
