We have already written about the project of an office building on the Mozhaisk highway. It consists of a giant 11-storey arch, crossed by the "nose" of a glass volume passing through it. The line of Kutuzovsky Prospekt, passing into the Mozhaisk highway, bends slightly and deviates to the left of the axis, says Alexey Bavykin. Therefore, its arch, although it does not stand in the center of the highway, but on the right, turns out to be strictly on the geometric axis of the Beauvais arch. Nearby there is a very long panel house, which has been successfully moved away from the red line of the highway. There is a square in front of the house, and nothing blocks the imaginary "ray" between the two arches. The square will be put in order and will turn into an addition - the parterre of the Bavykinskaya arch, maximally revealing the perspective of it from the center.
Therefore, the Bavykin Arch can be imagined as an imprecise projection of the Beauvais Arch in perspective, made with a large obscura camera. As if someone from the hotel "Ukraine" shone a flashlight on the Arc de Triomphe, and far behind it put a screen and a giant shadow of the arch was projected onto it - and, like in a theater of shadows, took on a life of its own - it became three-span. In addition, the Bavykin Arch was not in the center, but on the edge of the highway, and half of it “broke off” in the fight against the modernist city. This makes the arch look like an ancient ruin and evokes associations with a dilapidated bridge or aqueduct - at the Golden Section, the architect accompanied his project with a photograph of the Roman bridge, Emilia Lepidus, which was similarly broken in half. However, the main prototype is not an aqueduct, but an arch, and it is the Bove Arch standing in the future, says Alexey Bavykin.
The changes that have taken place in the project over the past six months have made it more coherent and made it possible to more accurately reveal the topic. Firstly, in the “broken” span of the arch, all the windows that previously looked like quadras that had fallen out of the masonry disappeared. The architect managed to assemble in this place elevators and other communications that do not need external windows. Outwardly, it looks as if the Cyclopean masonry was repaired, the holes were repaired. That is - Alexey Bavykin, in the design process, "restored" his not yet built ruin.
The second change - the modernist glass volume lost the trunk-like columns of a specific tree order, invented by Bavykin in 1994 for the portico of a village villa and recently implemented in Bryusov Lane. The rough supports disappeared - the architect spread the themes, left the trees to Bryusov, and here he sharpened the main theme - the arched one.
And, finally, the third and most interesting thing - inside, in the upper part of the span of the "whole" arch, the architect managed to design an atrium. It is known that the atrium is a sore and very favorite topic of our "wallets". After their enthusiasm for the late 1980s, Moscow now has a dark atriums. But there is no such thing. Usually atriums are courtyards covered with a glass roof; Bavykin recently made one of these in a residential building in Bryusov Lane. And here there is no roof, no yard. The atrium, three stories high, is arranged under a concrete cylindrical vault. Thus, the arch that we see from the outside is not an illusion painted on the facade, it is completely real, without deception. The arch is entirely inside and, probably, it will create a rare space there, similar to the Roman baths. The bend of the concrete vault, on the right and left - glass walls, in the middle - a bridge that allows you to walk from impost to impost.
Alexey Bavykin considers the arch on the Mozhaisk highway to be his programmatic work. What is interesting, because now our architects very rarely call their things software. And Bavykin calls this project fundamentally important for himself. This is the first of the objects under construction, in which one of the main themes of this architect is so clearly and obviously reflected, which, according to Alexei Bavykin's own words, is the combination of “culture one and culture two”. The first clearly means modernism, the second is more complicated. This seems to be historicism, but if you look closely, it’s not quite it.
Long ago, in 1984, for the 2001 Style competition, Aleksey Bavykin made an architectural object very similar to a bronze sculpture. This sculpture is a model of a glass building, in one of the corners of which a cast of the skyscraper-column of Adolph Loos is taken out. As it is now well known (see article by Grigory Revzin), this competition turned out to be fundamental for many "paper architects": Yuri Avvakumov chose the avant-garde there, Mikhail Filippov chose the classics, and Alexei Bavykin began to search for either collision or reconciliation, but one way or another existence of both together. We can say that at that time young Russian architects took the competition task very seriously, thought about the future and issued - each for himself - plans for the 21st century. Sooner or later, one way or another, but they consistently implement them.
Since then, Loos's column, and this bronze sculpture-model itself, have become a symbol of Bavykin's workshop, and I must say that today this workshop has probably the most meaningful and "speaking" logo in Moscow, because it is straightforward and visually embodies what Alexey Bavykin calls his artistic program. Generally speaking, this artistic program has three component parts: the continuation of the search for the Russian avant-garde of the 1930s, the combination of “culture one and culture two” and emphasized attention to the town-planning significance of each object.
The three parts of the Bavykin program are interconnected: it was on the verge of the 20s and 30s of the XX century, when the first type of modernism - avant-garde, architecture of abstract forms, was going to be replaced by a new embodiment of the classic theme - Art Deco, in different countries there were several landmark works - just those that are between cultures "one" and "two". In which the interaction of two antagonistic directions was considered not in a decorative way, as they began to do later, but more structurally. As if the avant-gardists, having carefully cleaned the architectural form from all unnecessary, thought about its foundations, about classical archetypes, and began to identify these archetypes.
It must be said, however, that this was mainly done by such avant-garde artists, who used to be strong classicists - they were probably worried about their own classical training, sprouting somehow not from the outside, but “from the inside” in their projects and buildings. Two characteristic architects of this short direction - Adolf Loos in Austria and Ilya Golosov in our country - are Alexei Bavykin's favorite authors. These experiments on the "manifestation" of classical forms from within the modernist ones continued, as it was said, for a very short time, they exist at the turning point and are quickly washed away by the main wave of Art Deco. Alexei Bavykin seemingly seeks to "pull out" this fleeting tendency and allow it to develop, and this is done without the slightest shade of irony, but quite seriously, and therefore, although the postmodern roots of his idea are obvious, this is not postmodernism as such. This is some kind of milestone revival, the revival of what has not developed on the verge between the avant-garde and a new wave of classical forms.
The main feature of the direction is that the classical forms are rethought as very large. And thus they are transferred from the rank of decor to the scale of volume. Loos's idea of making a skyscraper in the form of a column and Golosov's idea of turning the corner rotunda of a house into a large muffled column are very related in this respect. This enlargement of usually medium-sized elements to the scale of a building finds its closest relative in the "speaking" architecture of the avant-garde - in star houses, tractor houses and other structures that took enlarged symbols or enlarged equipment as a model. By the way, Alexey Bavykin also has a restaurant in the form of a frying pan.
In other words, when the avant-garde architects began to think about how to reconcile their search for a pure form with their academic training, instead of a tank house they tried to make a column house. Seeing this, the architect Alexei Bavykin, in turn, thought - maybe this is generally a fundamental way out, a resolution of antagonism? He already has at least two column houses, inspired by Loos ("2001 style") and Golosov (a building in the 3rd Avtozavodsky proezd, where the Golos corner cylinder is equipped with flutes, that is, his "column essence" is manifested in it). He also has an arch house.
Thus, the house-arch is the second significant attempt by Alexei Bavykin to beat in his architecture the non-peaceful coexistence of modernism and reinterpreted classical archetypes. There was a column, an arch appeared - this is similar to the second, next step on the topic. For the sake of fairness, it must be said that just as Loos and Golosov rethought the theme of the column, so did the neoclassical architects of the 1910s. they often turned to the theme of the triumphal arch, which, generally speaking, should be recognized as one of the fundamental for European architecture, if only because, in addition to the Roman and other emperors who built structures for themselves for military triumph, for a long time the architecture of Christian altars was solved in the form of triumphal arches. temples. An arch is no less an archetype than a column. Here, “in the fight against modernism,” half of it broke off, the entire decoration disappeared, the forms became laconic, but the meaning remained. She even grew up and promises to be very, very noticeable on Mozhaika.
