Unfortunately, the architecture of the recent past is still falling out of professional consciousness, it lacks a comprehensive study, art criticism, and architectural analysis. In the minds of the layman, "architecture" ends with the beginning of the 1960s, the onset of the era of faceless industrial housing construction. The fate of the legacy of the next two decades is even sadder - its archetypal image - the Brezhnev regional committee, heavy and boring cubes, gray, gloomy buildings.
The creative heyday of Ilya Chernyavsky fell precisely at this difficult time for the profession, the era of Khrushchev's "primitivization" and the struggle against "excesses", decorative, compositional, etc., when every notion of art was sometimes washed out of architecture. In his youth, Chernyavsky had to fight at the front, at the time of his creative maturity - in the professional field, for the right to artistic imagery, to the individual appearance of the projected buildings.
A collection of works by Ilya Chernyavsky is kept in the MUAR. According to the compiler of the monograph, Victoria Krylova, much of the architect's legacy has been lost, in particular, large charcoal and pastel sketches have almost completely disappeared. In a word, almost everything that was found was included in the current monograph, and some of the original drawings could be seen live at the mini-exhibition preceding the large exposition expected next fall at Zodchestvo. The idea of the book about Chernyavsky belongs to the famous art critic Andrei Gozak, who planned to publish it on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the architect's birth. It was financially supported by a number of major Moscow architects - Dmitry Bush, Yuri Grigoryan, Sergei Skuratov, Boris Levyant, Mikhail Khazanov. To date, however, only 500 copies have been published, but one more batch is expected from the Tatlin publishing house for the autumn exhibition.
As it turned out at the presentation, many of the architects who came are Chernyavsky's colleagues and students. Although he did not officially have his own school, today many proudly consider themselves his students, among them, for example, Viktor Logvinov and Boris Shabunin. Those who were familiar with Chernyavsky remembered him as an architect of incredibly strong will. He was stubborn and demanding of himself, and at the same time surprisingly intelligent and even gentle. Due to his creative intransigence, he often listened to comments addressed to him, but this only made him more active. For example, according to the recollections of his colleagues, at a time when there was nothing to think about the scenery, he went to Gzhel many times, copied decorative motifs from trays, and then "punched" all these details in his project.
Ilya Chernyavsky began working in the studio of Lev Rudnev, one of the prominent neoclassicists - which probably influenced his creative principles: even in the era of universal unification, he never neglected the artistic image. In Chernyavsky's interpretation, modernism lost its sterility and acquired increased expression, from functionalist transparency of plans it evolved to a complex composition. Its architecture looks light and free - it’s even strange to hear all the time that it was born hard. According to the recollections of his contemporaries, Chernyavsky "sculpted" his future buildings on scraps of paper - such as the sketches of the concert hall-plate in Adler, presented at the exhibition - and then took a long time to bring them to mind.
His best works were created in the field of resort construction: sanatoriums, rest homes, pioneer camps, etc. In the seventies, this genre was a kind of outlet for architectural creativity. The culture of Soviet recreation is generally a very curious and original phenomenon, the roots of which go back to the 1920s with their positivist ideas of precisely measured, useful and correct pastime of the working people. It was impossible to save money on the rest of a Soviet person, for a worker - only all the best, if a pioneer camp - then as in the movie "Welcome or No Unauthorized Entry", if a sanatorium - so a semblance of earthly paradise. Here the general economy and typification could in some way yield to the creative will of the architect - especially in those cases when it came to "tsekov" rest houses.
The most famous building of Chernyavsky - the sanatorium in Voronovo - was designed in the spirit of the best ensembles of the 1960s, such as the Children's Musical Theater Sats or the Palace of Pioneers on Sparrow Hills in Moscow. The plan is based on a system of intricate compositional connections, the forms are unique and expressive.
As sounded at the evening, the formula of Ilya Chernyavsky's architecture can be expressed in a small sketch of the architect (which Viktor Logvinov found in his archive). In the center there is an (almost Masonic) triangle - a symbol of creation, with the sides "unity" - "synthesis" - "architecture", from which the rays that make it up - "economy", "technology", "environment", "plastic", "Sun", "light", "color", "tectonics", "proportion", "scale", "time", "space", "texture", "rhythms", "movement".
The circuit is like the sun and looks very perfect; one can feel in it the desire to find a certain universal - a formula, or something. To add the whole meaning of the art of architecture into something very capacious, such that would give answers to all questions - well, or at least, would allow at least a step, but really approach the absolute truth. All this is somehow very characteristic - both the sun and a sincere striving for the ideal - society, man, communism, after all, then many sincerely believed in "real communism." The desire to act actively and do something real and necessarily - progressively moving forward. All this idealism was characteristic, frankly, both of the sixties and the best people of the era of stagnation. Such periods of love for ideal forms and schemes generally occur in the history of architecture - remember the same Masons of the 18th century or the Empire style of the early 19th century. And one can imagine how hard it was for the architects of the "seventies", who were forced to put their idealism, for the most part, on the table. Chernyavsky was still lucky - although it is not so easy to inspect his sanatorium Voronovo in nature (it is guarded with passion), but it is included in many textbooks, ours and foreign. The appearance of the book is another step in recognition.
