The equestrian center is a rather large structure, comparable to the yacht boathouse in the same place, in Pirogovo. For comparison: it would fit three collectible Pirogov villas-two thousand meters, about which so much was said last year. Villas, apparently, will not be built, at least not yet. And the stable is being built: in all respects, this is a more practical event - a new sport is being formed in Pirogov.
This does not mean that the architecture of the equestrian center is so simple - quite the contrary. She is more than full of allusions and ambitious in terms of meanings.
So: the building is a wooden peripter, that is, a rectangle surrounded by columns, with a gable roof and large triangular pediments at the ends. A third of the rectangle in its northern part is fenced off - this is a warm winter arena. Two thirds is open summer. The difference is clearly visible on the model: the roof over the summer part is glass with rare opaque stripes, the stripes thicken to the north and disappear to the south - forming a smooth transition from closeness to openness, however, in nature, only birds will be able to fully appreciate this technique.
As you can see, the rectangle is divided into two parts - therefore, if we continue to use the Greek terminology, which in our everyday consciousness is more suitable for temples than for stables - then we have before us not just a peripter, but a peripter with a peristyle (a courtyard surrounded by columns). The terminology, however, in this case is conditional.
Along the long western wall, the wooden peripter is "covered" by a structure of a different kind and with a different associative row. This brick building of a two-story hotel. It no longer looks like a temple, but like a fortress, and even more precisely - a monastery wall. The similarity is ensured by: whitewashing of brick walls, simple and not too abundant window openings, bending of the outer wall, and most importantly - buttresses that divide the walls into spans and "hold" the corners.
If we continue to refine the terminology, then the hotel does not even look like a wall, but like some 17th century cell building, renovated in the 18th century. Or to a monastery hotel … Often such buildings were built near the walls, and sometimes they even adjoined the walls, forming one whole with them. In a word, the sensations are more than "monastic".
The resulting combination is amazing. Wooden Greek temple behind the whitewashed wall of the Russian monastery.
Here it is necessary to make a reservation twice. Firstly, the main prototype of the temple-like stable is, of course, the Moscow Manezh. Burnt and reconstructed, showing the visitors of the exhibitions Betancourt beams interpreted by Pavel Andreev. The history of the Manezh is still very fresh, and the typology of the elite equestrian club in our country somehow cannot be said to have formed over the past 20 years of capitalism. It was here that the most famous, most sonorous Moscow prototype was taken as a model - the Manege of Alexander I was moved to the forests near Moscow.
This kind of transfer could not but affect the result. After all, you must admit that building an arena in the form of a Manege is quite logical, but building something equally white-stone in the forests and fields would be beyond good and evil, and what is most unpleasant, it could become like a Soviet cowshed. In the woods, a wooden one is appropriate, so the arena has become wooden.
But not everything is so simple. Here comes the "second": there are no wooden Greek peripters, and never were. More precisely, they were, but, as historians now believe, not in real life, but, let's say, in virtual life - on the pages of old textbooks. Where it is said that the order originated from a wooden post-and-beam system and where mythical wooden proto-columns are drawn, which no one has ever seen.
But now he will see! Because Nikolai Lyzlov is building exactly something similar: the wooden prototype of the peripter. Which was not. Image from the tutorial. Interpolation. The architect is well aware of the resulting effect and is willing to talk about it himself.
The great-image effect should be especially readable thanks to the material chosen by the client. The peripter should be built of lightly trimmed logs. Which turned out to be a difficult and expensive business: glued timber is cheaper and much easier to handle. However, having hesitated, the customer still insisted on the implementation of the original "dense" idea. So the image of the column-tree here will be literal - not the image of the trunk, but the trunk itself.
The wooden peripter from the textbook is the most learned of the images present in the Pirogov equestrian center. But he also has an emotional background, not so abstruse and easy to read.
A year ago, Grigory Revzin wrote about Nikolai Lyzlov's "collection" Pirogovskaya villa (house 1, house 2) and compared it to the "tent of the last tourist" in terms of the degree of immersion in nature. It seems to me that this comparison stuck, and to some extent it is also relevant in the case of our wooden temple-arena.
After all, what was the happiness and rest of an intellectual? For some - go to the forest with a tent and merge with nature through fishing. For others - to climb not just into the forest, but into some special wilderness and find there some kind of wooden (and, if you're lucky, a brick) old ruin. Or drive to the northern village and find there a half-abandoned wooden temple and a spinning wheel at the same time. From time to time, churches were transported to monasteries and museums of wooden architecture were organized there.
Here is the feeling of a tourist who got out of the forest to the nearest monastery-museum, and now walks around the white brick walls, and from behind the walls you can see some kind of tent-roofed wooden temple from a completely different place - and everything is entirely very subtle and romantic, the museum itself is also half-abandoned and relatively wild - this feeling, which is very close to me personally, Nikolai Lyzlov managed to catch and convey in his strange ensemble of a wooden peripter and a brick "cell building".
In addition to the "scholarly problem" with a wooden pro-order and the described emotional background, the project has one more characteristic feature: this is the most classic of Nikolai Lyzlov's projects known to me at the moment. In the city, this architect is much more restrained and minimalistic, although several times he has already been seen addressing the classical motives “hidden” in the modernism of the seventies. Here, the topic "from textbooks" is quite obvious, however, it is turned into a kind of architectural joke, almost an installation - look, they say, how your wooden Greek temples would look if you crossed them with a hut on chicken legs … This is quite in the spirit of Pirogov: turn the building into a full-fledged art object.
