Until recently, the existing dormitory of the Moscow State Conservatory could be used as a scenery for filming a horror film. Tiny 12-meter rooms, in which 2-3 students live, stuffy tutoring in basements, showers with always clogged gutters and lush mold on the walls … In the last couple of years, the leadership of the renowned university still found funds for partial renovation of the hostel, and the most egregious the problems were eliminated, but this did not save us from the acute shortage of square meters for living and rehearsals. And when the studio ordered a project for the reconstruction of the dormitory, the architects almost immediately suggested not to build on the existing five-story buildings, but to disassemble them, not to try at the very least to reshape the existing layout - a meager legacy of the 1960s - but to build new housing for students, corresponding to all modern norms.
The proposed plan, of course, is tempting and noble, but the architect himself, and even more so the management of the Moscow City Conservatory, was aware of its flip side: the phases of "demolition of old buildings" and "commissioning of new ones" will inevitably be separated by a rather long period of time, during which future musicians also need to live somewhere … This is how the idea of a three-part composition of the renovated hostel arose: first, one new building is erected and the inhabitants of one of the existing buildings move into it, then the first five-story building is demolished and a second new volume is erected in its place, into which residents are already moving in. the second five-story building, after which it will be safely liquidated, giving way to a new building.
The building site is located ten minutes walk from the Belorusskaya metro station and is bounded on the southern side by Zoologichesky lane, on the western side - by Malaya Gruzinskaya street. The existing buildings face the street with their main facades, that is, most of the windows of the hostel open onto a rather noisy transport artery. Andreev puts his three residential parallelepipeds perpendicular to the road, and, perhaps, with this simple town-planning gesture, the architect's real concern for the everyday comfort of the future Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky begins. Of course, while designing a dormitory for 900 people on a 0.81 hectare site, it was not possible to get away from the corridor system. But on the other hand, what's wrong with the corridor, on both sides of which are conveniently planned and large rooms (each has a bathroom)? Kitchens, special ironing, drying and linen rooms are also designed on each floor of the new dormitory. There are also two-room apartments in residential buildings for family students and visiting teachers, and on the ground floor there are 5 rooms for disabled people.
In total, the complex of the renovated hostel will include five volumes - three of the already mentioned residential ones (the central building will have 14-15 floors, two flanking it - 12-13 floors each) and two low-rise ones designed to accommodate non-residential premises needed by students. A three-storey block with an assembly and cinema-concert halls is shifted to the left of the high-rise composition, and an elongated two-storey building with entrance lobbies, a pass office, a cafe and a canteen, as well as a gymnasium and a swimming pool serves as a support for the two outer towers. It is noteworthy that all the tutoring centers located here have overhead lights - the flat roof of the stylobate is literally "quilted" with the lenses of the skylights.
The facades facing Malaya Gruzinskaya Street will not leave passers-by with doubts that in front of them is a building that is most directly related to the music field. This accessory is intended to emphasize the contrasting combination of light facades and dark glazing planes: the pattern of the windows of the residential blocks really reminds of an accordion keyboard, and the facade of the stylobate part is designed as a score, the role of individual notes on which is played by windows placed at different heights. Whether some kind of melody will really be written on the building with the help of window openings and whether it will suit the students of the composition department of the Moscow Conservatory is still an open question. However, these are already details. The main thing is that a precedent has been created in the capital when a hostel - a genre that has always been considered the most uncreative among architects - is decided as a building not only comfortable, but also aesthetically attractive.
