Generally speaking, a book is a natural stage in any long-term creative path, and Nikolai Malinin, who began publishing at the age of 17 (“as a local historian,” he invariably emphasizes), can boast of that. However, quite often the collected works for the reporting period remain a lifetime monument, pleasantly tickling the author's vanity, but not very noticeable to everyone else. Malinin turned out differently: collected together, his articles about the buildings of the late 1990s and early 2000s, put together a motley and very curious puzzle called "architecture of new Russia", supplemented by a 14-page preface about the history and possible ways of development of Russian architecture over the past 20 years.
While working on this project, Nikolai told his colleagues that the book would be titled “The 100 Best Buildings in Moscow in the Last 20 Years”. However, now that the book is ready, there are discrepancies on at least two points. Firstly, there are not a hundred objects, but 108. Secondly, to assert that all these 108 are the best would be a very big courage. However, Malinin does not even evaluate them as purely architectural works. Strictly speaking, he never wrote for and about architects at all. Maintaining the most friendly relations with their camp, he did not seek to rank himself with him professionally, always emphasizing that real life is much more interesting to him than the proportions of the order themselves. For Malinin, architecture is not frozen music, but an integral part of life, flesh of the flesh of the state in which it is created, its politics, economy, features of social life and mentality.
As for the content of the book, it includes objects, of which not everyone can boast of an impeccable quality of form, but all of them are definitely the most noticeable. Whichever page you open, you will see buildings that in any, even the shortest conversation about this era, it is impossible not to mention. Hotel Balchug, Gorbachev Foundation, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, McDonald's in Gazetny Pereulok, shopping center Nautilus, House-Egg, Patriarch. Also included is the "most luxurious unfinished" business center "Zenith" on Vernadsky Prospekt, better known to the general public as "Kristall". Objects that have always been opposed to these buildings in terms of their architectural merits are, of course, also included in the book - the Mayakovsky Museum, the International Moscow Bank, the Infobank building on Vernadsky Avenue and the high-tech Alexander Asadov on Krasnoselskaya (reconstruction of the Transrailservice building) … All these years, Malinin meticulously collected manifestations of high-quality architecture on Moscow streets, however, the buildings are mixed in the book, and one can only be separated from the other by looking at the illustrations and reading the texts. In this, perhaps, there is some drawback of the publication, but this can also be considered the principled position of Malinin - truly high-quality, whether high-tech, postmodern or environmental, architecture would never have appeared in our country without Nautilus, Patriarch and Balchug ". One would not have grown without the other, and separating flowers from litter is the task that the author entrusts to the reader.
“What role did architecture play in this celebration of life? And was she? There is a widespread belief that it was not. That everything is just a construction boom and a triumph of real estate … Does this mean that there is no interesting architecture in the city of Moscow? Of course not. Another thing is that it turns out to be truly fascinating not when analyzing formal features, but when measuring it in some other categories. City, history, economy, art, the personality of a customer or an architect … Therefore, each text of this book is not an art history analysis, but an attempt to tell a story. " This honest warning from the author is the key to understanding the creative method of the critic Malinin. If the house has a story, he will certainly tell it, if not, he will come up with it, because without "musical accompaniment" nowhere. A review of the residential complex "Ambassadorial House", which in Borisoglebsk, opposite the house-museum of Marina Tsvetaeva, he builds on the poetic lines of the poetess, Asadova tells about the new building, quoting the lines found by Yandex from the poem "The Architect" by Eduard Asadov, the facade built for the editorial office newspaper "Extra M" compares the office building on 2-nd Tverskaya-Yamskaya with the layout of the newspaper itself and along the way talks about how it was invented. In general, Malinin draws allusions from anywhere - from the history of domestic and world, sports and gossip, movies and popular songs.
One of the favorite professional jokes of this author is: "It's much easier to write about a bad building than about a good one." I don't know how easy it was for Nikolai to write his ironic reviews, but the fact that the longest texts were written on the most odious buildings of the past decades is a fact. 3 spreads are dedicated to Balchug, with a detailed analysis of such a phenomenon as the "Moscow style" and its most striking manifestation - the turrets, 4 spreads have been written about the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and more about Ton and the history of creation and explosion than about reconstruction and its main author Mikhail Posokhin. There are also four about Triumph-Palace, and after that, excerpts from an interview with its author Andrei Trofimov are given. It must be said that the description of this object turned out to be one of the most dramatic in terms of the intensity of passions and clearly demonstrates the compromises that modern architects and those who write about them have to make. Trofimov himself does not hide: “The idea of the“eighth skyscraper”also came from the customer. My task was to execute it professionally … But, to be honest, it still seems to me that it was possible to invest in this project a little more modernity … Because in a hundred years they will start to get confused. " And Malinin adds on his own behalf: “It's a shame that I included Triumph Palace in the“top ten buildings in Moscow in 2005”. He turned it on, because that was the request of the management of the magazine in which he served. Where the main advertiser was, guess who. But it’s not even a shame for a compromise, but for the fact that I tried to convince myself in every possible way that Triumph-Palace was not so bad. And that he corrected himself, and got accustomed, and that in general "Moscow will digest everything."
It hardly corresponds to the genre of the guide indicated in the title of the book. Formal signs, it would seem, are met - and the format is quite pocketable, and there is a map with the designations of all objects. But the buildings were selected not by geography, but by the year of construction, and it is not very easy to find the house of interest by the address in the book. And most importantly, the texts themselves for brief informational notes about objects that tourists like to study so much, walking around the attraction around, are completely different. In addition to the fact that they are very voluminous (only those of them that were once published in Shtab-kvartir magazine differ in relative brevity), they are also very personal, that is, they require very thoughtful reading, which is not always assumed in cult trips. … And the "newspaper and magazine" origin of some descriptions is very much felt, somewhere at the level of slang, and somewhere because of the mentions of momentary realities, which today are more likely to puzzle the reader. For example, a review of the Synagogue on Bolshaya Bronnaya (“The Architectural Workshop of Sergei Estrin”) ends with a postscript: “The author has done it. I wrote about a “bold architectural solution” that looks like a challenge, and the young bully Alexander Koptsev immediately reacted to the challenge. But that's another story". Who remembers today the name of the extremist who staged a massacre in the synagogue? And, most importantly, why inscribe it in the annals of history?
But there is no doubt that you cannot throw out of history what has been built in Moscow over the past 20 years. Attempts to generalize this experience and publish it in the form of a guidebook have been made before (just remember the book by A. Latour "Moscow 1890-2000" and the project C: SA), but the atlas of modern architecture, written with such passion and passion, is being published in the capital for the first time.
