Today, fans of Soviet architecture associate Pavlov's name, first of all, with such buildings as the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute (CEMI), the Zhiguli technical center on Varshavskoye Shosse, the Main Computing Center of the USSR State Planning Committee on Sakharov Avenue. All of these are undoubtedly iconic works of modernism, a kind of icons and symbols of this style, but their fame sometimes overshadows the scale of the personality of their author and the versatility of his talent. Even in the announcements of the current exhibition, which were now and then met on the Internet, its hero appeared as “the architect of the“second wave”of Soviet modernism, but, fortunately, the exposition itself exhaustively represents all stages of Leonid Nikolaevich's work. Completed and competitive projects, paintings, sketches and drawings - there were so many materials that the exhibition barely fit into the suite of the Museum of Architecture. And, despite the fact that the expanded exposition is timed to coincide with Pavlov's centenary, which was celebrated in 2009, curator Anna Bronovitskaya decided to organize it not chronologically, but thematically. This approach fully justifies itself: all the most significant plots for the architect are structured and illustrated, and put together, they form an amazingly vivid puzzle, whose name is a happy creative destiny.
The very first hall of the exposition is dedicated to Pavlov himself and the city in which the master lived and worked. Here are his self-portrait, biographical documents, tablets with quotes from the famous "Extrem of Architecture", as well as the architect's proposals from the 1960s-1970s to transform the capital of the Soviet state. These works are striking in their scale, modernist scope, freedom in dealing with the existing buildings. In particular, Pavlov was extremely worried about the issue of transport infrastructure, well aware of the pace of motorization of the population, he put the construction of roads almost above all other aspects of the city's development. It is from these considerations that the architect decisively cuts Moscow along the north-south axis with a multi-lane highway (in the most densely built-up areas it was supposed to be raised on supports), and in the eastern half of the city he designs a new wide avenue - a mirror repetition of Novy Arbat. Pavlov suggested that Zamoskvorechye should be freed from development altogether (only some of the most significant monuments are preserved) and turned into a giant park, in which only a few large complexes will be located. And although today such a project is quite shocking with its radicalism, it seems very correct that the exhibition begins with him - the scale of Pavlov's personality is immediately obvious. And this scale is mesmerizing.
The compositional center of the exposition is the Information Hall, dedicated to projects of various data storages, from libraries and the editorial office of the Izvestia newspaper (competition project of 1967), to scientific institutes and computing centers. Pavlov became the first architect in the USSR to design buildings for working with computers, and found a very visible architectural image for this most mysterious and "promising" device of his time. The plastic analogue of the computer has become a cube placed on giant triangular supports (the author himself jokingly called them "adimarips", reading the opposite word "pyramid") and "wrapped" in narrow stripes of windows imitating strings of numbers and symbols. This technique was developed and "perfected" by the architect in the projects of all computing centers, which he carried out by order of the State Planning Commission, the Central Statistical Administration and the State Bank of the USSR. The exhibition presents numerous sketches that clearly illustrate the process of searching for an image that has become canonical, Pavlov's paintings dedicated to computing centers, photographs of completed objects made especially for this exposition by a remarkable architectural photographer Yuri Palmin. The entire corpus of materials dedicated to CEMI is located in the same hall: plans, sections, photographs. There is also a model of this building made specially for the exhibition, as if folded from two plates-halves: it helps, at least in miniature, to evaluate the entire poetry of Pavlov's plastic design (in reality, it is almost impossible to see CEMI as the author intended it to be high-rise residential buildings are built close to each other). And the famous "ear" on the model, by the way, looks much more like a Mobius strip (as, in fact, it was intended) than life-size.
"Information" was housed in the largest hall of the Enfilade, from which the wings of the exposition scatter in different directions - other, no less significant, but less realized in practice themes of Pavlov's work. It is connected with the main staircase and the first biographical hall by the "Theater", "Transport" and "Palace", and on the opposite side there are "Memory" and "Lenin".
The theme of transport in Pavlov's work appeared twice - in the late 1940s he designed metro stations (Dobryninskaya, later - Serpukhovskaya and Nagatinskaya), in the 1960s - the first car service stations in Moscow. And if computing centers made Pavlov “the main one in science”, then the famous “triangle” of the workshop on Varshavskoe highway and the technical center “Kuntsevo” provided him with the status of the creator of a beautiful myth about the people's car and its accessibility. Of course, at the opening of the exhibition, much was said about the fact that today the triangular prism hovering over the stylobate is under threat of complete destruction (the city intends to build a shopping and entertainment center at the intersection of the Moscow Ring Road and Varshavskoye Shosse). They cause concern for the fate of this object and its photographs - the "triangle" is tightly boarded up with billboards of various calibers, and, of course, does not sound in full force.
"Palaces" and "Theaters" are a collection of projects that, alas, were not destined to be realized. However, this does not detract from their importance for the history of Soviet architecture - many of Pavlov's ideas and proposals were actively picked up by his colleagues in the workshop and spread throughout the Union. The most striking example of a project that, with the light hand of Pavlov, stepped into the masses, perhaps, should be considered a two-hall cinema with 4 thousand seats. At the exhibition, he is presented not only in sketches, but also in a model, thanks to which this project can be easily recognized even by those who have little interest in Leonid Nikolaevich and his time. The transparent volume is covered with an arched roof protruding above the entrance in the form of a strongly extended and effectively curved canopy. In this clear and ringing decision for the late 1950s, almost everything was unheard of freedom - both the interconnection of the interior with the external environment, and the cut made on the side facades - but such figurative courage easily overcame the barriers of conventions and prejudices. Already in 1961 in Moscow was built the cinema "Russia" (now "Pushkinskiy") - almost a complete copy of Pavlov's project. And how many "variations on the theme" have been implemented in other cities of the country, probably not a single architect will be able to calculate.
And although the exposition is not built according to the chronological principle, the halls "Memory" and "Lenin" quite logically turn out to be the final ones. In the 1970s, in connection with the centenary of the leader, Leniniana became the leading theme in the work of Leonid Pavlov, and the museum in Gorki became his last major completed building. The object, which, due to its monumentality, expressiveness and paradox, is unlikely to find a worthy match in the museum architecture of the 20th century, the architect himself called “my Parthenon”. Having realized at the end of his life his passionate dream to build a building in an exclusively natural environment, Leonid Pavlov simultaneously managed to create one of the first works of Soviet postmodernism. He was at that moment a little over 70 years old, but he, without hesitation, took up the development of the artistic language of the new style and succeeded. It seems that this openness and lightness was the main creative secret of the architect Leonid Pavlov, who captured in his works not only the image of the era, but also its main achievements and hopes.
