Architect Oleg Karlson builds private country houses, sometimes very large, rather palaces than houses, estates with chic and grand scale. One of the features of such an order is that his work is little known: not all customers are ready to publish their houses, and the stand at Zodchestvo became the first "publication" of one of Oleg Karlson's new buildings, the Modern estate near Moscow, construction which was completed in 2009. I must say that there were somehow noticeably more spectators around this stand in the Manezh, they crowded in front of it, looked at it, discussed it - even from the outside it was clearly noticeable that the house aroused the genuine interest of fellow architects.
The second feature of private ordering is that the majority of clients (not that the absolute majority, but probably ninety percent) prefer historical styles. In this case, the client asked the architect to build an Art Nouveau house. The reason for this wish was not so much aesthetic as, let's say, genealogy: the ancestors of the hostess (and the house was built for her anniversary) owned, among other things, a house on the Volga, built in the early 20th century in the Art Nouveau style.
Oleg Karlson and the architects of his bureau, who had already built many private houses of various sizes and styles, took the task as a kind of professional challenge and began work on the project by studying books about modernity and its monuments, from “immersion in style”. Traveled through Europe, studying the buildings of the beginning of the century; carried away by collecting and restoring furniture of this time. Strictly speaking, Oleg Karlson, as he himself admits, set himself the ultimate task completely independently. To some extent, this decision was influenced by the location - the house is located in the village, the general plan of which was made by Ilya Utkin. The general plan was not fully realized, but Utkin built two houses on one of the main streets of the village; Oleg Karlson's "modern estate" was just between them. The authority of Ilya Utkin, the famous "wallet", custodian of the heritage and master classicist, in many ways determined the "bar" - thus, a purely creative task was added to the main "dynastic" motivation of the customer: to penetrate the principles of building modern architecture and make a high-quality, reliable stylization … It is all the more interesting to consider what happened.
The architect, of course, could not exactly repeat any example of the Art Nouveau style of the early 20th century. First of all, for the most banal reason: stylization by stylization, and the house should be modern and provide its inhabitants with a significant part of the benefits of modern civilization: garages for several cars, including for the service personnel and security, a pool inside the house (we will return to it later). Of the special amenities, we will name one: an underground passage is arranged between the guard house and the main house, so that in bad weather the owners can get out of the car and enter the house without getting wet from the rain (“do not fall under the stones from the sky” - the architect jokingly explains) … In addition, the scale and size of the house is also quite modern, and does not at all appeal, as one might think, to historical palaces: the “two thousandth house” (the area of the main house of the “Modern manor” is 1700 meters) has become a kind of standard over the past 10 years a rich house near Moscow. However, in the Art Nouveau era, the typology of the palace did not work out at all - the palaces remained in the 19th century, reviving later, in the 1910s, but already in the style of neoclassicism. Modern built: railway stations, passages, multi-storey apartment buildings, and as private housing - wooden suburban dachas and stone city mansions. Therefore, even the phrase "Modern estate" sounds a little unexpected: at the beginning of the 20th century, the manors with their cherry orchards and the Art Nouveau with its dachas, for the placement of which these very gardens were cut down, were rather antagonists. In a word, the typology of a country palace in the Art Nouveau style had to be invented by the architects in many ways.
Let's look at the plan. Three symmetrical gates go out onto the street, a wide straight alley starts from the central ones, which leads to the main entrance to the house; the scheme is completely classic. But the house itself is sharply moved away from the central one to the right and the main entrance is located in the extreme left projection. At this point, the house and the main alley intersect and from this intersection of the two most important things a kind of "main point" of entry is obtained, which, moreover, is located almost in the very middle of the park. Modern allowed such things, he was very fond of non-trivial, asymmetric solutions. According to Oleg Karlson, the asymmetrical plan was inspired by the layout of the neighboring plot of Ilya Utkin: there the house is also shifted from the axis to the right.
However, the asymmetry of the location of the main house is superimposed on superimposed on the "estate" - the classic symmetrical scheme of the park with a central axis. As if there was an old park with an alley, and then a new owner came and put the new house not in the center, but in his own way, as it was fashionable at the beginning of the 20th century. If you look closely at the plan of the house itself, then you can also find a similar overlap in it, only more complex. Just looking at the plan, we see: in the middle of the house there is a classic Palladian "peace" (the letter "P", a building with two projections), from which asymmetrical wings with wings extend to the left and right. It is fashionable to think that the same (imaginary) heir took the old manor house and rebuilt it in a new style, replacing the portico with a loggia, adding a gazebo, a bay window … He broke the parterre in the fountain in front of the loggia (according to classical logic, the main alley was supposed to lead just here, but she walks to the left, and the parterre has turned into a front, and at the same time a chamber, closed by a lattice, a public garden with benches and urns.”Of course, there was never such a story with the heir, because the matter is even more complicated.
The house, which looks like one large palace from the outside, in fact, says the architect, consists of three parts. On the left - the main house itself, the dwelling of the owners, which is also planned by "peace" and is almost symmetrical. In its left risalit there is the aforementioned main entrance - a deep (6x5 meters) porch leading to a relatively narrow vestibule. Having entered there, you need to turn right and cross a very small vestibule to get into a vast two-story space with a staircase to the second floor. The staircase leads upstairs to the bedrooms, and from the hall you can either go forward - to the daily dining room and kitchen (20 meters each), or, turning left - to the front part, stretched along the house from the garden side: another dining room (painted plafond, wooden cabinets, high backs of chairs, the solemnity of a family dinner), then a pink piano, a giant fireplace-sculpture, sofas, pillows, bent legs … For greater integrity of the space, the walls are replaced by wide arches that serve more for framing than for limiting - and it looks like a 'long hall', a gallery-living room of English country palaces.
On the right, the main residential building is adjoined by a series of high double-height spaces: a winter garden (accessed from the front dining room), a swimming pool with a humped bridge thrown over it, and a sauna - a typical modern spa, forming a perpendicular axis with a solemn exit to the parterre garden with a fountain … The entire spa is housed under a common glass roof that slopes down towards the park - this overhead light lends the imposing space a similarity to 19th century passages. In keeping with this analogy, the architect himself calls it an “inner street”.
To this "street" on the opposite side (that is, to the right and to the west) is adjoined by another house, a little less than the master's - the guest house; it was originally intended for the parents of the owners. Three complexes: the main house, the atrium and the guest block are strung on one longitudinal (along the street) axis, similar to a palace suite. In any case, a walk along it promises a constant change of impressions: the spacious, high, open is replaced by the closed and chamber, wooden, parquet, carpet, and cozy. The axis unites all three houses into one complex, and they turn out to be fused into a kind of "town".
This comparison is not accidental. Outside, the house-palace really looks like a series of different Art Nouveau mansions merged into one street. They are different, and the viewer walking around the house from the outside has no chance of getting bored: somewhere there is more sculpture, somewhere the majolica frieze is leading, somewhere there are giant windows. By the way, there was a story in the windows: modern double-glazed windows, as you know, are more suitable for large forms than for small ones that Art Nouveau loved; therefore, the most common way to imitate historical "carpentry" is now gluing pseudo-frames on top of a glass plane. The architect did not make such a decision, the windows had to be redone: now the frames and the double-glazed windows themselves are naturally curved with a modernist outline. Although they are forcedly larger than the authentic ones, they support well the overall striated graphics of the facades.
The main thing in this house, of course, is the decor. The house consists of decor, outside and inside it is literally woven from dense decorative "fabric", constantly reminding by the curves of lines that we are dealing with modernity. Different materials: reliefs, forging, majolica, patterns of windows, not only in curved frames, but also in stained-glass windows act according to the "relay race" scheme, transferring the viewer's attention from one to another and constantly offering a new spectacle.
Stucco moldings, majolica, and many other decorative details outside and inside are made according to the sketches of the artist Pavel Orinyansky. Oleg Karlson considers co-authorship with this artist very important in this project, with which one cannot but agree - there is a lot of decor, it, as befits in Art Nouveau, becomes a necessary part of architecture, and architecture, in turn, operates with panels, reliefs, cabinets and other as with their tools.
More importantly, the abundant decor is made so carefully, meticulously and accurately that the jewelry acquires, willy-nilly, a new quality: we are dealing here with high-class craftsmanship. “We designed and built this house for a long time, almost five years,” says Oleg Karlson. They painted everything themselves, both the landscape of the park and the interiors. Ultimately, under our leadership, 20 workshops of various specializations worked on the "Modern estate": reliefs, forged lattices, majolica, most of the furniture - all this from beginning to end was done under our supervision, we, as architects, practically did not leave the object. " For example, architects have been looking for a floor tile suitable for the turn of the XIX-XX centuries for a long time, until they found the desired sample at the Barcelona exhibition. Some of the furniture was purchased from the Italian factory Medea, but the Art Nouveau collection there turned out to be so small that the architects ordered a lot from their own drawings; drew a lot of built-in wardrobes, panels, screens and more. The house, both outside and inside, is decorated like a precious box.
This approach provides a completely different, unusually high, level of artisan quality in all the details, and at the same time the coherence and thoughtfulness of the whole. The authors call it “total design”. This is not just architectural supervision, this is a work akin to a 19th century contract, when an architect was responsible “for every nail”. Nowadays they almost never build like that.
If you type the words “modern architecture” in an Internet search, you can find completely different examples of stylizations, the authors of which simply believe that to imitate modernity, it is enough to draw a couple of curved lines on the facade. In this context, the modern manor house designed by Oleg Karlson is a new phenomenon. It is completely different from the rustic forgeries of the nineties - such a work, in addition to a lot of effort and time, requires a fair amount of artistry in dealing with reproducible architectural language.
Another question is the fact of stylization itself. In the paradigm of modernism, a trend that has been prevailing with varying degrees of success for nearly a hundred years, there should be no stylization. Yes, strictly speaking, and the main branch of modernism was also directed against stylization, against historicism of the 19th century - however, modernism was more tolerant than its "grandson" - modernism, and quickly assimilated all directions of the former eclecticism, endowing them with a fair amount of novelty and freshness. The paradox is that the style, which initially sought to escape stylization, has now become its object itself. And the most interesting question, of course, is how similar it turned out to be modern.
It turned out similar. Women's masks, irises, swans, lilies of the valley and lilies; bending stems, many curved lines - on the facades, fireplace, carpets, closets, wooden partitions, in Orinyansky's pastel paintings on the walls and ceiling … Maybe a little too similar, the density of recognizable motifs is too big, the eye seems to be constantly offered additional evidence similarities with the chosen style.
There are also differences; of these, the most tangible is the lack of mass. Art Nouveau loved the mass, loved to interrupt the thick stucco or painting with a sudden inert wall, allowing one to feel the heaviness of the foundation, the sculptural viscosity of the building. Here the approach to style is more graphic, “bookish”. The wall here is more flat than an array or sculpture. Therefore, it can be cut through: what happens on the façade of the loggia, which opens out into the parterre from the winter garden, or in the interior of the atrium, where the supports penetrate through the holes in the inter-storey ceiling, and above the archivolts, holes are also found instead of the walls (recalling the recently popular deconstruction). Art Nouveau also did not like the panels and window frames, which can be found in this house.
There is no mistake in all this (there is not very much historically “pure” modernity, it is often mixed with something, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily), but there is an imperceptible feeling of some additional influence, apart from modernity. It seems to me that this is additional - gothic. More precisely, not too articulated trend of a sort of Gothic Anglomania. Hence the long living room mentioned at the beginning with a fireplace, an abundance of windows and stained-glass windows, flat wooden ribs between the glasses in the atrium, forming a kind of inverted ship's bottom over the winter garden; lightweight ceiling structures of the second floor (wonderful ceilings, not a gram of foam board on them, they alone connect the house with the authentic beginning of the century, only they still gravitate more towards the very end of the 19th century, towards historicism and its structures than towards modern; however, modern, as the closest heir, could well use these themes and used them whenever he wanted). That is, in addition to samples from the area of "pure" Art Nouveau, the ghost of Morozov's mansion on Spiridonovka is found here.
However, the very fact that the house gives rise to such reasoning suggests that the architectural experiment was rather a success. The authors managed to largely master the style of the beginning of the century. And to immerse ourselves in it so much that the house - from time to time - deceives us, forcing us to operate with concepts of a hundred years ago.
All other buildings in this manor house are wooden.
To the right of the main house is the banquet hall building (again Anglomania, a separate banquet hall), stretched along the southwestern border of the site. At first, its volume was conceived as a house-fence to fenced off from the boiler room in the neighboring area. Then, when it became known that the hosts were planning a party with a very large number of guests, the architects suggested turning this building into a kind of reception house. The result is a long wooden hall (all buildings of the estate, except for the main house, are built of wood), covered with wonderful wooden vaults - which, by the way, received the ArchiWood award in the spring. The vault itself is, strictly speaking, pentahedral, but many strongly protruding circular ribs create the effect of a long cylindrical vault, and at the same time give the interior a resemblance to the openwork cast-iron structures of passages and stations of the 19th century. The most remarkable thing is that the parquet on the floor consists of panels that can be disassembled, and then the banquet hall turns into a skating rink. This amusing undertaking is almost unique among the modern estates near Moscow: there are swimming pools, tennis courts and golf courses, and indoor personal skating rinks have not yet become widespread.
Since the house and the banquet hall are collected in one part of the property, all the remaining space, three out of four squares, is given to the park (recall that it was also created by Oleg Karlson's bureau). Behind the house, the park is lined with paths strictly geometrically and on the plan resembles an 18th century garden. To the left of the house, in the northern part, even baroque "three beams" are found (they lead to the building of the "coach house" garage). True, in reality the park is not so similar to its classic palace prototypes: there are many trees among the trees and they are of very different sizes; the architects kept most of the old trees on the site and did not hide its nature near Moscow.
In the eastern part of the park there is a Japanese house of the owners' daughter with a bright red frame and raised roof corners, surrounded on three sides by a picturesque pond with a humped bridge and a softened version of a garden of stones around. "This is not China or Japan," says the architect, but something in between, an imitation, most of all similar to the Russian and European chinoiserie of the 19th century. " The paving of stone paths here part, sprouts with grass - and the entrance to the territory of the conditional "east" is marked by wooden (also red) gates, which stand on one of the three main alleys.
Curiously, this house occupies the eastern part of the park, resulting in an almost literal east-west opposition: chinoiserie in the east, the main house with a parterre and a restaurant in the west. This adds a plot to the architecture of the park, which in general looks not only pleasant and neat (there are many flowers, lawns are trimmed), but also, let's say, historically competent. This is how the park of some Central Russian estate with a 200-year history might look like, if not for the revolution. Diverging rays of paths, alleys, the indispensable chinoiserie - and the spruce trees near Moscow, as if sprouted on top; although in fact they were here before the park.
All together amazes first of all with the high-quality "workmanship", the conscientiousness of execution. In this case, the meaning of this definition is not only purely handicraft, although there are plenty of piece, remarkable for our times craft. The definition of "conscientious" can also be attributed to the quality of architectural stylization - the author does not deny, but in every possible way emphasizes that this is precisely "… stylization, decor", without pretending to revive the style and not putting any others before himself, as is now customary, idealistic supertasks. Although it must be admitted that such a position is also not devoid of its own fixed idea: the architect takes stylization (unlike his postmodernist colleagues) very seriously, plunges into historical research, and as a result operates with fairly reliable forms, skillfully using the alphabet of stylistics a century ago.
