Two years later, the State Central Museum of Musical Culture named after M. I. Glinka will celebrate its 100th anniversary, and it is planned to coincide with this wonderful date that the expansion of his possessions will be timed.
Today the museum, whose funds number over a million items (musical instruments, a collection of paintings, author's manuscripts, personal belongings of composers and performers, and much more), lives in a building specially built for it in 1985, designed by the famous Soviet architect Joseph Loveiko. It is a typical example of mid-1960s modernism. The lapidary rectangular volume, the main facade facing Fadeeva Street, has undergone significant changes since that time, but the main accent of the plastered plane of the facade is still a stained glass window made of colored cast glass by masters under the direction of the artist K. Markunas from Lithuania. The main facade is adjoined by a sculptural composition - a belfry with bells from the museum collection. One of them is from the church of the village of Novospasskoye, where the great composer was born, whose name the museum bears. If you can argue about the style of this building, then its condition, technical equipment, decisively leave much to be desired. The museum is sorely lacking premises for storing collections, there are no freight elevators for moving exhibition equipment and museum items, the dimensions of stair flights do not meet current standards, air conditioners do not function - the temperature and humidity conditions necessary for storing unique exhibits are not observed. The room in which the works of Russian and Soviet painting are stored is located in the basement, in an area not equipped and not intended for this. In other words, the need for reconstruction is long overdue, and the approaching anniversary is just the right thing.
The pre-project proposal for the reconstruction of the museum, made by AM SK & P LLC, became one of the components of the museum development concept until 2014. Looking ahead, it should be noted that it was unanimously approved by the Board of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. Much credit for this belongs to the director of the museum, Mikhail Arkadyevich Bryzgalov and his team of like-minded people obsessed with the idea of expanding the museum. The architects received a detailed design assignment based on a thoroughly studied analysis of the state of the museum and all its needs. It is impossible not to note the great importance of the contacts of the authors of the pre-project proposal with the leading employees of the museum - Vladimir Vladimirovich Lysenko, Karina Sergeevna Balasanyan, Yuri Samuilovich Belenky, Elena Vsevolodovna Batova, Nina Vladimirovna Mileshina and many others.
“After a cursory acquaintance with the unique collection of the Museum of Musical Culture, I immediately perceived the problem and the desire of museum workers to do everything possible to make it more accessible to visitors,” says the chief architect of the project, Vladimir Labutin. “That is why we considered the reconstruction of the museum from the very beginning as an opportunity to turn it into a multifunctional cultural center with sufficient space for permanent and changing exhibitions, a modern storage facility, several concert halls and a library.” However, the architects had to equally masterly fit not only into a plot that was more than modest in its parameters, but also into a very limited budget. In addition, an elite residential complex is being built according to the project of Mikhail Filippov, on the site bounded by Pykhov-Tserkovny lane and Fadeev and Dolgorukovskaya streets, practically close to the museum. The multi-storey buildings of the "Italian Quarter" occupy a huge area and form something similar to a Roman amphitheater. With such pressure on the scale, the museum has nothing left at its disposal - a narrow strip of land between the Loveiko building and the inner-quarter passage.
Vladimir Labutin's team began work on the project of a new storage facility with a thorough analysis of what, in principle, could be built on such a modest site. The permissible height of the new building of the museum was also studied in detail - it should not have worsened the calculated insolation of the housing under construction. The dimensions and shape of the volume were verified with surgical precision: somewhere from the conventional parallelepiped, the architects had to cut off and round off the corners, and somewhere, on the contrary, to use the opportunity to put forward an additional block. The resulting storage facility, as a result of such complex research, looks like a puzzle itself. In plan, it has the shape of a polygon, with its only straight side adjacent to the existing building of the museum, and the plastic of this volume awakens associations either with a giant boulder, or with an intricately cut diamond. “Having received such a form, we did not resist it, having decided that the new building would become the cornerstone laid in the foundation of a new, modern stage in the development of the museum,” the author of the project explains the concept. In accordance with this image, the material was also chosen - the facades of the storage facility are supposed to be revetted with sheets of copper alloy, whose terracotta-brown scale emphasizes both the “natural origin” and the preciousness of the “stone”.
Sitting on a free area of the museum territory, the new volume, as already mentioned, is closely adjacent to the existing building. True, at the zero level, there is a passage between them, which is necessary for transporting and loading exhibits, but higher - the buildings are connected by a system of passages and stairs. The marks of the connections (in the old building there will be five of them after the reconstruction, in the new - seven) do not coincide, therefore in this part of the complex there is a special freight elevator capable of stopping at any mark. By the way, it is planned to replace all vertical communications in the existing building: it will have four new elevators and two new staircase blocks attached to the side facades. At the expense of the existing technical floor, the authors of the project propose to build up the museum with two floors, which will house a new two-story exhibition space. At the same time, permanent expositions will remain on the second and third floors, and on the first, in addition to the main premises of the entrance group and the department of scientific and educational work, kiosks and cafes will appear.
The Prokofievsky Concert Hall will also remain in the museum, for which the workshop will develop new interiors. Two more halls will be designed in the new building - a small organ (the museum owns an organ made by the outstanding German master F. Ladegast, which previously sounded in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory) and a lecture and concert hall with 400 seats. It is interesting that both of them will be located at the level common for the two buildings, so that from the halls through the foyer it will be possible to go to the already mentioned two-height exhibition halls.
One of the side facades of the new building, facing away from the "Italian Quarter", hangs like a mezzanine over a decorative pool, visually enriching and expanding the space to which the windows of the library and the museum's audio library will face.
The reconstruction project envisages not only the redevelopment of the interior of the museum building, but also a new version of the decoration of its facades. In particular, Vladimir Labutin suggests draping the "slab" of the main facade into a folded glass fence. At the same time, trying to preserve the "memory of the place", he leaves the existing Suprematist graphics of Loveiko and supplements it with images of musical instruments. The belfry with bells is also preserved. It is proposed to revet it with small-sized colored mosaic tiles, which will soften the brutality of the sculptural composition, and the architects dream of returning the ability to sound to the bells themselves. And in this detail, like in a drop of water, the main idea of this project is reflected - the disclosure of the potential of the richest collection of the Museum of Musical Culture, capable of making it a popular cultural and educational center of Moscow.
