We have already written about this project. Four years ago, it was an office building, a gigantic piece of fluted glass column was built into the corner, wrapped in four sleeves, each one floor in size - an ingenious paraphrase of a theme discovered by Ilya Golosov in the building of the Zuev Palace of Culture. Construction according to the first project was started, and two underground floors were cast in concrete, but then the investor was required to change the function: the building became two-thirds a hotel, and a third of the area was left to offices. “And rightly so,” Aleksey Bavykin comments on this decision of the city authorities, “a hotel is more needed here”.
There are even two hotels: one, two-star 'Elap', occupies a plate stretched along the Third Avtozavodskiy passage, the second, three-star 'Ibis', is placed in the second plate, placed transversely. In the previous project, the ten lower floors were given to a car park with open walls, for ventilation with air from the street. In the new version, only two floors remain from the above-ground parking, the second and the third, under the two-star hotel. Ventilation there will be normal, and outside, instead of a light, wallless structure, a dense and high white base has been formed, cut through by long horizontal windows. Constructivist tape windows were one of the recognizable elements of the old project, and in the current version this technique has been preserved, albeit partially, taking into account the reduction in the cost of facades: the glass strips were replaced by rows of square windows, the walls between which will be faced with dark brown panels.
The third (and if you look from the side of Avtozaodskaya Street, then the first, that is, the main) element of the complex is a gigantic office tower, 25 meters in diameter and 30 storeys high. It looks completely different from hotels, even the height of the ceilings will be different. But the shape and dimensions of the cylindrical volume, as well as the L-shaped plan of the hotels, was predetermined by the existing plinth - the tower rests on a round ramp to enter the parking lot.
It is easy to guess that the tower is the successor to the giant Doric column from the previous project. But if the plan of the building was forced to be saved, then Alexey Bavykin radically changed the plot. Previously, the protagonist was the architecture of the avant-garde, and the motivation was the factory environment of the twenties (on the one side "Dynamo", on the other a huge ZIL, between them the workers' quarters). Now the architect, as if looking deeper into the history of the area, discovered the main conflict of this place. In the XX century, there was almost the front line of the struggle of the then progressive, that is, industrial construction, with the monuments of ancient Russian architecture. The Church of the Nativity of the Virgin in Old Simonov with the graves of Peresvet and Oslyabi was absorbed by the Dynamo plant. The plant built it up on all sides, placed a compression shop in it and did not want to give it away for a long time. But the church survived and its salvation was one of the main themes of the Moscow 1980s. It is about ten minutes walk from the site of Alexei Bavykin to her. And a little further there are the remains of the Simonov Monastery, and there are towers, and among them the Dulo tower, remarkably large and round … Part of the walls of the monastery, the cathedral and several buildings were demolished, the tower and a few more fragments survived. So the interpenetration of the old and the new (more precisely, the eating of the old with the new) has become the main pain of the auto-factory area. But this is one of the favorite themes of Alexei Bavykin; therefore, it is not surprising that the architect, having read this plot in context, made it the basis for his new architectural improvisation.
Indeed, if we look at the project, we will see that the building is composed of elements of very different nature; moreover, they are endowed with well-defined, though not literal, historical associations.
The powerful cylindrical body of the tower was freed from rectangular clutches and covered with a brown crust of rough "wild" stone. At first glance, windows are cut through the stone surface, at first glance, they are small, but the height of the windows grows towards the upper floors, and the surface of the stone wall decreases until, in the three upper tiers, the openings merge into thin glass strips. As if the stone hide began to crawl under the streams of some special rain, revealing the real, glassy nature of the cylinder. Or the hair stood on end at the tower …
It can be said differently: the stone rustic in the lower part is brutal, even making us believe for a second that there is a stone mass behind it, and not a ventilation facade fastening, at the top it completely loses its pseudo-material properties and becomes strips of stone "glued" to the glass. The device is obviously artistic, stylized, in this case it should show that the tower is dilapidated. This is a metaphor for ruin, not a literal picture of destruction, but a hint.
In some places, small balconies of the "lonely smoker" protrude from the walls, loved by Bavykin and recognizable as a signature. They line up in a spiral, as if a spiral staircase runs along the walls inside, which happened in fortress towers. We add a little imagination, and lonely office smokers turn into sentinels, observing the surroundings in order to make sure everything is calm around. In memory comes: "monasteries-watchdogs" - so called well-fortified monasteries in the south of Moscow, namely Donskoy, Danilov, Novospassky and the same Simonov, who is nearby. Dark sandriks add hints of reinforcement - slabs of lintels over the windows; now they are technically not very necessary, but in the fortress architecture such slabs were a simple and reliable way to block a window opening. But the main theme is, of course, the stone coat of roughly hewn squares. She makes a romantic textured miracle out of the tower, something "generally medieval" or even a fantasy genre. In ancient Russian architecture, frankly, there were no such towers and could not have been (except in Izborsk), but in Normandy of the 11th century, perhaps, something similar would have been found.
If the tower is a fortress, then the white-striped volumes of hotels are similar to: a factory, a house-commune of the avant-garde, or even a research institute of the 1980s. Their simple and rational modernist volumes do not just adjoin the tower, but energetically include it in their sphere of influence, covering it on top with a thick white slab, the contours of which are narrowed, enhancing the perspective and endowing this super-console with additional internal energy. In addition to the tower, there is one more stone volume - the vertical staircase in the courtyard, similar to a section of a medieval wall, sunk in the avant-garde plate. So before us is the factory building, merged in an unexpected symbiosis with the not completely destroyed remains of the monastery.
Of course, the image is collective, and there is nothing exactly the same either in the Simonov Monastery, or on the territory of "Dynamo", or in the nearby lanes, the architect would not copy any existing thing. He creates a kind of "architectural dramatization" of the meeting of history and modernism, transforming the building into a plastic reflection on a theme given by the context.
This approach to the context is not entirely trivial: Bavykin does not just coordinate his building with the height of the eaves of the nearest houses, he approaches the matter analytically. He examines a piece of the city in which his project is assigned to be, and makes his own conclusion about what is most important for this area, and then embodies it in the plastic composition of the building. Placed around the city, these buildings become a kind of beacons for comprehending its urban fabric - quietly and unobtrusively lining up into their own narrative network.
In this case, the plot is the coexistence of the old and the new, history and modernism; now, one might say, the favorite theme of the architect. The project of an arch-house on Mozhaisk highway was built on it. But if there is a dynamic collision, then here is a quiet absorption and equally quiet resistance to it, some kind of even peaceful, ultimately, coexistence of stubborn antiquity and modernity, almost like in Istanbul, where pieces of old walls are constantly growing into new buildings. Therefore, it is not surprising that last spring, at the personal exhibition of Alexei Bavykin, projects for Mozhayskoye Highway and for Avtozavodskaya were hung opposite - they give different answers to the same question: how history and modernism interact within one building.
In this case, it turns out especially well: a shabby, but still powerful and brutal old tower grows in the volume of the striped avant-garde "factory" volume. That is, this plant grows on it. And the tower is not just, but "Dulo"! It turns out, by analogy with the title of the famous series of stories by Averchenko "A dozen knives in the back of the revolution" - a barrel in the back of the avant-garde …
